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Haw Wood Farm star party

Breckland’s Haw Wood Farm star party has been and gone but what a weekend is was with very good conditions all week. I attended on the Friday and Saturday nights. Friday was clear until about 3:30am, Saturday, 2am.

On Friday evening I finished the evening at about 1am by setting up a sequence in CCD Commander (which I’m trialling at the moment) of 3 minute images of M45 and went to bed. Waking at 3am, I packed up the gear as it had clouded over and rain was forecast.

In all, I collected 45 exposures. Trailing continued to be a problem throughout the weekend but I have a theory that it’s due to some slight vibration from the camera fan. My thanks to John Hipperson for putting the idea in my head.

Deep Sky Nebula

The Veil supernova remnant

Post author By admin
Post date August 8, 2013
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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.

The 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.

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.

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

Deep Sky Nebula Open Cluster

M39

Post author By admin
Post date July 7, 2013
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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″.

North is up.

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.

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.

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:

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.

Telescope: Zenithstar 70
Camera: QHY9C

Equipment

New mount

Post author By admin
Post date May 6, 2013
2 Comments on New mount

Here’s a picture of my new setup. My bank balance is lighter, and Italy’s trade balance has improved significantly!

Operationally, the Avalon Linear Fast Reverse is an EQ6. The interesting bit is that the EQ6’s worm gear has been replaced by a belt & pulley reduction drive. The manufacturer claims very accurate guiding is possible using this system. The mount is controlled using either a Synscan hand control or EQMod on the computer. As the bits to make a direct computer connection haven’t arrived I’m using the handset in pass-through mode.

I haven’t got the backend for my 60mm finder scope guider yet so I’ve got my QHY5 attached to a Canon 75-300 lens via a Geoptik adapter. I’ll need to source a lighter counterweight as the 3Kg is too much for the Zenithstar.

Comet Deep Sky Galaxy Solar System

Cosmic encounter

Comet Panstarrs has not put on the display that was hoped for earlier in the year but it has given a photo opportunity as it makes a close pass of the Andromeda galaxy on it’s way out of the Solar System. There’s no risk of collision here, the comet is in our Solar System and the galaxy is 2.5 million light years away.

The images were acquired using a Canon 350D with a 75-300mm zoom lens at f/4.5. Eleven 2 minute exposures were stacked in Maxim, had the light pollution gradients removed in PixInsight and final processing carried out in Photoshop.

Comet Solar System

Comet C/2011 L4 Panstarrs

Tonight was unexpectedly clear when I got home from work so I picked up the Canon, 18-55mm lens and tripod and headed for the end of the lane.

One patch of stubborn cloud remained anchored over the comets position for what seemed like ages, but eventually the sky was dark enough and the cloud permitted a view.

Single 10 second exposure at 55mm, f/5.6, ISO 200

Deep Sky Nebula Open Cluster

Christmas Tree cluster (NGC 2264)

Post author By admin
Post date March 7, 2013
No Comments on 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.

This 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.