The first
part of the evening was the Camper Stargaze.
The club hosts these throughout the summer in the parking lot next to the
playground, and lots of club members come out and set up gear to show off the
night sky to both campers at the park and people who hear about the event
through Facebook/word-of-mouth/etc. Last
month’s event apparently had 250-300 people, which is the biggest crowd we’ve
yet had! We think people are getting
more interested because of the upcoming solar eclipse. Last night didn’t have quite that number, but
I heard it was over 150. There were a
lot of club members present with their gear, so it didn’t feel like it was that
many – I maybe had 20 people total come by.
We looked at Jupiter, M51, and M13.
M51 was difficult to see – I could make out the two cores, but some of
the guests had trouble, but M13 was very nice, especially with averted
vision. It was right at zenith, but
luckily I had the telescope far enough forward in the mount that the star
diagonal didn’t hit the mount like it usually does that high. Jupiter looked pretty good – I put on the
13mm eyepiece, which I think I need to clean after so many kids’ faces smudging
it up. But the view was still nice, you
could see the two main cloud bands and its four Galilean moons. Callisto was just above the planet, very
close to it. I had several little kids
come through, and there’s always one who is very knowledgeable, and it’s fun to
watch them show off. This time it was a
young boy, maybe 5 or 6, who could name all of the planets in order. The family of one of my Girl Scouts came out
as well, and I left the event at the time it was set to end, although there
were still people there, in order to show them the observatory as part of
earning the Sky badge. It killed me to
leave when people were still looking through scopes, but I also had an ulterior
motive: I wanted to do some imaging before the moon came up!
After doing a tour of the
observatory and the dome where I image, my Girl Scout and her family took off,
and I got busy getting set up on the memorial scope. I only
had about an hour and a half though until the moon was up, so I scrapped my
plans for imaging the Veil Nebula and picked an easier target instead: the
Trifid Nebula. I got about 14
progressively brighter 6-minute frames before I called it quits; my blue histogram peak
was about to fall off the right edge. I
lost one of my frames when the mount did the thing again like on 4th
of July weekend, where the hand controller acted like I was pressing and
holding the menu key, and it looks like it stopped tracking or something for a
bit, since PHD showed some huge spikes trying to compensate. I hit the menu key a few times, and a few
other buttons, and then let it sit for a moment, and it stopped and continued
tracking where it left off. Night
saved! I hope this doesn’t keep happening
because a replacement hand controller for the Losmandy Gemini is expensive…
Anyways, here’s the image! Light pollution removal algorithms are truly
magical, I have decided. I think I’ll
use this one for my Photoshop tutorial.
Date: 15 July 2017
Object: M20 Trifid Nebula (and M21 open cluster)
Camera: Nikon D5300
Telescope: Vixen na140ssf
Accessories: Astronomik CLS filter
Mount: Losmandy Gemini II
Guide scope: Celestron 102mm
Guide camera: QHY5
Subframes: 13x360s (1h18m)
Darks: 23
Biases: 20
Flats: 20
Temperature: 59-61F (15.5C)
Open
cluster M21 is in there too – I was going to center M20, but then decided it’d
be nice to have the cluster there as well.
I’m also quite pleased with the lovely shade of pink-red that came out. I didn’t adjust that color at all besides
white-balancing use the black point.
I left the observatory around 2:30
AM, and got to bed about 3:15 AM. Unless
it clears up Monday night, my next log entry will be from the Green Bank Star
Quest!
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