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.
