There
were quite a few club members out tonight!
It’s Labor Day weekend, and lots of people brought out their RVs,
campers, and tents for the weekend. I
re-aligned my telescope and re-did the polar alignment using Altair instead of
Antares, and it definitely made a difference.
While Saturn was up, since the seeing was better Friday night (ClearSky
even said conditions were “excellent,” which is super rare around here!), I
imaged it again through the telescope with the QHY5. I checked it with the eyepiece first – it
definitely was better. I showed some of
the newer club members the view. It was
pretty good.
[I didn't quite have the planetary stacking in RegiStax with RGB data figured out yet, so I apparently never processed this data!]
I
was finally able to focus the guide scope working – turns out PHD will stretch
the image by like a ton (the histogram) if it doesn’t detect stars, so the
noise goes away once you’re near focus.
It was just finding that point that was tough. I made sure to mark it this time on the
focuser tube. It turned out that I was
having problems focusing because I couldn’t reach the focal point with the QHY5
on the Orion ST-80. Attached directly,
it didn’t have enough out-travel (I could see the stars getting smaller, but
still not near focus), and with the star diagonal, it didn’t have enough
in-travel. So I took the Barlow lens out
of my Barlow and just used it as an extender tube, which put it just far enough
back that I could focus without putting it too far back. So now I just have to use that. Rawr.
Anyway, I also made the telescope a little heavy toward the
counterweight side, and once I did start guiding, it worked much better than before! I shouted triumphantly, “At last, I’m
guiding!!”
My
first target was M16, the Eagle Nebula, since longer exposure would surely get
my more detail. I tried a one-minute exposure first, and my stars were still
round. Then two minutes…still
steady…then 5 minutes…still circular!
However, the image was getting pretty washed out by light pollution at
that point. John Chumack recommended I
use my Orion SkyGlow filter, which helped quite a bit, especially since all the
interesting Milky Way stuff is in the direction of the city this time of year,
the southwestish. I still set the ISO at
only 800.
M16 Eagle Nebula, Nikon D5300 on my C11, f/6.3 focal reducer, Orion Skyglow filter
Guiding: QHY5 on my Orion ST-80
5x300s, ISO-800
[I forgot to write about this: I got a new camera, the Nikon D5300, which I used my intervalometer to control.]
Next,
I tried for my first “challenge” object, the mag 11 Bubble Nebula, but it was
very high altitude, and the pictures I was looking at on my tablet showed a lot
of drift. So I didn’t think my telescope
could handle all the weight at that high of altitude. It turned out that I was looking at the wrong
frames – the folder I was in decided not to be date-arranged anymore. So I went to the Helix Nebula instead, but I
still couldn’t see it, even with a 1-2 minute exposure. I’ve tried it a few times before. So I went
back to the Bubble, but while trying to find it using Precise Goto, I
discovered that my telescope was no longer in alignment. It must have done the fast-slew thing from
the shielded cable shorting during a slew, so I missed hearing the
higher-pitched sound it makes when it does that. So I re-aligned, and then went back to the
Bubble. I was letting PHD do its
calibration run, but the star was just too far north to move much during
calibration – or so I thought. Turned
out that was wrong too – PHD wasn’t talking to my mount anymore, even after
re-connecting, because I couldn’t get it to calibrate for a star in the east
that should have been easy. Oh, well,
tomorrow night.
It
was getting late, so I decided to get some Crab Nebula images since it was
rising to a reasonable altitude in the east.
I did some 3-minute exposures on it until about 4:30 AM. By the time I hit the sack, Orion was rising
and moving south, and I could see where the Orion Nebula was at. It’s still too low to image well, so I’ll
wait till October for that one, I think.
I can’t wait to do some long exposure on it! I forgot to take darks before going to bed. Crab Nebula turned out great though, with
some darks I took the next night:
M1 Crab Nebula, Nikon D5300 on my C11, f/6.3 focal reducer, Orion Skyglow filter
Guiding: QHY5 on my Orion ST-80
10x180s, ISO-3200
Look at
the filaments!! LOOK AT THEM!!! FILAMENTS!!
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