It was
cloudy again in the first part of the evening, but not too bad. I re-aligned and re-polar aligned both
scopes, and this time I used the Borg to align the AVX since that’s what I’d be
imaging through. This time, I did
6-minute subframes on the CGE Pro, which worked great. I imaged M104, the Sombrero Galaxy,
first.
Date: 23 May 2017
Location: Prude Ranch, TX - Texas Star Party
Object: M104 Sombrero Galaxy
Camera: Nikon D5300
Telescope: Celestron C11
Accessories: f/6.3 focal reducer
Mount: Celeston CGE Pro
Guide scope: Orion ST-80
Guide camera: QHY5
Subframes: 8x360s (48m), ISO-1600
Darks: 15
Biases: 20
Flats: 20
Temperature: 41F - 50F
Once that was underway, I set up
the D3200 on the Borg to image Markarian’s Chain while I waited for the Milky
Way to rise. It came out okay. One nice thing with the shorter exposure
times is that I got 57 usable subframes in less than four hours.
Once the Milky Way was good and up, I moved
over to M8 & M20, the Lagoon and Trifid Nebulae, and some of the gorgeous
clouds of the Milky Way. The tracking
let me get away with 150 seconds (2-1/2 minutes) on the Borg, which is pretty
decent since its focal length is 500mm.
It slowly drifted, but not too bad.
When I stacked it, I discovered that the Borg has some serious field curvature. I don’t know if it’s that my camera chip size
is too big for it or if I need some additional corrective optics, but I’m going
to need a field flattener if I want to do much more imaging with it. Unfortunately, they’re really expensive – I
did a brief search, and the lowest focal reducer I could get (it’s already got
a pretty large FOV with a DSLR attached to it) is like $350. Yikes.
I’ll have to keep poking around.
Still pretty much in love with the result, though.
Date: 23 May 2017
Location: Prude Ranch, TX - Texas Star Party
Object: Markarian's Chain
Camera: Nikon D3200 (Miqaela's)
Telescope: Borg 76ED, piggybacked on C8
Mount: Celestron AVX
Guide scope: N/A
Guide camera: N/A
Subframes: 51x150s (2h7m), ISO-1600
Darks: 18
Biases: 20
Flats: 20
Temperature: 45 degrees F
See on AstroBin (plus galaxy labels)
Sooooo many galaxies!
Date: 23 May 2017
Location: Prude Ranch, TX - Texas Star Party
Object: M8 & M20, Lagoon & Trifid Nebulae
Camera: Nikon D3200 (Miqaela's)
Telescope: Borg 76ED, piggybacked on C8
Mount: Celestron AVX
Guide scope: N/A
Guide camera: N/A
Subframes: 37x150s (1h32m), ISO-1600
Darks: 18
Biases: 20
Flats: 20
Temerature: 42 deg (darks taken at 39 degrees)
Sooooo
pretty! Colors look great, the stars
that are near the center at least don’t look like they show any chromatic
aberration (I mean, it is an ED apochromatic triplet), and that FOV is great
for all those large gorgeous nebulae out there.
And with a small chip CCD like the ASI120, it gets a similar FOV as my
C11 does with a DSLR, so I should be able to do some awesome stuff with galaxies and smaller
things with a camera like that. I should
try my QHY5 on it sometime.
While the first round of targets was
going, I brought my sister Melody with me to the Upper Field to see what was happening up
there. It was packed! So many people
plugging away at observing lists or photography. We wandered around, hoping to find someone
who’d lend a view through their scope.
We eventually came across a pair of absolutely massive binoculars that I just had to look through! They were 6 inches in aperture apiece! The guy was really nice and pointed them at a
few things for us and whatever I wanted to see.
We looked at galaxies M95 & M96, Comet 41P, Omega Centauri, the Leo
Triplet, and the False Comet cluster, which I’d never seen or even heard of
before. It’s two closely-spaced star
clusters with a tail of stars that could probably be mistaken for a comet in a
smaller aperture. It’s not in SkySafari
as the False Comet Cluster, but its NGC number is 6231. It’s too far south to see from home much at
all – it only gets as high as 8.5° there. I
couldn’t really see Comet 41P either; I thought I saw where its nucleus might
be, but I wasn’t sure. Leo Triplet
looked great. After that, we wandered
around some more, but the legendary 36” Dob that was up there was closed down
for the night. So we went back down to
the lower field, getting a snack at the snack bar along the way. Bob highly recommended the brisket burrito,
which was delicious but messy, and it was kind of weird having brisket in a
tortilla, lol. Talk about Tex-Mex!
When we got back down, it was time
to change targets. I’d looked at the
Needle Galaxy through Derek’s scope I think earlier that evening; I didn’t
realize how bright and big it was! So I
made that my next target in the C11. So
this was a night for edge-on galaxies.
Both images came out great!
Date: 23 May 2017
Location: Prude Ranch, TX - Texas Star Party
Object: NGC 4565 Needle Galaxy
Camera: Nikon D5300
Telescope: Celestron C11
Accessories: f/6.3 focal reducer
Mount: Celeston CGE Pro
Guide scope: Orion ST-80
Guide camera: QHY5
Subframes: 14x360s (1h24m), ISO-1600
Darks: 15
Biases: 20
Flats: 20
I’ve
never gotten much detail on the disk in M104, but the dust lanes in the Needle
Galaxy came out spectacularly for my DSLR!
And the colors!!
Now, I will pause here a moment –
the nice dark backgrounds in all my pictures aren’t really that dark in the
subs, I do have to trim off the left of the histogram a bit to get there, or
use the light pollution tool in the Astronomy Tools toolkit for Photoshop I
just bought (only $20 and you get the actual
files, so I was able to install it on both my laptop and desktop for the price
of one). Here’s a subframe of the
Needle:
But it’s
still not bad! And there were some
clouds roving through, and it was pretty low.
While images were going, I tagged
along with Bob and Jim as they did their TSP observing list, and saw several
things in Bob’s refractor: galaxy NGC 4631, NGC 4565 (the Needle Galaxy) M20
Trifid Nebula, M8 Lagoon Nebula, M17 Swan Nebula, galaxy NGC 4655, the Wild
Duck Cluster (in Derek’s Dob), M7 Ptolemy’s Cluster (also in Derek’s), galaxy
M83, and galaxy M101 Pinwheel Galaxy. I
think next year, I’m going to bring the C8 on the NexStar mount and do visual
observing while the imaging is going.
I’d love to earn some pins. I’m
thinking about either getting crossbars and a cargo hold that goes on the roof,
or maybe renting a little tow-behind trailer.
Derek bought one for like $1300, and he said he barely even noticed he
was towing anything. It’d give me a lot
of extra space, and I’d pack the lighter stuff in there so that it’s easier to
tow. It’d be good practice for when I
eventually get a camper, too.
Earlier that evening, I had the
D3100 set up for timelapse when Jim announced that the ISS was making a
pass. It was a long one too – SW to NW,
and it got pretty high. So I took a
series of 30-second exposures. I’m not
sure what I’m going to do with it yet – maybe I can make some kind of hybrid
image.
Went to sleep at 6 AM again! Ahhhhh yeahhhhh!
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