Monday, May 28, 2018

#142 - Friday, May 25, 2018 - Dancin' in the moonlight

It's Memorial Day weekend!  And that means camping at the observatory!  Earlier that afternoon, however, I decided not to camp after all, since it looked like it was going to rain and thunderstorm starting in the morning.  Also, I just didn't feel like it.  I was originally going to test out using my 8-in SCT on my Celestron AVX mount, but once I had all the equipment staged on my living room floor, I decided I really didn't want to load it all in the car for a half-night of moonlit imaging.  Maybe I'll experiment in my front yard first.  We'll see.

Even though it was strongly moonlit, it was rather clear, so I decided to set up my ZWO camera on the club's 5-inch refractor anyway.  First, before astronomical twilight was fully over, I slewed over to the moon to focus, and I also grabbed a full-frame video on it, since the full-frame video I took on my 8-inch on Thursday night was unreadable to RegiStax for some reason and made it crash.  The final processed image came out great!
Date: 25 May 2018
Object: Moon
Camera: ZWO ASI1600MM Pro
Telescope: Vixen 140mm neo-achromat refractor
Accessories: Astronomik L Type 2c 1.25" filter
Mount: Losmandy Gemini II
Frames: 2030/3002
Exposure: 2.5 ms
ISO/Gain: 0 (HDR)
Stacking program: RegiStax 6

I loooooooove my ZWO!  Such awesome contrast and dynamic range, even though it's only a 12-bit ADC!  What a great camera.

Once twilight was mostly over, the sky was really bright with moonlight, so I picked a bright object to image - the Needle Galaxy, NGC 4565.  It's also fairly large, so a good target for the refractor.  Most galaxies are too small to image well with such a large field of view.  I was going to do M51, the Whirlpool Galaxy, but it was too high and was getting cut off by the top of the dome.  The Needle Galaxy was closer to the moon, however, which made the background pretty bright in all the images.  Despite the moonlight, I got a nice result!  It caused a lot of noise in the background of the image, since any additional light increases the incidence of shot noise and other sources of noise, so I had to cut pretty far into the histogram in order to make the background look nice.  Despite that, it came out quite well anyway!
Date: 25 May 2018
Object: NGC 4656 Needle Galaxy
Camera: ZWO ASI1600MM Pro
Telescope: Vixen 140mm neo-achromat refractor
Accessories: Astronomik LRGB Type 2c 1.25" filters
Mount: Losmandy Gemini II
Guide scope: Celestron 102mm
Guide camera: QHY5
Subframes: L: 27x120s (54m)
   R: 16x120s (32m)
   G: 15x120s (30m)
   B: 15s120s (30m)
   Total: 73x120s (2h26m)
Gain/ISO: 139 (unity)
Stacking program: DeepSkyStacker
Stacking method (lights): Median kappa-sigma clipping
Darks: 20
Biases: 20
Flats: 0
Temperature: -15C (chip)

Once I got an hour's worth of luminance data on a half hour's worth on each RGB channel, I packed up and called it a night.  I wasn't going to camp, so I needed to leave around 2 AM in order to be awake enough to drive home.  A fruitful night, given how bright the sky was!


Sunday, May 27, 2018

#141 - Thursday, May 24, 2018 - Finally, some good atmosphere

Having excellent atmospheric conditions is important to getting sharp, clear images of solar system bodies.  This is not terribly common at my home location, but ClearSky promised 4/5 "seeing," a term used for how stable the air is (bad seeing results in the swirling mushiness that makes it hard to see fine detail on planets or the moon), and the forecast delivered!

I set up my 8-inch Schmidt-Cassegrain in the front yard on my Celestron NexStar SE mount.  I test how good the seeing and transparency are by stepping up magnification bit by bit.  I align the mount using a 25mm eyepiece, and then I slewed over to Jupiter and put in a 17mm, 13mm, and then finally a 6mm eyepiece.  Usually, when I look through a 6mm eyepiece (which provides 333x magnification on my C8), Jupiter just becomes a fuzzy ball.  But when the conditions are good, I can resolve a few cloud bands!  So I went ahead and attached my ZWO ASI1600MM Pro camera, the five-position filter wheel I have my LRGB filters in, and then I connected the camera to my tablet, which I had on a folding table to the side.  Once I got it centered and the exposure time turned down, and the telescope focused, I cut the ROI (region of interest) down from the full resolution of 4656x3520 down to 800x600, which effectively "zooms in."  I could use a Barlow to increase magnification, but the native resolution is already 0.4 arsec/pixel, and even a night of really good seeing isn't going to get that low, since the atmosphere always has a slight blurring effect.  Using a Barlow would also double the focal ratio, taking it from f/10 to f/20, which would mean I'd need to increase my exposure time, which would reduce my frame rate.  One of the big bonuses of using a ROI is the increase in frame rate, since the camera only has to read off part of the chip.  I was pulling 30+ fps, sometimes as high as 60 fps.  At high frame rates, you can grab more frames in the clear moments of seeing, which gets you a larger number of high-quality frames to stack in RegiStax later.  So it's a good deal all around.
I use SharpCap with my ZWO camera to capture solar system objects.  I've used FireCapture in the past, but it sometimes has really weird behavior, and I find it more difficult to use, especially on a tablet, since the buttons are so minuscule.

The seeing degraded later in the evening when Jupiter and the Moon moved over top of my apartment building, since the roof was probably emitting a lot of heat from the day.  The Great Red Spot was in a better position later in the evening, but the earlier image came out better.  Both are still awesome though!
Date: 24 May 2018
Object: Jupiter
Camera: ZWO ASI1600MM Pro
Telescope: Celestron C8
Accessories: Astronomik LRGB Type 2c 1.25" filters
Mount: Celestron NexStar SE
Frames: L: 1186/3010
R: 945/3002 
G: 951/3008
B: 668/3002
Exposure: L: 12 ms
  R: 20 ms
  G: 20 ms
  B: 25 ms
ISO/Gain: 139
Stacking program: RegiStax 6

Date: 24 May 2018
Object: Jupiter
Camera: ZWO ASI1600MM Pro
Telescope: Celestron C8
Accessories: Astronomik LRGB Type 2c 1.25" filters
Mount: Celestron NexStar SE
Frames: L: 1054/3002
R: 1336/3006
G: 827/3006
B: 994/3006
Exposure: L: 10 ms
  R: 20 ms
  G: 20 ms
  B: 25 ms
ISO/Gain: 139
Stacking program: RegiStax 6

The lunar images came out great too!  
Date: 24 May 2018
Object: Moon
Camera: ZWO ASI1600MM Pro
Telescope: Celestron C8
Accessories: Astronomik L Type 2c 1.25" filter
Mount: Celestron NexStar SE
Frames: 496/3010
Exposure: 5 ms
ISO/Gain: 139
Stacking program: RegiStax 6

Date: 24 May 2018
Object: Moon
Camera: ZWO ASI1600MM Pro
Telescope: Celestron C8
Accessories: Astronomik L Type 2c 1.25" filter
Mount: Celestron NexStar SE
Frames: 330/3013
Exposure: 7 ms
ISO/Gain: 139
Stacking program: RegiStax 6

It was a great evening!

Wednesday, May 16, 2018

Texas Star Party 2018 Summary: Walking in the Light of the Stars

This was my second year attending the venerable Texas Star Party, the mecca of astronomers all over the country, and even around the world - we had visitors from Australia, the UK, and Kosovo as well!  And for good reason - it's well-organized, supports a large number of people, and has fantastic dark skies and a high probability of clear, dry nights.  I didn't need my dew heaters at all the whole week!  It was worth all the vacation days I had to take from work.  Even though I was busy either taking or processing images the whole time, it still felt like vacation to me - being outside, especially under the stars, getting some fresh high-altitude air, wearing shorts and t-shirts and hats, talking to all kinds of strangers-made-friends, and even working on my tan while I was copying data, messing with my gear, or setting up my next timelapse sequence.

I did get to do a little sight-seeing - with all of the image editing I was doing (I just couldn't wait!) and log entries I was trying to keep up with, I didn't make it off the ranch the entire week until I went on the McDonald Observatory tour on Saturday.  We saw the same two telescopes as last year - the J Harlan Smith 107" Cassegrain reflector and the 300" Hobby-Eberly Telescope - but it was still cool to see them again, especially with Miqaela.  Also, this time, I got to operate the Smith telescope!

Saturday night, Miqaela won a set of Moon, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn maps (woo hoo), and then we set out our chairs with the folks around us and enjoyed some drinks in the warm air under fairly cloudy skies.  Despite the cloudiness, we managed to do a fair bit of astronomy - we saw Venus, Jupiter, the Big Dipper, a satellite, and several other stars as they peaked through the clouds.  I had a great conversation ranging from the Borderlands video game series to Dungeons and Dragons with two younger guys near where we were set up, and later one of the Aussies came over and regaled us with the tales of their US tour thus far.  I packed it in at 1 AM because Miqaela and I still had a long drive!  Fortunately, we had done most of our packing between dinner and the Great Texas Giveaway, although that meant I had missed part of that evening's talk.

This year's Texas Star Party was a blast, and I fulfilled one of my other imaging goals as well, besides the Rho Ophiuchi region: more timelapse video!


My week in numbers:
- 3,000 miles behind the wheel
- 192.8 GB of data (83.8 GB of astro data, 109 GB of timelapse)
- 6 nights of imaging
- 3 telescopes
- 2 guide scopes
- 6 cameras
- 3 mounts
- 4 tripods
- 6 counterweights
- 3 laptops
- 6h45m average sleep per night (including travel nights)
- 20 Stinking Planetaries observed
- 1 excellent star party!
And yes, we managed to fit all this, plus Miqaela's two cameras, two telescopes, guide scope, counterweights, mount, and two tripods, plus all of our data cables, power cables, two folding tables, a step stool, boxes of accessories, adapters, tools, nuts, bolts, and batteries, and warm clothes, cool clothes, sleeping bags, pillows, folding chairs, blankets, and snacks into my 2017 Ford Escape.  Because I am a Tetris champ!  And I definitely inherited my skills from my mother, passed down from my grandfather :D  Hanging out with my fellow club members and their friends and family was a real treat, and my minion Miqaela also got some fantastic images, including this one of the Snake Nebula!

Date: May 10, 2018
Location: Prude Ranch in Texas
Camera: Nikon D5300
OTA: Orion ST-80
Mount: Celestron Advanced VX
Guide Scope: Orion 50mm Guide Scope
Guide Camera: ZWO ASI 120MM
Subframes: 22x300s, ISO 1600
Darks: 32
Bias: 15
Flats: 15
Temperature: 52-54F

The last night, Saturday, cleared up as well, and we got to enjoy a few more hours under the dark Texas skies.  Walking in the light of so many stars is surreal.  You look up, and there just so many.  The Milky Way is a mottled smear thrown across the sky, filling up half of it, almost appearing like someone tore a hole in the dome.  Up at the top of the Milky Way, in the region of Cygnus, it feels like you can count every individual star of the thousands that are shining brightly above.  The stars feel close, like you could reach out and touch them, or fall upward into the sky and become lost in the inky depths, grabbing them by the handful and pulling them toward you in an embrace.  Looking through a telescope at the many dimmer wonders, such as nebulae, galaxies, planetary nebulae, and globular clusters, looks like an image, like someone hung a print of an astrophoto in front of the telescope.  Globular clusters reveal thousands of tiny dots; galaxies show off their spirals and their dust lanes, inviting you to come explore; nebulae look three-dimensional, as if you were flying through them in a spaceship, plying the waters of the Lagoon Nebula or soaring with the Eagle Nebula.  It is no wonder than ancient cultures paid so much attention to the sky and filled their lore with tails of the shapes traced out by the brighter stars.  The night sky instills wonder in people throughout the ages, inspiring art, religion, science, and poetry.  It drives us forward to dive ever deeper into its depths, to answer the call from across a vast distance.  First with our eyes alone, carefully plotting the motions of the stars, moon, and planets; then with instruments to aid our viewing, small telescopes and then ever larger ones; then with cameras, their unblinking eyes capturing photons emitted far away and long ago to reveal the structure, history, and unfathomable beauty of our shared universe; and then, finally, with ships, vessels that carry our technology and ourselves off the surface of our origin, away from our cradle, and out into the empty traverses between the stars and the galaxies, searching for answers to the most fundamental questions, and walking in the light of other stars.

The dark skies call, and I must go. ✨


#140 - Friday, May 11, 2018 - Sleep Deprivation - Texas Star Party Night #6

And so it was, on the sixth night, after days of burning the candle deeper and deeper into the night, chasing moonrise back until it was afraid to show its face until dawn, I, Molly Wakeling, hit the wall.

Friday night started out cloudy after not winning anything the first night of the Great Texas Giveaway, but then cleared up as promised after 2 AM.  After seeing some fantastic images of the Rho Ophiuchi region taken by another astrophotographer, I just had to try again, this time with 10-minute subframes.  But how to get 10-minute subframes when I can barely do two minutes on the Vixen Polarie?  The answer lay with the Borg.  Resistance was futile, so I rigged the scope for piggyback mode.

The reason I piggybacked it instead of attaching directly is that I needed to be able to guide in order to achieve 10-minute subframes, I was pretty sure.  So I pulled my 11-inch Vixen-style dovetail out of my support supply box, which I previously used to piggyback the Borg on my 11-inch to use as a guidescope until I got the Celestron guidescope on its Losmandy rail, and slide it into the dovetail clamps I leave on the Borg.  I just flip the Borg upside down and back for either mounting it on the C11 or attaching it to the AVX.  For the AVX, it has a small dovetail made, presumably by the previous owner, of wood.  Very clever, but not terribly stable, nor long enough - I will soon be replacing it with a plate or something.  With the SBIG detached, I also removed the waterbottles on the front, but kept the binoculars.  What a beautiful instrument of science.

With the 55-200mm lens set at 95mm and f/4.5, I loaded the previous night's alignment and slewed to the star Antares.  Using the DSLR's viewfinder (the good ol'-fashioned way), I adjusted the scope until Antares, the star Rho Ophiuchi itself, and the other stars in the vicinity were where I thought might work well to capture the region and its beautiful dark rivers.  After 1-minute and 5-minute test frames, I went all the way to 10 - and still got nice round stars!  (Very easy at that short of a focal length.)  All the while, I was dreaming of my bed.  The desire to be horizontal was powerful.  All of my astro-buddies had gone to bed, so I was out there alone.  Once the images were going, I set my alarm for 3 AM, when it was going to cross the meridian so I could do a meridian flip on the scope, and I got comfy in one of the reclining chairs.  Unbelievably, I did actually fall asleep for a bit (I am absolutely terrible at falling asleep any place besides a bed).  I woke up when my alarm went off, disoriented and feeling ill.  I staggered over to the telescope, did the meridian flip, attempted to visually put it back in the same spot (I didn't download the index files for AstroTortilla to be able to plate-solve images that wide, not to mention I didn't have the calculations on hand for what my actual FOV was to give to it), and took one or two more subframes, but they were way not in the right position, and I just didn't have the mental energy to continue.  So, with the sky still clear and dark at 4 AM, I dishearteningly shut down the computer, covered the scope, buttoned everything up in case of morning rain, and wandered to bed.  Pretty sure my path was quite zig-zaggy.  I didn't even brush my teeth, just threw on some PJs, put my retainer back in, and passed the heck out!  

Overall, I did much better than last year as far as late-night energy goes, but this was my absolute limit.  It helped that I got nearly 6 hours of quality sleep a night that week, sleeping in until 11 or 11:30, thanks especially to my quiet roommates and my quality sleeping mask.  

So, was my suffering worth it?  ...I'd say so!  My definite goal for next year is to get more subframes (although it's a week earlier, so the Milky Way will rise even later!), but this came out quite nicely for only four subframes!
Date: 11 May 2018
Location: Prude Ranch, TX - Texas Star Party
Object: Rho Ophiuchi region
Camera: Nikon D5300
Telescope: Nikon 55-200mm lens at 95mm, f/4.5
Accessories: N/A
Mount: Celestron AVX (piggyback on Borg)
Guide scope: Orion 50mm mini-guider
Guide camera: QHY5IIL-Mono (borrowed) 
Subframes: 4x600s (40m)
Gain/ISO: ISO-1600
Stacking program: DeepSkyStacker 4.1.0
Stacking method (lights): Auto-adaptive weighted average
Darks: 7
Biases: 20
Flats: 0
Temperature: 60-64F

It's a tough region to capture, but this was cool!


#139 - Thursday, May 10, 2018 - I'll Take What I Can Get - Texas Star Party Night #5

After dinner, I grabbed my warm clothes from the bunkhouse and meandered down to the lower field to await sunset with my astro-buddies.  I was chillin' in a lounge chair when I was called over to the setup of the gentleman behind my setup.  A member of The Astro Imaging Channel on YouTube, Alex, had asked me earlier in the week if I would do a presentation on their channel!  He had swung by to do an introduction of me and my scopes.  He asked if I had done anything unique or creative in the setup.  Not much, but I showed him and his camera what I did to my Borg to balance it...read on to find out...anyway, it quickly came to light that so much of my gear is borrowed or has been given to me!  A true blessing of friendship.

Once the sun went down, I made another attempt to adjust the C11, since the evening started out partly cloudy, and it definitely looked better in the eyepiece, but the question remained - would it guide?  I polar-aligned it again, using a tool called a belt wrench to help me turn the altitude adjustment knob.  It was hard to figure out how to use right, but it did help a lot in being able to turn it once I got the hang of it.  I used SharpCap's polar alignment tool again, which is kind of hard when you're not level, since after adjusting left and right, it wants you to adjust up and down again, and on it goes.   Add my tripod to the list of things to fix...

It cleared up after 1 AM, so I decided to test out the C11 on the Sombrero Galaxy.  I carefully focused with my Bahtinov mask on a nearby star (the same one that comes up for Precise Goto), and then I took some 180s frames.  Guiding that evening was...not pretty.  Mind you this is with a 600mm focal length scope mounted on top of my C11 using a Losmandy dovetail, the big wide ones, and a QHY5 mono camera.

The result is evident in the images. 
Sorry, the bottom got cut off.  Stupid Microsoft Paint

As I was going through all of the test images I took, it reminded me of back when I was first starting out, going through images where there'd be two or three bad ones in a row, then a good one, then a few more bad ones...periodic tracking error.  I should not be seeing this when guiding.  And it wasn't even only in one direction for the dec axis!  I tried turning off guiding in declination, or only guiding one way, or turning on backlash compensation (although, as I had to explain to every person I talked to about this, this is not a backlash problem - when I took in an eyepiece, there is no delay whatsoever switching directions), but nothing seemed to help.  The only thing I can think of at this point is that I'm still not quite adjusting the adjustment knob quite right for the worm gear in the dec axis.  My RA axis was also slipping and binding a lot too though, for reasons unknown, as if I was not in balance.  *sigh* I'm out of ideas.  When I talked to a Celestron rep there about the problem, he was shocked to hear that I was having these issues with the CGE Pro, particularly since it had just been refurbished by Celestron last year and it's been Hypertuned.  After the CGE and now the CGE Pro, I am starting to think that my next mount will not be manufactured by Celestron.  I'm so done with this crap.

I tried the Sombrero Galaxy with 30-second images as well, and I had a larger number of usable frames, but none of the blue ones came out, unfortunately.  On any of my targets.  I've heard that the blue Astronomik filter I use, which they claim is parfocal, is just slightly not parfocal.  Parfocal means that you don't have to change focus when switching out filters - the reason you would need to do this is not because you are adding or subtracting path length (they're inside a filter wheel), but because of small differences in the index of refraction of the material.  The effect is not noticeable on the 5-inch refractor at my club's observatory (I checked with a Bahtinov mask), but perhaps it is much more noticeable on something with the far longer focal length of my 11-inch Schmidt-Cassegrain (800mm on the refractor, 1763mm with my focal reducer in place on the C11).  Further tests are needed.

I tried the Iris Nebula, Ring Nebula, and Whirlpool Galaxy as well, but didn't have any good blue frames on any of them.  The Whirlpool images I took close to morning, so I only got luminance.  I went ahead and stacked the luminance frames anyway, so that I'd have something...they came out kind of neat!

Date: 9 May 2018
Location: Prude Ranch, TX - Texas Star Party
Object: NGC 7023 Iris Nebula
Camera: ZWO ASI1600MM Pro
Telescope: Celestron C11
Accessories: Astronomik L Type 2c 1.25" filter, f/6.3 focal reducer, EV focuser
Mount: Celestron CGE Pro
Guide scope: Celestron 80mm 
Guide camera: QHY5
Subframes: L: 17x180s
Gain/ISO: Unity (139)
Stacking program: DeepSkyStacker
Stacking method (lights): Median kappa-sigma clipping (2,5)
Darks: 20
Biases: 30
Flats: 25
Temperature: -25C (chip)

Date: 10 May 2018
Location: Prude Ranch, TX - Texas Star Party
Object: M51 Whirlpool Galaxy
Camera: ZWO ASI1600MM Pro
Telescope: Celestron C11
Accessories: Astronomik L Type 2c 1.25" filter, f/6.3 focal reducer, EV focuser
Mount: Celestron CGE Pro
Guide scope: Celestron 80mm
Guide camera: QHY5
Subframes: L: 4x60s
Gain/ISO: Unity (139)
Stacking program: DeepSkyStacker
Stacking method (lights): Median kappa-sigma clipping (2,5)
Darks: 19
Biases: 30
Flats: 1: 20, 2: 0
Temperature: -25C (chip)

Date: 10 May 2018
Location: Prude Ranch, TX - Texas Star Party
Object: M57 Ring Nebula
Camera: ZWO ASI1600MM Pro
Telescope: Celestron C11
Accessories: Astronomik L Type 2c 1.25" filter, f/6.3 focal reducer, EV focuser
Mount: Celestron CGE Pro
Guide scope: Celestron 80mm
Guide camera: QHY5
Subframes: L: 12x30s
Gain/ISO: Unity (139)
Stacking program: DeepSkyStacker
Stacking method (lights): Median kappa-sigma clipping (2,5)
Darks: 20
Biases: 30
Flats: 20
Temperature: -25C (chip)

Date: 9 May 2018
Location: Prude Ranch, TX - Texas Star Party
Object: M104 Sombrero Galaxy
Camera: ZWO ASI1600MM Pro
Telescope: Celestron C11
Accessories: f/6.3 focal reducer, Astronomik L Type 2c 1.25" filter, EV focuser
Mount: Celestron CGE Pro
Guide scope: Celestron 80mm
Guide camera: QHY5
Subframes: L: 31x180s
Gain/ISO: Unity (139)
Stacking program: DeepSkyStacker
Stacking method (lights): Median kappa-sigma clipping (2,5)
Darks: 20
Biases: 30
Flats: 25
Temperature: -25C (chip), 50-58F (ambient)

If you look carefully in the Ring Nebula image, at about the five o'clock position, you can see a small galaxy!  Awesome!!

On the other hand, the AVX was working great.  Of course, it had a very light load with my Borg riding atop.  Guiding in declination wasn't going so well on that one either earlier in the week, but the answer was much less mysterious: the wooden dovetail bar that is currently on the Borg clamps is very short, and especially after I attached the SBIG ST-8300M I'm borrowing to it, along with a filter wheel, it was heavily unbalanced.  So, I got creative...

I first grabbed some duct tape and wrapped the little Orion 10x42 binoculars on it, but it wasn't quite enough, so I grabbed a few waterbottles from the car and strapped them on too.  It still wasn't enough, but it was much better!  Guiding looked somewhat better.  And with a scope with such a wide field-of-view, it's pretty forgiving of small errors.
Poorly-balanced guiding
More well-balanced guiding

With such nice guiding, I got a full set of LRGB images using the ZWO filters I borrowed from my minion Miqaela, since she was still DSLR imaging, on part of Markarian's Chain, centered on galaxy M86.  Markarian's Chain is a portion of the Virgo Cluster of galaxies that makes this neat long chain of galaxies that is fun to follow in a big juicy Dob.  The large FOV of my Borg can capture a fair amount of it.  My last attempt at least year's Texas Star Party came out very noisy, mainly due to the fact that I was borrowing Miqaela's Nikon D3200, which we later discovered while I was taking dark frames on it had an unusually high noise profile.  Like, the dark frames were nearly totally red and white!  This time, the SBIG was cooled to a frosty -15C, which gave it significantly less noise.
Date: 10 May 2018
Location: Prude Ranch, TX - Texas Star Party
Object: Markarian's Chain
Camera: SBIG ST-8300M (borrowed)
Telescope: Borg 76ED
Accessories: Hotech field flattener, ZWO LRGB filters 1.25"
Mount: Celestron AVX
Guide scope: Orion 50mm mini-guider
Guide camera: QHY5IIL-Mono (borrowed)
Subframes: L: 10x300s
   R: 8x180s
   G: 7x180s
   B: 10x180s
   Total: 35 frames, 2h5m total
Gain/ISO: 
Stacking program: DeepSkyStacker
Stacking method (lights): Median kappa-sigma clipping (2,5)
Darks: 30 (300s), 30 (180s)
Biases: 0
Flats: 0
Temperature: -15C (chip), 62-68F (ambient)

There are a ton of galaxies in this image!  Check out this inverted black and white version to detect more...basically anything that has a smudgy appearance is probably a galaxy.

Check it out on AstroBin for a version that has many of them labeled.

After I got through all of that imaging, I had a little darkness left around 4 AM, but only got a few luminance frames on the Western Veil Nebula before the moon came up and it was time to turn in.  

My third project for the evening was the reason I took my Nikon D5300 off of my Borg - I took a lot of timelapse images that week, and wanted to do some long exposure on the Milky Way.  I took the Vixen Polarie and the Nikon up to the upper field and took several minute-long images across the sky to make some panoramas.
My Nikon D5300 attached to my Vixen Polarie.  It's in a flat position for the panning daytime timelapses I was taking, but for night sky imaging, you angle it so it's pointing at Polaris, using a small hole in the side.  (It can also be used in the southern hemisphere, pointing at the southern pole, with a switch flipped).

While I was up there, I apparently missed club member Bob making some of his famous scrambled eggs.  I can't believe it!  However, the panoramas came out so awesome, it might have been worth missing the eggs...maybe...


If I wasn't typing this on my desktop, I'd include that one emoji with the stars for eyes here...I'm so excited about these images!  They came out a little distorted from Photoshop's Photomerge tool, but I just need more practice taking them.  And I think I might even have some airglow in the bottom image, which is from molecules in the upper atmosphere releasing energy absorbed during the day as greenish and reddish light.  You can only see it in very dark locations.  In the second image as well, you have three planets - ruddy Mars on the left, bright Jupiter on the right, and dim Saturn in the middle, just to the left of the main bulk of the Milky Way.  The top frame is four frames mosaic'd, and the bottom image is seven.  :D:D:D:D  The skies were truly wonderful!

This was another late night in a long line of late nights - I climbed into my sleeping bag at 5:45 AM.  Another (mostly) excellent night!

Thursday, May 10, 2018

#138 - Wednesday, May 9, 2018 - ♫Deep in the daaaaaaark of Texas!♪ Texas Star Party Night #4

I slept in until 11 AM, took a shower, and got lunch, and then I went back down to the lower field to offload all my images.  While my files were copying, I saw a dust cloud start to pick up on the road over by the dining hall, and then the winds started swirling and it turned into a full-on dust devil!  It moved swiftly towards where I was at, and then it turned and tore through the north end of the field, about 50 feet from where I was.  It knocked over several telescopes, including a big Dobsonian that was standing upright, and it picked up and carried one of those canopies halfway across the observing field.  I watched it teeter around before it landed, just barely missing several vehicles and telescopes, landing in a tree.  I moved frantically looked around the several big telescopes in my vicinity, trying to figure out which one to save!  I stood ready to brace myself against my 11-inch on its Celestron CGE Pro mount, since I figured it was the most breakable of all my scopes.  Fortunately, it dissipated before it could cause any more damage, although I heard another one picked up around the same time in the upper field and knocked over and damaged several scopes.  It was crazy to watch!

Later that afternoon, I was on the list to give a talk titled "Origin of the Elements: The Story of Stellar Nucleosynthesis."  I like to give astrophotography talks at these kinds of events, but I'm a little out of my league here at the Texas Star Party on that front, so I decided to give a more physics-y talk.  I spent quite a lot of time researching and digging into the details, and it was hard to pack all of the information I found into 20 minutes!  Every little topic could have been a whole class lecture.  As a result, I didn't actually have a chance to rehearse the talk, so it didn't go as smoothly as I would have liked.  But I got a lot of compliments afterwards, so I guess it sounded better outside my head than in!  Now I can refine it, since I'm giving the same talk to my astronomy club within the next few months.  I got some interesting questions about neutron star nucleosynthesis afterwards, which I need to go investigate some more.

Night began to fall, and the sky was nice and clear.  Jupiter is nearing opposition, making it big and bright, so I took the QHY5L-II I'm borrowing as a second guide camera, attached it to my Astronomik LRGB filters, and attached the whole thing to my 8-inch, after I found the various adapters that have now become scattered across my gear.  Since it was shortly after sunset, however, the seeing was terrible, so I haven't processed it yet to see if I got even a few good frames in the messiness.  I'll have to image it from home in the next few weeks here.  That's one nice thing about planets - they don't care about light pollution, you can image them from anywhere!

Once I finished that, I got the cameras re-attached, and began re-aligning and re-polar aligning both of my scopes.  The wind bumps them around during the day, and then my Celestron AVX mount lost power after I turned it on due to a finicky power supply connection, so I had to completely re-align that one as well.  Polar alignment is very difficult on my CGE Pro mount, so it took a while.  But I finally got them both up and running around 12:45 AM.  On the 11-inch Schmidt-Cassegrain, I collected RGB data on M104, the Sombrero Galaxy, to go with the luminance I had taken the night before.  When it got lower later, I moved over to the Iris Nebula to get a few more luminance frames and then RGB frames.  None of them really came out, however - they all look out of focus, even though I carefully focused it with a Bahtinov mask before each target, and I had re-collimated it the night before.

I had slightly more luck on the AVX mount.  I wanted to use my Nikon D5300 on my Vixen Polarie star tracker that night so I could image the Rho Ophiuchi region widefield, but I didn't want to let my Borg refractor just sit there useless either.  Then I remembered that I had also brought a SBIG ST-8300M CCD camera that I'm borrowing from a fellow club member, which I had brought to let my minion Miqaela try to use on her Newtonian telescope, since it may be able to focus when her DSLR can't (since the sensor in DSLRs is so much farther back than in CCD cameras).  I borrowed Miqaela's ZWO LRGB filters for it, and aimed it at M17, the Swan/Omega/Horseshoe/Checkmark Nebula (so many names!).  It made it so back-heavy though that I couldn't balance it in declination without a longer dovetail, so I duct taped a pair of binoculars to the end!  It still wasn't quite enough, but it was better.  As a result, guiding wasn't great in declination, so I only took 3-minute subframes.  But it came out all right anyway!
Date: 9 May 2018
Location: Prude Ranch, TX - Texas Star Party
Object: M17 Swan Nebula
Camera: SBIG ST-8300M
Telescope: Borg 76ED
Accessories: Hotech field flattener, ZWO LRGB filters 1.25"
Mount: Celestron AVX
Guide scope: Orion 50mm mini-guider
Guide camera: QHY5L-II
Subframes: L: 9x180s
   R: 7x180s
   G: 3x180s
   B: 4x180s
   Total: 1h9m (23x180s)
Stacking program: DeepSkyStacker
Stacking method (lights): Median kappa-sigma clipping (2,5)
Darks: 30
Biases: 17
Flats: 0
Temperature: -20C (chip), 50-54F (ambient)

After I got those all going, I set up my Nikon D5300 on my Vixen Polarie star tracker and pointed the camera at the Rho Ophiuchi complex surrounding the star Antares, just east of the Milky Way.  It's a gorgeous, colorful region of stars, a globular cluster, and dust clouds.  I set my lens to 100mm focal length, focused, and set up 2-minute exposures.  They didn't end up being quite long enough to really capture it well, but it didn't come out too bad.
Date: 9 May 2018
Location: Prude Ranch TX - Texas Star Party
Object: Rho Ophiuchi region
Camera: Nikon D5300
Telescope: Nikon 55-200mm lens @ 100mm, f/4.8
Accessories: N/A
Mount: Vixen Polarie
Guide scope: N/A
Guide camera: N/A
Subframes: 33x120s (1h6m)
Gain/ISO: ISO-1600
Stacking program: DeepSkyStacker
Stacking method (lights): 
Darks: 0
Biases: 20
Flats: 0
Temperature: 50-54F

After I got a bunch of frames on that, I tried to image the Veil Nebula region, but I couldn't get long enough exposures for how much star streaking I was still getting.  I don't have the polar alignment module for the Polarie because it's expensive and awkward to use, so I can only roughly polar align it, so it doesn't always track that well.  So instead, I turned it back to the south, set the lens to 55mm, and did 3-minute exposures (shorter focal length means it takes longer to see the streaking) on a region of the Milky Way.  The subframes were gorgeous, and it came out great!
Date: 9 May 2018
Location: Prude Ranch TX - Texas Star Party
Object: Milky Way widefield
Camera: Nikon D5300
Telescope: Nikon 55-200mm lens @ 55mm, f/4.5
Accessories: N/A
Mount: Vixen Polarie
Guide scope: N/A
Guide camera: N/A
Subframes: 6x180s (18m total)
Gain/ISO: ISO-1600
Stacking program: DeepSkyStacker
Stacking method (lights): Auto-adaptive weighted average
Darks: 48
Biases: 20
Flats: 0
Temperature: 50F

So despite my C11 not working great, I did finally get some good images last night!  Hopefully we get another good night before this party ends so I can try to get at least something out of my C11 for all the effort it takes to set up.

While imaging was going, I wrapped up the "20 Stinking Planetaries" Texas Star Party special observing list, and then got my pin the next day!  It's my first observing pin!
After I finished the planetaries, I put on this 2-inch eyepiece I got from another club member, a Meade 40mm, 60-degree FOV, 5-element Plossl monstrosity that weighs practically as much as the telescope.  I ran through the common objects list on my hand controller and drank in gorgeous view of the Lagoon Nebula, Trifid Nebula, Wild Duck Cluster, Whirlpool Galaxy, Sunflower Galaxy, Black Eye Galaxy, and many more.  We finally went to bed at 5 AM.  What a night!



Wednesday, May 9, 2018

#137 - Tuesday, May 8, 2018 - Persist! Texas Star Party Night #3

I managed to sleep in all the way until 11 AM, and I trotted off directly to lunch after getting up and getting dressed.  Two cups of coffee for me - I was feeling prettttty out of it!  Also a couple Tylenol.  After lunch, I worked on processing images and getting caught up on blog posts, and then headed over to the "Eclipsathon" - a gathering of eclipse-goers to share stories from the August 21, 2017 solar eclipse, along with pictures and videos.  After I gave my bit, I got a text from Miqaela, who had gone into Fort Davis with another club member, asking me to put her laptop away because it was raining in town!  I went outside, and I could see rain clouds rolling in.

So I quickly put her laptop and all of our cardboard boxes into my car, and made sure everything else was covered up and secured for all of my fellow club members and neighbors.  Then I ran back up to the lecture hall and made an announcement about the oncoming rain, which prompted about half the room to dash out to make sure all their gear was secure.  It rained pretty hard!  But everything was safe and sound, at least in our corner.

Once it got dark, I got my gear uncovered and set up another timelapse on my other DSLR to watch my scopes move and the Milky Way rise.  It was cloudy most of the evening, and it was kind of neat to see because in a place where there's very little light pollution, the clouds are black.  Sometimes it's hard to tell whether there are actually clouds in a given area or not!
15-second exposure on my Nikon D3100, part of my timelapse sequence that night.

I finally made some progress on my CGE Pro mount!  I put an eyepiece on it to see how bad the jitteriness still was, and I popped open the motor casing to adjust the worm gear again - it was still binding a bit, so I loosened it a bit more.  When I put a little pressure on the eyepiece to mimic the weight of my camera that it's balanced for, there was very little of the bounciness!  Progress!  So I put the camera back on, re-aligned (it can move a tiny bit during the day with the wind), and took some test images.  The stars looked nice and stable while I was guiding!  Finally!!  I took the camera back off and put an eyepiece back on to collimate, since I learned that I'd been doing it not wrong, but not the best way either, and got it pretty close.  Zenith had cleared, so I used Arcturus, which was quite high by that time of the night.  Since there were still quite a few clouds passing through, I pulled my chair over to the circle of astro-friends and chatted over drinks, since the forecast said the skies might clear.  And clear they did, around 1:30 AM - showtime!  Since the Milky Way was still kind of low, I pointed at M104, the Sombrero Galaxy, and took luminance frames on that, this time making sure the cooler was on.  They looked much better!  
Single raw luminance frame, 180s, unity gain, ZWO ASI1600MM Pro on my C11

Guiding did get weird after a while though, but it was getting lower toward the west, so I switched targets to the Iris Nebula and got a full set of luminance frames on that as well.  Next I'll get the RGB frames!

Over on the Borg with my Nikon D5300, I pointed that over to the Snake Nebula, Barnard 72.  Miqaela became interested in this target a while back, and I thought I've give it a try too.  She's gotten some phenomenal images on it, and I'm pretty stoked about mine too!  I lost the last few subframes to moonlight just before 4 AM, but got over two hours of data on it.  But it came out AMAZING!!
Date: 8 May 2018
Object: B72 Snake Nebula
Camera: Nikon D5300
Telescope: Borg 76ED
Accessories: Hotech field flattener
Mount: Celestron AVX
Guide scope: Orion 50mm
Guide camera: QHY5II-M (John Chumack's)
Subframes: 28x300s (2h20m)
Gain/ISO: ISO-1600
Stacking program: DeepSkyStacker
Stacking method (lights): Median kappa-sigma clipping (2,5)
Darks: 40 (48F)
Biases: 20
Flats: 20
Temperature: 45-53F

Next, I'm going to take the Borg off of my AVX mount and attach my 55-200mm Nikon lens to my DSLR and attach that to the mount without a telescope so I can get a nice wide field of the Rho Ophiuchi region.  I tried last year, but was too zoomed in and didn't get the result I wanted.  We shall see!

The clouds stayed away the whole rest of the night, and the sky was absolutely incredible.  Other people went to bed, but my persistence paid off big time!  I also got some great shots of the Milky Way using my Vixen Polarie star tracker to allow me to take 30-second exposures (my D3100 can't be automated for longer than that), but of course I forgot to switch to raw -.-  So I will be repeating those tonight if the skies hold out.
30 seconds, ISO-1600, Nikon D3100, tracked on Vixen Polarie

Once my imaging rigs got going, I de-tarped my 8-inch Schmidt-Cassegrain and started working on the "20 Stinking Planetaries" observing list.  Each year, the Texas Star Party puts together special observing lists, and if you complete them, you can earn observing pins!  This will be my first observing pin, to pair with my Outreach Award pin from the Astronomical League.  I'm going to need to put these on my hat or something soon here.  My Celestron NexStar mount is goto, so it was a lot quicker for me to find them than people using push-to mounts, although the observing list planners prefer people to do push-to.  But I'm a newbie, and I did have to use reference stars a few times to find some of the extra-tiny ones.  I made it through 16 last night, so getting there!  It included the easy-to-spot ones, like the Ring Nebula and the Dumbbell Nebula, as well as a number of ones that are very difficult to distinguish from stars.  There was one, NGC 6781, that wasn't just a tiny disk, but was actually rather large, and definitely something I could image!  I'd probably have to image it from here because it's quite dim, but it was pretty.

Tuesday, May 8, 2018

#136 - Monday, May 7, 2018 - Texas Star Party Night #2



The second night began partially clear, and then cleared up after sunset.  I honed in alignment and polar alignment on my two mounts, and tried out the polar alignment routine in SharpCap for the first time, which was way super cool and very easy!  Well, it would have been easier if the altitude adjustment knob on my CGE Pro wasn’t such a bear to turn.  Luckily, I got some help from my neighbors – one of them had this tool with an adjustable rubber neck that grips the knob, and then I was able to turn it without as much difficulty.  Earlier that evening, after I got my D3100 set up on the upper field to do an all-night timelapse, I went and found some of the Celestron reps to get their advice on the mount issues.  They didn’t have any mount experts present, but I got some advice on how to potentially get around the issue, which was to lower the aggressiveness of guiding and lower the frequency that guide commands are sent in PHD so that it’s not trying to guide out the bounciness after a correction is made.  

Once I was all ready to go, though, a long line of high cirrus clouds rolled through the eastern sky, but it was clear down to the south, so I imaged Omega Centauri instead.  Omega Cenauri is a massive globular cluster located in the deep south in the constellation Centaurus.  It lies about 15,800 lighyears away, and is the largest globular in the galaxy at 150 lightyears across.  Even at that distance, its angular size in the sky as seen from Earth is slightly larger than the full moon.  Globular clusters are tightly bound collections of stars that usually exist in the halos of galaxies, and sometimes pre-date the galaxy itself, and Omega Centauri's average age is around 11.5 billion years old.  This one contains as many as 10 million stars! It may also have a black hole at its center.   The seeing was so bad that close to the hilltops that guiding wasn’t really working at all, since it kept losing the guide star, so I just took 20-second subs.  In addition, my C11 is very susceptible to the seeing conditions, so the frames turned out pretty mushy.  I deleted the whole dataset.  But I also imaged it on my Borg with my Nikon D5300 attached, and since the aperture and FOV are so much smaller, it looks a lot sharper.  I had to delete quite a few subs when clouds started covering that area too, but it’s not a dim object (I could see it with 5-second subs on my ZWO camera when I was centering it), so I took 2-minute subs since guiding wasn’t working on that scope either, and I don’t need a ton of them.  Unfortunately, I have not been taking 2-minute darks, so I had to stack without them.
            
Date: 7 May 2018
Object: Omega Centauri
Camera: Nikon D5300
Telescope: Borg 76ED
Accessories: Hotech field flattener
Mount: Celestron AVX
Guide scope: Orion 50mm
Guide camera: QHY5II-Mono
Subframes: 15x120s (30m)
Gain/ISO: ISO-1600
Stacking program: DeepSkyStacker
Stacking method (lights): 
Darks: 0
Biases: 20
Flats: 22
Temperature: 48F


Over on the C11, I imaged Omega Centauri as well, but that scope is particularly susceptible to bad seeing, so it didn't turn out very well.  After I got a full set of LRGB, I found a target in a clear part of the sky – M64, the Black Eye Galaxy, which was on my imaging list, but further down.  I got luminance and red frames on it before the moon came up around 2:30 AM, but I realized when I was shutting down that I forgot to turn the cooler back on after doing the polar alignment routine.  Ultimately, it was too cloudy to see if guiding was going to work in the east, so that will be my first task for tonight.  I’m hoping that my polar alignment is good enough to avoid needing to guide in dec.
            
After 1:30 AM, it cleared up some more, although the transparency and seeing were still pretty bad.  I slewed the Borg over to the Snake Nebula and started capturing that.  Dark nebula are all but impossible from light-polluted areas, so it was so cool to see it!  I need more data before I can stack, but I’m pretty excited about it.  My minion Miqaela got a few really nice subframes on Sunday night as well, but the moon is rising not long after the Milky Way until later in the week, which doesn’t give us much time.
            
I tried out another new tool tonight, in addition to SharpCap’s polar alignment routine – I finally ran AstroTortilla!  It for some reason couldn’t plate-solve my ZWO images on the C11, but it ran fast and accurately on the Borg with my Nikon camera!!  Earlier in the evening, as the clouds were just rolling in, I was going to take more subframes on M97 and M108, so I gave it a JPG screenshot of one of my subframes from the night before, and it ingested that, took a picture with my Nikon (I had slewed to M108), slewed the scope, and then it was exactly where my subframe from the previous night was!  It was truly magical.  It plugs into BackyardNikon to take the image.  I had to change a few settings in BYN, mainly just the port number it was talking through, and then it worked just fine.  I’m not sure why it’s having a hard time solving my ZWO images – it should have plenty of stars with only a 5-second sub, since that camera is quite sensitive. I’ll try a longer sub next.
            
The moon rose at 2:30 AM, and everyone else had gone to bed because of the earlier clouds, so I packed up and retrieved my camera from the upper field, which had been going all evening.  My D3100 doesn’t work with an intervalometer for some reason, but it does work with a wireless remote shutter (on the same port, no less).  So I rubber-banded a piece of plastic I found in a desk drawer at the JB observatory last winter to the shutter button, velcro’d it to the tripod, taped over all the lights with gaffer’s tape, plugged the camera into power from the AC pedestal that powers the entire upper field, and let it run!  I just used batteries for my D5300 down on the lower field, since the screen can close on that camera, so the batteries last much longer (and I’m right there to replace them as opposed to having to make another trip up to the upper field).  I slept until 11 AM, when my alarm went off.  I feel pretty out of it today, but I’d better bolster myself with coffee because I’ve got several more nights ahead!
View of the upper field on a night with poor transparency and seeing

Next post: #137 - Tuesday, May 8, 2018 - Persist! Texas Star Party Night #3

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