Bruce Hartsell
The Photography Club of Quail Creek recently announced winners of the first-quarter challenge with the theme Light. Steve Piepmeier won first place with “Colony Saguaro Rainbow.”Steve said, “Walking my sunrise walk on a cloudy morning, sometimes expectations change and a random event happens that makes you happy you went out walking. This morning a spritz turned into a drizzle, so I headed back, but to the west, the low light of a strong rainbow was just forming. I hurried to get to a vantage point and then realized it was moving with the cloud opening, so I started running to capture the colony saguaro with the rainbow.” iPhone 16, 120 mm, f2.8.
Jim Parco won second and third place with two astronomical images, one of M42—the Great Orion Nebula, and the other of M45—the Pleiades. Jim noted, “The Orion Nebula is visible to the naked eye as a “smudge” in the constellation of Orion in the winter sky directly overhead of the northern hemisphere.” He said the subframe images were acquired over five nights in January and February 2026 from Palmer Lake, Colo., using a “Redcat 91, 5-element Petzval quintuplet with a focal length of 448mm and an aperture of 91mm (f/4.9).” He went on to explain that “425 monochrome images were stacked into a single RGB image with a total exposure time of 17 hours, 47 minutes, and 30 seconds, ranging in exposure durations from 30 seconds to five minutes per subframe, and Pixinsight software stacked and dithered the subframes.
Jim said the image of the Pleadies, commonly known as “the 7 Sisters” and to astronomers as “Messier 45 (M45),”is visible to the naked eye during the fall and winter night skies. He acquired the subframe images from Palmer Lake, Colo. during four nights in October 2025 using a Redcat 51, a 4-element Petzval quintuplet with a focal length of 250mm and an aperture of 51mm (f/4.9). He said, “Over 500 monochrome subframe images were stacked into a single RGB image with a total exposure time of approximately 16 hours of total integration time with each subframe exposure time of 120 seconds,” and he used Pixinsight to stack the subframes, which were dithered every three frames.
The photography club, which is open to all Quail Creek residents, holds a quarterly challenge, which allows more processing than the monthly contest, and members vote for the winners each quarter. Additional information is available at www.pcqc.org.