Project Catch Up

Time to post some of the ongoing projects.

We had a great run of cold clear nights in Jan - March which gave us some time to capture a few nice images.

Lynx Galaxy Field - 2016-Feb 27th -- 118 minutes total exposure time

Center (RA, Dec)L (107.635, 50.124) Over thirteen galaxies are very easy to spot (anything blurry), but close examine reveals a total more than sixty. Many are on edge, others barred, some blue, white, and yellow.

M81 - 2016-April - May -- 284 minutes total exposure

 

Taken over 4 weeks, this is M81 in Ursa Major. Next year I'd like to add another 400 minutes of exposure. Even at that shorter time the detail is the arms is pretty good.

M33 -2015 January 6th - 117 minutes total exposure

 A fairly short exposure of M33 I did at the end of the night as a test before closing up. It lacks a lot of color and definition, but I thought it was a good quick image. It is a massive galaxy and I was most interested to see it's size on my SX-HV35.

Orion Mosaic - Feb - March 2016 - 298 minutes total exposure

Over 7 nights I took three separate images of NGC 2034, NGC 2024, and IC 432 all around the most eastern star in Orion's belt.. These were processed in PixInsight to create a mosaic of the three images, seamlessly adding them together to create one image. Because of the bright star in the area (Alnitak) I did get some lenses flares from my optical system. Even with that, I do like the results.

Progress - NGC 2024 - The Flame Nebula

A few nights of alignment work have passed. Alignment is wrench work getting the scope properly aligned with the night sky. The telescope has an altitude equal to it's geographic latitude and an azimuth of due north. In this position one axis spins around the celestial pole, called right ascension, and the other selects north and south from the celestial equator, called declination. When well aligned there is no declination adjustment required to track the stars in the sky. Alignment is important because the better the scope is aligned the less movement of stars in the field of view, and the clearer images during long exposures.

I hate aligning because I want a good alignment for good pictures, making me very picky. With portable scopes I always spent the first 90 minutes aligning but with a permanently mounted telescope there is no reason not to have a fine tuned alignment. Then on start you just tell the telescope to find home and it's aligned. Sweet! We've accomplished that here at Agatha Observatory.

On Feb 5th we had crystal clear steady cold air. Perfect for telescope work. As the sun went down I grabbed twilight flats for all four filters and set the scope on Canopus. After dinner I headed out with NGC 2024, the Flame Nebula, in mind. This is a diffuse nebula in Orion just east of Alnitak the most eastern star in Orion's belt (the left most on the belt). I decided to keep Alnitak on the image even though such a bright star often causes lens artifacts.

The components of the photo were 12 2 minute exposures for each filter LRGB. I started with luminosity because that way I at least get a good monochrome image if something fails or the clouds roll in. All went well until about 21:30 when it came time for the meridian flip. The scope moved, reacquired but I didn't trust it and moved it after the slew. Unfortunately I mistook a lens flare for the nebula and moved the scope the wrong way. Two of the blue exposures occurred during the slew due to a software glitch and the rest  were too far east. The good news is, there is little blue in the nebula, it's mostly in Alnitak. This meant I only had two good blue images before the meridian flip and eight with mostly of  Alnitak after. But the result were still good.

The monochrome:

The color:

There are many lens artifacts including the multiple colored rings around Alnitak but I've decide I like them and did minimal processing to remove them.

Second Light, First Image

Been a long time, I know. That's the way it goes with kids. Suffice to say the observatory is done and the equipment is in. The telescope is a Meade 12" ACF LX-850 on a German polar mount with the StarTrack auto-guider. It is mounted permanently on the pier. I'll get some pictures of all that.

After receiving it last year I mounted it up and began the process of fine tuning the alignment so I wouldn't have to align every time. I had just achieved that, programmed the PEC, etc. when there was some electrical failure and the DEC motor stopped working. I had to ship it back to Meade and it took them five months to return it. That's five months out of my warranty. Sheeesh!

The camera is a StarLight XPress HX-35 full frame monochrome camera with a 5 position filter wheel mounting red, green, blue, lumiance, and an opaque to act as a shutter. No problems with the camera.

Monday night, after months of clouds and rain we had a good clear night and I managed to rough align the scope. PEC is still unprogrammed and the alignment is not fine tuned but I grabbed a 2 minute exposure of M42 with just the lumiance filter. Just wanted to share the results.

So there's the first light image, second time around.

More later.