by Robert Vanderbei

Here’s a picture I took of the Heart Nebula (aka IC 1805) on April 27.
I used my Seestar S30 smart telescope sitting on the walkway just outside the front door of my house.

The picture is a stack of 528 10-second exposures that were automatically aligned and stacked by the code built into the Seestar. That’s a total exposure time of 88 minutes. The images were captured starting a little before 9pm and stopping a little before midnight.

The Heart Nebula is circumpolar when viewed from here in NJ. When I took these pictures, it was low in the WNW part of the sky—only about 20 degrees above the horizon.

The Heart Nebula is a large nebula.  The Seestar S30’s camera provides a fairly large field of view but not large enough to capture the entire Heart. Here’s the nice thing… the Seestar software has a “mosaic” option where it can build a wider field of view image.

I used the mosaic feature to take this picture.   The field of view was upscaled by a factor of 1.5 from the non-mosaic size.