#76 - Sunday, February 19, 2017 - The Big Leagues

Another clear night!  And it was a little darker than Friday night.  It looked like some clouds were going to roll in around 10 PM, but that didn’t happen, thankfully.  Although I did get some ground fog around midnight – however, the telescope didn’t seem to care and saw right through it.  I did have a battle royale with dew though, which killed my external battery before I plugged the dew heater in instead. 

            

I started out with the Rosette Nebula, a new target for me.  It’s too big to do with my 11-inch, although I might try a mosaic sometime if I can get that process down.  I could just barely make out some differences in contrast in the subframes, but HOLY COW did this come out awesome!  It came out all right from DSS, but a little Photoshop really made it pop.  Since my camera isn’t very sensitive to red, I have to massage the colors a bit to make it more realistic.  This one is probably my new favorite.

Rosette Nebula, Nikon D5300, Vixen NA140ssf, Astronomik CLS filter

Guiding: QHY5 on Celestron 102mm

23x300s, ISO-1600

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[Note: This is now an award-winning image!  I won second place in the 2017 OPT/Astronomical League astrophotography contest in the Deep Sky category!]

The detail is amazing, and I even picked up some of the blue from the cluster in the center.  Oh, also, an AstroBin user commented on one of my images and mentioned a piece of freeware called Noiseware (well, there’s a paid version too, but they have a free version) that really does a wonder with noise.  I tried Photoshop’s noise filter, and it doesn’t even come close.  Unfortunately, it only saves out small jpeg files (a couple of MB), so not good enough to print.  I’ll have to see if I can either get Photoshop’s to work better, or see if the paid version does TIFFs.  

I think I will use this one for my upcoming astrophotography talk to my club, since the subs have a lot of skyglow and you can barely make out the nebula:

After 2 hours on Rosette, I switched over to the Pleiades before they set, and I did have to re-sync the mount, even though they are nearby.  Luckily, its guess was okay for the sync star, and I didn’t have to go that far.  I was planning two hours on it too, but it dropped below 20° altitude before then, and the pictures started coming out crappy.

M45 Pleiades Cluster, Nikon D5300, Vixen NA140ssf, Astronomik CLS filter

Guiding: QHY5 on Celestron 102mm

15x300s, ISO-1600

Since this one is all blue, color balance was simple, since the filter lets through blue light the most already.  I think it captures the nebulosity pretty well, although I’ve seen better.  I might re-process to make the blue a little bluer and a little less green – I’ll have to go look at some pictures to get a good idea of what shade the blue should be.

            

It was just about midnight, but I wanted to get one more target in, since Monday was a holiday anyway, so I flipped around to the north to do the Leo Triplet.  I got it synced to nearby Denebola, but then my guidescope started acting up.  The new darks library I took (I didn’t realize yet that I could import it from my CGE profile in PHD) for some reason added a high background, and then sometimes the whole field was just gray with no stars.  I checked focus, shined light in it to make sure it was still reading, and finally got it working again by unplugging and replugging it, and restarting my computer.  Then I also imported the old darks library.  That seemed to get it mostly going.  That and taking test images took 45 minutes.  So I did an hour and a half on the Leo Triplet, and called it a night.  Again, I left at 2:30.  The fog was quite thick on the drive home, but luckily it still didn’t take much longer.  Galaxies are very hard to white balance with a light pollution filter, and the CLS is no exception.  My attempts in Photoshop just introduced a bunch of noise. So I gave up and kept them more or less blue.  Also, they must have turned off the lights at the nearby dairy farm because I was able to do 5-minute exposures at ISO-3200 without too much background.

Leo Triplet (M65, M66, NGC 3628), Nikon D5300, Vixen NA140ssf, Astronomik CLS filter

Guiding: QHY5 on Celestron 102mm

16x300s, ISO-3200

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So yeah, a great night!  I am very pleased with the Rosette Nebula!  The memorial scope is fun to image through because of its faster focal ratio and large FOV, and also how I can get everything set up in like in 20 minutes, but the large FOV also really limits what is worthwhile to image because a lot of interesting things would just have too few pixels on target, such as M51 and the dearth of other galaxies up during the wintertime.  And for those dimmer galaxies, only 5.5 inches of aperture doesn’t do much for you.  But the flat field and pinpoint stars sure are nice.  I need to look into off-axis guiding or something for my 11-inch so that I don’t get flexure issues from the mirror moving around.   Once I get that mount fixed.  I might just send it off to Clay Sherrod to deal with.

Next post: #77 - Friday, March 3, 2017 - Some Nights I Stay Up Cashing In my Bad Luck

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#75 - Friday, February 17, 2017

I did go ahead and get that CLS filter, from Astronomik.  Color balancing is easy on nebulae, but hard still on galaxies.  I will have to work on that one.

            

The evening started off rough – Jim did some adjustment on the polar alignment, which appears to have made it worse.  I couldn’t even do 45 seconds unguided without streaking.  I tried again with my QHY5 guide camera, but I didn’t quite have enough backfocus on the guide scope.  So I took a bunch of short exposures on the Flame and Horsehead Nebulae, but then Jim on Facebook suggested I use a star diagonal for the extra length.  It worked!  Soon I was up and guiding.  This was after some guests I brought had left – so I was running in and out of the dome before, trying to show them stuff.  Luckily, the three other club members were there, who were happy to share their views in the big Dob owned by the club.  My guests, a father-son duo, I met by club member Phil, who arranged an interview from the son to me about differences between refractors and reflectors for his middle school science fair project. 

Once I got guiding going, things went great from there!  I imaged the Flame and Horsehead Nebulae, and then M81 and M82.  They came out great!

Flame & Horsehead Nebulae, Nikon D5300, Vixen NA140ssf, Astronomik CLS filter

Guiding: QHY5, Celestron 102mm

25x180s, ISO-1600

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M81 & M82, Nikon D5300, Vixen NA140ssf, Astronomik CLS filter

Guiding; QHY5, Celestron 102mm

21x180s, ISO-3200

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I still can’t quite get the memorial scope to do a proper alignment, so I just sync on a nearby star and then guide.  That seems to work great.  I haven’t tested how long it will guide for yet.  At least 5 minutes with still very nice stars.  I was out until 2:30 AM!  So glad to finally have some clear weather.

Next post: A Guide for Guiding


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#74 - Thursday, February 2, 2017 - Refractor imaging

[I will make a separate post detailing what exactly happened to my CGE mount.  I didn't include all of those details in my original log entries.]

It was clear last night, but I didn’t believe the forecasts, so I made other plans!  Luckily, the sky cleared up for a little while tonight too.  The drive over to the observatory was cloudy, and while I was getting set up it was cloudy, but then things finally cleared up after I took some “consolation prize” video of the moon and Venus. 

I still can’t get the memorial scope to align properly.  Well, firstly, I wound up having to use the Telrad that Jim recently attached because the finderscope is way not in alignment and I can’t figure out how to align it.  I followed the instructions more carefully this time.  My first attempt, I used Betelgeuse as the sync star, and then something else I can’t remember as another alignment star, and then something in the west I can’t remember, but when I slewed to the moon, it was way off.  Venus too.  Then I had to slew to another star for another alignment, but it was super off.  So I shutdown the mount and restarted, and its initial guesses were good for Betelgeuse and Pollux, but it wouldn’t let me add it.  I checked that I was doing things in the right order.  I tried another star farther away, but still no luck.  So I slewed over to the moon manually and took some video, and then some for Venus.  They were both pretty rock solid in not moving, so I figured it must be well-enough polar aligned that alignment doesn’t particularly matter.  I didn’t have goto, but the moon was too bright for the dim stuff anyway.  After the videos, I manually slewed over to M42 (of course), recognized its dim greenish form and two stars of the trapezium in the viewfinder, and started imaging.  The moon was too bright to do very long exposures, especially at that scope’s focal length – f/5.7 – so I did 60s at ISO-1600.  It’s still too bright, but we’ll see how it turns out.  I took 20, and then I decided to try my luck with the Flame Nebula and Horsehead Nebula, since they’re super easy to find right there next to Altinak.  I could just make out the Flame Nebula in the frames where the background wasn’t blindingly bright, but Altinak is so bright too.  We’ll see what stacking and processing can do. 

[There were some thin high clouds that made some interesting halos around the brighter stars, but overall not bad!]

M42 Orion Nebula, Nikon D5300, Vixen NA140ssf

21x60s, ISO-1600

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After getting 40x90s images on Flame/Horsehead, the clouds began to reappear, so I packed up around 10:30 PM.  Not a bad night!  I meant to also test how long the tracking is good for on the memorial scope so I’ll know if I need to even guide or not, but I forgot at the end, and it was getting a little cloudy anyway to be able to make out exactly how round the stars would be.  But Jim said he plugged the Malincam into it back in November and had nice round stars at 3 minute’s exposure.  So I’m curious to see whether I’ll even need to guide with it.

Flame & Hosehead Nebulae, Nikon D5300, Vixen NA140ssf

18x90s, ISO-1600

I’ll see if I have time to process the images in the morning; I don’t expect much, but why not.  Can’t wait for a darker night!  And probably a CLS filter.

Next post: #75 - Friday, February 17, 2017

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#73 - Tuesday, December 20, 2016 - When In Doubt, Borrow Someone Else's Scope #2

Since my CGE mount is down for the count, I decided to go learn how to use the memorial scope, a permanently-mounted pier inside of a personal dome that was purchased by the club from a club member using a memorial donation upon the passing of another club member, which is a Vixen 5-inch refractor on a Losmandy Gemini mount, with a Celestron guide scope.  

            

I started entering stars, but it seemed to be slewing all over the place and having really bad guesses.  I figured out later that I wasn’t quite doing it correctly, but then the clouds started rolling in, and it was getting cold.  I also tried focusing my QHY5 on the guide scope, without success.  I might try with FireCapture rather than PHD though, since PHD has longer refresh times and stretches the histogram like crazy, so it’s hard to tell when you’re close.  I did get my DSLR attached to it though with the M48 adapter I bought for it, which is good.  I was worried it wouldn’t be the right size.  And I got it focused, no problem.  It was nearly already there, as a matter of fact.

            

It was a short night, but I’ll try again once it clears up around here and is not extremely cold when it is clear.

Next post: #74 - Thursday, February 2, 2017 - Refractor imaging

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#72 - Sunday, November 6, 2016 - The Mount Issues are Mounting

Another gorgeous night!  It was a little warmer, although I was still fighting dew, just not as much.  Because of the end of Daylight Savings, I got to get started at 6 instead of 7, which was awesome.  Also, Orion comes up an hour earlier now.  Since the first quarter moon was so high, I decided to grab a video on that before I got started, and I also grabbed a video of it on the guide scope with the QHY5, but it didn’t have good enough contrast to get a nice shot, even after messing with the gain, exposure, and gamma as much as I could.  I guess I could’ve thrown my neutral density filter on, and it wouldn’t have changed the focus because it screws onto the end of the extension tube, which just slides inside the guidescope, but oh well. 

            

Daylight Savings Time seemed to be causing issues with the telescope as well; it wasn’t quite getting on stars quite right.  So I replaced the alignment stars and calibration stars, and that seemed to work, so I started imaging Stephan’s Quintet.  I got two images in when I needed to do a meridian flip, so I did that, but then PHD started having fits.  During calibration, it was giving me non-orthogonality errors, so I ran the guiding assistant to see if it would help.  It didn’t, and the manual said it might be due to bad polar alignment.  RA was the main problem.  I figured maybe the time change would affect the polar alignment somehow, so I started re-doing the polar alignment, but then I accidentally touched the RA cable, which caused it to jump when it shorted.  So then I had to re-align completely.  I left the camera attached so that I could do fine alignment using BackyardNikon’s Frame & Focus feature, which uses live view.  At ISO-3200, I can see not only the stars I usually use for alignment, but even the precise goto stars show up no problem, since the D5300 will adjust the shutter speed & ISO to see something.  But its guesses as to where Vega and Altair were terrible; I actually had to go get the Telrad since it was not even close.  When this happens, it’ll usually correct itself out as I add stars, but it was consistently guessing terribly, which it shouldn’t have been because I was polar-aligned still from the previous nights.  So then I shut it down and restarted completely, and it was getting even worse, not even making it close to Vega.  I even tried putting it an hour ahead and back in Daylight time, but the result was the same.  Basically, it looked like RA wasn’t going far enough; dec was pretty close.  It was either stopping too soon, or not spinning the gears as fast as it thought it was.  It might have been my imagination, but sounded less aggressive than usual when it was moving.  After trying various things, power cycling, unplugging and replugging, changing the time, etc, it was still not working.  So I went inside to warm up and have some dinner (I brought leftovers, but Bob cooked some brats that he shared), and then I packed it up and left by 11:30.  It’s weird that it worked in the first part of the evening; it went to the moon from the home position, all the way in the south, with no issues, and also went to Stephan’s Quintet on the east side of the meridian with no issues.  It even went over to Fomalhaut, the polar alignment star I’m using, just fine.  It wasn’t until I hit the cable and made it jump.  The cable also got hit a few more times as I was re-situating it.  Oh, also, it seemed to take longer than normal to find the switch position in RA.  Bob suggested that maybe it’s time to send it out to get hypertuned, and maybe they can do the Bennett mod while they’re at it.  He said he knows someone who had their Celestron mount tuned with a guy named Dr. Clay.  It’ll cost some money, but will be cheaper than getting a new mount – the CGE mount’s original price is $3,000.  A quick look online shows a site called Deep Space Products that does it, including the Bennett mod (although you have to supply the kit), for $505 (so $855 total with the Bennett mod kit).  That sounds pretty good to me if it’ll save me the headache of the cabling issue and these other issues I’ve been having.  I can also get a dual Losmandy-Vixen ADM dovetail attachment put on there for another $110, which I was talking to Bob about last night – he thinks I should get a refractor sooner rather than later, like before I get a deep sky camera.  Seeing the results from just my guidescope, I’m inclined to agree.  There are a lot of issues shooting with the SCT, and another one is possibly cropping up – mirror shift.  It’s not a big deal to re-focus for each new target and after a meridian flip – it only takes a minute, especially now with BackyardNikon – but it might be the cause of the drift I still see.  Even with guiding, the image slowly moves across the frame, and that movement shows up in pretty much every other frame.  My RMS error isn’t too bad in PHD (about 2 arcsecs), although sometimes when I’m moving the scope at slow speed, it is a little sticky in dec, I think.  (Although, it’s my RA error that is the larger of the two – I do have some backlash).  I haven’t done the mental geometry, but it seems to be moving in the same direction each time – not the same camera direction, but the same sky direction.  This might indicate the mirror shifting as it tracks across the sky in RA.  There are two fixes I could do: use off-axis guiding (in which case, I’ll probably need to get a more sensitive CCD, but I might not, I’ll have to test), or send the scope off too for a hypertune (I could get a spring put behind the primary to keep it from shifting, since I can’t lock the mirror on this C11). 

            

So, a disappointing end to an otherwise spectacular weekend.  But it was a great weekend!  And I got some sleep last night.

Next post: #73 - Tuesday, December 20, 2016 - When In Doubt, Borrow Someone Else's Scope #2

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#71 - Saturday, November 5, 2016 - Andromeda mosaic attempt

Another fantastic night of imaging!  When I first got out there at 7, there were some thin, high clouds, so I got everything put back together and then waited till they cleared out.  I discovered that Photoshop has a mosaicking tool called Photomerge in the Automate menu, and I saw some evidence online that it will do oddly-oriented and oddly-paneled astroimages, so I decided to try a 6-panel mosaic on M31!  Since I still wanted to image nebulae in the Orion complex too when it came up, and because of the late start, I decided just to do 10x3 minute images for each panel, for a total of three hours.  I wound up having to do a meridian flip halfway through, but thankfully it happened to be just as I finished the top half of the image, so I didn’t have to think too hard to get it lined back up again on the other side.  Also, I’m glad it’s so bright – my test images to align it the way I wanted were only 15s long, just enough to see the core.  

Well, it almost worked...I seem to have a missing panel...

After that was done, I took a stack of 10x5 minute images on the Flame Nebula, up right next to the Horsehead Nebula, which is right next to the easternmost star of Orion’s Belt, Altinak.  I put the nebula up near the top of the frame so that Altinak wouldn’t just totally bloom and cause reflections and lens flare and stuff, so I just cropped out the emptiness as the bottom.  It came out pretty well, if still noisy.

           NGC 2024 Flame Nebula, Nikon D5300 on my C11, f/6.3 focal reducer, Orion Skyglow filter

Guiding: QHY5 on Orion ST-80

8x300s, ISO-3200

I left about 2:30 AM so that I wouldn’t have two completely sleep-deprived nights in a row!  Also it was cold.  Also club member Will and I were the only ones left, and Will had to leave at 2.  He collected RGB data for his awesome monochrome Andromeda image.

            

Daylight Savings Time ended that night, and I was worried that stuff might break, but the only thing that semi-broke was BackyardNikon; it was partway into a 300s exposure at 2 AM, and then it jumped back to -3600 seconds and was counting up from there instead.  So I just aborted it and re-started.  I’ll submit a bug report sometime this week.

#73 - Sunday, November 6, 2016 - The Mount Issues are Mounting

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#70 - Friday, November 4, 2016 - Allllllll the images

It was chilly, but boy was it a good night!  Completely clear, excellent seeing, stable atmosphere, no wind, and to top it all off, the telescope behaved very well.  My guided images are still drifting – I need to figure out why – but my stars are only a little bit smeared, so it’s livable.  I finally bought a USB thermometer so that I can record the temperature as I take my images and match lights to darks with more accuracy.  Alignment went super smoothly – its initial guesses for stars were very good, and even polar alignment was close.  I’ve been using Fomalhaut now that Altair is too high and Antares has set, or is at least behind the trees or something.  It’s just above the trees, but the C11 can see through trees pretty well.  Alignment took only 20 minutes; I arrived at 7 PM, and was imaging by 8:30.  It was awesome! 

            

I started with the Fireworks Galaxy, which was high in the north, but I lost a little less than half my exposures to dew.  I had to really crank up the dew heater, since we nearly hit the dew point.  I had to use the blow dryer three times as well.  Even the guide scope dewed up, so I had to crank up that dew heater as well.  I couldn’t see it with a 60s exposure, but I could make it out with 5m, so we’ll see how it comes out in stacking.

NGC 4946 Fireworks Galaxy, Nikon D5300 on my C11, f/6.3 focal reducer, Orion Skyglow filter

Guiding: QHY5 on my Orion ST-80

16x300s, ISO-3200

Well, you can see it, which is cool…the background came out pretty noisy, though.

            

Next, I did the Crab Nebula, since I think the last time I did it I only did 3m exposures because of light pollution.  It was high in the east.  The eastern sky at the observatory is the best, especially around 3 AM, when it is quite dark.

M1 Crab Nebula, Nikon D5300 on my C11, f/6.3 focal reducer, Orion Skyglow filter

Guiding; QHY5 on my Orion ST-80

19x300s, ISO-3200

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It came out more or less like the first one – next, I’ll have to try not using the focal reducer so I can get more resolution on it.

            

Next, I finally did the Horsehead Nebula!  I could just make out its shape and some of the red color at 5m.  Hopefully it comes out well in stacking.  I lost a few of those to dew as well.

Horsehead Nebula, Nikon D5300 on my C11, f/6.3 focal reducer, Orion Skyglow filter

Guiding: QHY5 on my Orion ST-80

17x300s, ISO-3200

See on AstroBin

It came out a little noisy, and apparently Alnitak (easternmost star in Orion’s Belt) is a really bright star – you can see the reflections from it being just off the frame on the left.

            

Finally, I switched the camera over to the guidescope, and tried to fit the Flame, Horesehead, and Orion Nebulae into a single frame.  It was not to be.  I think I can get it if the Flame is at the very top of the frame and Orion is at the very bottom, but they might be cut off a bit, and I try not to have stuff too close to the edges because of coma and vignetting.  I think I’ll try a four-panel mosaic here instead.  So instead of doing the trio, I just did a wide field on Orion, which looks fantastic.  I did 1m exposures, about the limit of the guide scope unguided.  

M42 Great Nebula of Orion, Nikon D5300 on my Orion ST-80, unguided

12x60s, ISO-1600

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Holy sweet goodness that came out awesome!!

I am curious to try guiding the guidescope using the main telescope…I can get like sub-pixel accuracy because the focal length of the C11 is soooo much longer than the guidescope, so little tiny movements in the guidescope will appear large and easily correctable in the C11.  I didn’t try it last night because it was already nearly 3 AM.  Perhaps later in the winter when it’s up earlier in the evening.  Right now, Orion’s not really up until about 12:30 AM.

            

Overall, a fantastic night!  It felt pretty cold due to the high humidity, but it was windless, which made a huge difference.  It was in the upper 30s.  Frost formed on top of my camera bag and other accessories.  It’s going to be clear Saturday night too, so I left the equipment set up.  The transparency is supposed to be not quite as good, but it looks like it’ll be another windless evening, and lower humidity, since the temperatures should be in the lower 40s instead.

Next post: #71 - Saturday, November 5, 2016 - Andromeda mosaic attempt

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