It was
cloudy the first half of the night, and the forecast called for rain, so I
didn’t set up the scopes. But there were
some patches in the clouds, and I looked through club member Derek's 12-inch Dob (I
think it’s 12 inches), and he had it trained on M81 & M82. Under those dark skies, they just jumped
right out! They were so easy to see. It was amazing. I couldn’t wait to image!
Sunday, May 21, 2017
Tuesday, May 16, 2017
#81 - Tuesday, May 16, 2017 - Texas Star Party Prep
Unfortunately,
I’m writing this over a month later because I guess I never actually wrote this
one. Let’s see what I can remember.
I got the new CGE Pro mount built, although
lifting the mount head onto the equatorial section was very difficult. So the
altitude adjustment works in two segments: less than 40 latitude, and greater
than 40 latitude. You have to move a
piece in order to switch between the two.
We are at 39 degrees, so you’d think I could leave it on the less than
40 mode, but nope. I wasn’t quite able
to reach the all-star polar alignment star, nor was I able to reach Polaris
just doing it that way. It was close,
but not quite, and I couldn’t turn the knob any further (it got super tight
near the end). But I didn’t want to
switch into the other mode since I would be in Texas the next week, so I
decided to see how well I could do not polar aligned just with guiding. That didn’t work out so well. But it was worth a shot! And I made sure everything was able to talk
to each other, and figured out how to build everything. So it was still a fruitful trip. And then I just left all the boxes in the car
because it would have been too much of a pain in the butt to haul them back
upstairs, just to haul them back down on Thursday night.
Monday, May 15, 2017
#80 - Monday, May 15, 2017
I was
going to bring out my new CGE Pro to test out on Monday night with Miqaela (and
teach her how to guide), but she couldn’t make it after all. It was clear though, so I couldn’t resist and
went out to the memorial scope dome to take some images.
I ended up getting out there late, so I just picked the first target
that sounded reasonable for that scope – M81 & M82 – synced to Dubhe,
calibrated guiding, and off I went. Got
23 images, and some high clouds rolled in, but they might still work. Most of them are clear. However, I recently turned on GPS data on my
Nikon D5300, and that seems to break DSS.
I’m having permissions issues trying to remove it in Windows, and it’d
be easy if they were JPEGs and not NEFs, but alas, I’ve been trying for
hours.
[I eventually solved this problem by booting up Ubuntu on my laptop (I have a dual-boot on it for Windows/Ubuntu), and then wrote a bash script using exiftools to remove all of the GPS-related attributes. It worked! I still have a lot of dark frames taken in the first two weeks of May that I need to hunt down and cleanse, but I'll do that as I find them, I think.]
Saturday, May 6, 2017
#79 - Saturday, May 6, 2017 - Girl Scout outreach
I brought
my outreach rig (the 8-inch SCT on the Celestron NexStar SE) to Camporee and set it up about 45 minutes before sunset. Jupiter was visible around sunset, as well as
the Moon, of course. I had a few older
girls and adults, and about 30 Daisies and Brownies come by, and we looked at
both Jupiter and the Moon. Lots of oohs
and ahs! It had looked like it was going
to stay cloudy, but then it cleared up all of a sudden once I got set up! So perfect. My coworker and astro-friend Sarah came to help out as well.
Solar system tracking was abysmal,
but it got better after I aligned (still drifted off every once in a while though). Altitude backlash was pretty bad.
Thursday, March 23, 2017
#78 - Wednesday, March 23, 2017 - My first comet!
Another club member, Ray, was
using the memorial scope until about 10:30 PM, and the sky was covered in high clouds
anyway, so I did some timelapse looking toward the Orion nebula. I also tried to set up the Meade refractor
that’s on the CGEM mount, but I couldn’t get a guidescope attached to it. I looked at some things visually through the
big Dob the club owns – M42, and galaxies M81 and M82. I also looked at Jupiter in the memorial scope
and club member Mark's SkyBridge.
After Ray left, it was still cloudy,
so I decided just to check out a couple visual things while the timelapse
went. I synced to Dubhe in Ursa Major
(Jim figured out the bad gotos by the way – using “warm restart” keeps the
previous pointing model, which messes up a new night. So use “cold restart” instead.), and then
plugged in the celestial coordinates for Comet 41P/Tuttle-Giacobini-Kresak and
went hunting for it with a 38mm eyepiece.
There were a few things that caught my eye, but nothing that really had
any discernible nebulosity to it. So I
plugged the camera in and got that all set up, and then went back to the
coordinates. I took a 60-second image –
and there it was! A little fuzzy ball
near the center of the frame.
Comet 41P/Tuttle-Giacobini-Kresak, Nikon D5300, Vixen NA140ssf, Astronomik CLS filter
Guiding: QHY5, Celestron 102mm
11x180s, ISO-3200, no flat (it came out weird)
Because
there were still some high clouds, I only did 180-second images, and because it
was already so late, I only got 16 before I had to quit. Also, guiding was not that great so close to
the north celestial pole. I also made a video from the subframes - it spans 48 minutes.
Timelapse GIF of Comet 41P moving through Ursa Major. Each frame is 3 minutes long, and there are 16 frames, spanning 48 minutes.
[Sorry for the fast speed - I don't think I can control it. The background brightness difference is from a thin high cloud that rolled through at the beginning.]
Friday, March 3, 2017
#77 - Friday, March 3, 2017 - Some Nights I Stay Up Cashing In my Bad Luck
It looked
like it might be clear, so I decided to head out and give it a shot. I was at my friend Chelsea’s house before, and I
got sidetracked talking, so I didn’t get out until about 8 PM. The moon was less than a quarter, waxing, but
still relatively high in the west and was bright enough that I had moonshadows. However, I couldn’t find anything in the
eastern sky to image with the memorial scope (too large of an FOV for many of the
small galaxies that winter is good for), so I decided to do at least a
high-altitude object – the Flaming Star Nebula.
It had crossed the meridian already, but the memorial scope doesn’t meridian-flip
at the meridian – it goes like waaay past it.
So after about four images, while I was inside reading, it stopped
tracking at its limit, and I lost about six images or so because I got held up
in conversation on Facebook Messenger.
So I went back out and did the flip, but the star field in the picture
was not quite the same as before. I
re-synced; same thing. But I couldn’t
quite see the nebula in the subs, at least not on my small tablet with the red
filter on, so I just went for it anyway, thinking my tired Friday night brain
wasn’t flipping the image right in my head.
Well, I was right – it didn’t quite land on the same star field, and
some high clouds came in, and guiding didn’t work that well, so I only had four
pictures. I stacked them, but the SNR
was just too low to do much with it.
Flaming Star Nebula, Nikon D5300, Vixen NA140ssf, Astronomik CLS filter
Guiding: QHY5 on Celestron 102mm
4x300s, ISO-1600
Also, I
forgot to take biases again, so I took them at home where it was warmer, but I
took the wrong ISO. I also didn’t have
cold enough darks – it was like 28 F that night. 30 is close.
Oh well, anyways…hopefully I can image it again soon!
Sunday, February 19, 2017
#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
[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
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.
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