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Deep Sky Nebula

Kelling Heath star party

The autumn event at Kelling Heath has come and gone for another year. Friday evening was cloudy meaning I could catch up on some sleep. Saturday was partly cloudy, clearing for an hour and then it clouded over completely until early on the Sunday. I’d booked an extra night for the Sunday and this turned out to be the best night with clear skies from dusk until dawn.

As soon as it was dark enough I started taking pictures of Sh2-155 in Cepheus again as I want to complete the right hand side of the Cepheus mosaic. Once Orion was high enough I started a mosaic of the Witches Head and left CCD Commander taking images until dawn while I caught up on some more sleep.

When processing, I decided to try something different and followed a workflow tutorial on the Pixinsight website for dynamic range compression. This uses HDRMultiscale as usual but replaces the stars with ones generated using the masked stretch script.

The initial result is here. Next step will be to add in the remaining data from Saturday evening and then combine the frames into the Cepheus mosaic.

Cave Nebula

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Deep Sky Nebula

Barnard 143

While at Haw Wood Farm I took advantage of the clear, dark southern sky to take some pictures of Aquila. Just to the west of Tarazed is a black sooty smudge against the bright stars of the Milky Way.

B143

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Deep Sky Nebula Open Cluster

Cepheus wide field

The original intention with this picture was to take 5 hours of sub frames of the Cave nebula (Caldwell 9), aka Sh2-155 in Cepheus. However, a problem with the focusser meant that after the first 90 minutes the remaining images were offset in RA. Fortunately, there was enough overlap to enable me to join the images in a wide field mosaic. The bright cluster bottom left is M52.

There’s some residual light pollution down the centre of the image. This is very hard to deal with in mosaics. Also, there’s a lot more noise in the right hand side due to the relative lack of exposures.

Caldwell_9_blog

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Deep Sky Nebula

The North American nebula

Last night was forecast clear from dusk until dawn and I had a camera to test. A replacement fan arrived on Friday and was fitted on Saturday. Camera body vibration was eliminated.

Some short test exposures on the mount confirmed that the trailing was gone so while I was waiting for the moon to set I took some 10 minute exposures of NGC 7000.

NGC7000-blog

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Deep Sky Nebula

The Veil supernova remnant

After the hottest day of the year Thursday evening was forecast to be clear all night and it didn’t disappoint. As I had to work on Friday I set the telescope up, left it imaging and went to bed. Got up at 1:30 for a meridian flip and returned to bed, rising at 4 to the sound of the guider alarm. It had lost the guide star in the glare of pre-dawn. All in all, 4 hours worth of 10 minute exposures were gathered.

After processing in Pixinsight, here is the result.

VeilThe field of view is about 3 degrees wide and is an uncropped frame from the Zenithstar 70 with WO focal reducer/flattener.

The Veil is the remains of a supernova star explosion some 5000 years ago. At it’s distance of 1500 light years it now spans 70 light years and it’s still expanding.

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Deep Sky Nebula

The Crescent Nebula

By the time I’d captured a few images of M39 it was dark enough to try NGC6888, The Crescent Nebula, also in Cygnus. With a darker sky background I opted for 10 minute exposures and started at about midnight. 9 images, plus 25 flat frames later I called it a night.

Processing is entirely in PixInsight; after 6 months with this program I’m starting to get more comfortable with it, still lots to learn though and a course with Ian King later this month should hopefully help.

NGC6888

This picture overlaps in one corner with my earlier image  of Sadr. I shall have to try stitching them together as a mosaic.

Categories
Deep Sky Nebula Open Cluster

M39

While waiting for it to get dark last night (there is no astronomical twilight in the UK at this time of year) I took about thirty 30 second images of M39 in Cygnus. The sky background was still very light but during processing a planetary nebula appeared nearby. As I’ve mentioned before, my favourite tool for identifying this sort of object is Aladin and this showed it to be Minkowski 1-79 (1946).

Also in the field is the rather faint open cluster Platais 1. One of it’s member stars is the Cepheid variable V1726 Cyg with a period of 4.2 days and diminutive brightness range of 8.87 to 9.06.

There are two readily identified double stars in M39; h1657 with a separation of 21.6″ and A770, rather closer at 7″.

M39_annotated

North is up.

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Deep Sky Nebula

Gamma Cygnus

 

This is an area I’ve imaged before using the Canon 350D, Zenithstar 70 and Astrotrac but this time it’s with the QHY9 mounted on the Avalon. Last night was clear after dark and after spending some time fine tuning the guiding I set the camera recording 10 minute frames and retired to the warmth and comfort of the sofa. Emerging at 1:30 it was just starting to cloud over so I terminated the sequence and took 20 flat frames using my light panel.
A dynamic Background Extraction routine in PixInsight removed most of the unsightly light pollution on the left of earlier versions of this image. I’ve also made the image a lot lighter to show more of the faint nebulosity and removed the star spikes.
Sadr_Brighter
Despite the stiff breeze, the guiding worked extremely well with Maxim reporting star roundness figures of around 0.05 which is better than I’ve seen using any equipment previously.

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Equipment Galaxy Nebula

Work in progress…

Having got the backend of the 60mm finder swapped for a guider adapter the next job was to sort an EQdir replacement for the SynScan hand controller. Initially I thought I’d use an FTDI serial-TTL cable but I’m short of USB sockets on the Asus Netbook and I want to connect my bluetooth GPS receiver as well so I went looking for a wireless solution. Hobbytronics sell a suitable bluetooth module and I found some example circuit diagrams on the EQmod website so set to work with a soldering iron. Here’s the end result, prior to boxing up:
EQDIR
Testing revealed no problems so I put it in a small plastic project box and it hangs off the mount’s DB-9 connector.
The next problem was some star elongation I noticed when imaging NGC4244 on friday night. Initially I thought it was field rotation, but a closer look showed that the elongation was in the RA direction. While the guide log showed both axis having less than 0.5 pixel errors, RA was considerably worse and was bouncing between +/- errors. Next time out, I reduced the aggressiveness of the RA guide corrections and with a setting of 0.4 the problem was much reduced. As I previously mentioned, I’ve got a sizeable unbalance in the RA axis while I wait for a replacement counterweight so hopefully, this is the root cause of the problem.
Here’s the result of the tuning. 13 frames of 5 minutes each of M97 & M108 in Ursa Major.
M108
Telescope: Zenithstar 70
Camera: QHY9C

Categories
Deep Sky Nebula Open Cluster

Christmas Tree cluster (NGC 2264)

After imaging comet Ison I moved on to a small galaxy in Gemini (picture to follow) and NGC 2264 in Monoceros. The 20″ seemed to be behaving itself, and, with a nice bright star in the cluster, guiding was straight forward. 20 thirty second exposures were acquired and most were good enough to stack. Stacking was performed in Maxim and the resultant floating point fits file was transferred into PixInsight for further processing.

NGC2264This image would benefit from longer exposures as the nebula is pretty faint. However, it’s one of the better 20″ pictures that I’ve produced.