Galaxies M81 and M82, in Urse Major

After some weeks of rain, storm and clouds and having got my guide camera back from repair, after breaking it yet again, I rushed down to the dome when I saw that the Cloud God had gone away to annoy someone else.

Taken with the H9C in the 80ED and the Meade 6.3 FR, guided, quite well this time too, by the 14", and an exposure of 85 mins in 5 min subs.

Lots of noise caused by the heavy hazy sky which also turned the half Moon quite yellow. But you've got to try at every opportunity.

Processed in AA4, PS7 and Paint Shop Pro10.

NGC 457 The Owl cluster

It was a good night last night, the weather forecast showed clear skies from around 6.00 p m to midnight, so about 5.00 p m I started to set my kit up, ready for polar alignment etc.

I've one or two targets on my wish list, one being the Owl cluster, in Cassiopeia, which is one of my favourite clusters and I've been meaning to photograph it for some time, it's aptly named, having the appearance, that its popular name suggests.



80 mm refractor, Astronomik CLS filter and a standard Canon 10D.
30 x 90 seconds exposures, stacked in Nebulosity and finished in Photoshop CS3

Observatory Last night

A good turn out last night at the Observatory. After the very informative astrophotography workshop it was surprisingly clear with a few passing clouds on a strong westerly wind, very mild for the time of year too, with it being 8C in the dome at around midnight. Saturn was quite a good sight despite it being only approx 10 degrees above the gibbous Moon. Mars was viewed with a small amount of surface detail visible in higher magnification. After everyone apart from Brian and myself had departed home I attached my Canon onto the 80ED. As the scope was aimed on the Moon I took a few of shots. This was the best.

Canon EOS 350D 1/125. ISO 100. Processed in photoshop.

I then took 15 images at 30s and 15 x 20s of the Pleiades (M45) of which none were usable. M45 was actually getting quite low in the sky. They looked OK on the LCD screen on the camera but once on a PC they were most disappointing. There were too many passing clouds and all my pictures suffered from too much light pollution. (I should have took my light pollution filter with me, D'oh). By about 0030, patchy cloud was building all the time from the west and I went for M37 in Auriga.

I managed to get 5 frames that were usable.
80ED refractor. 5 x 20S, ISO 1600. Stacked in MaxDSLR and then processed in photoshop. Not brilliant but a start. Just before we quit for the evening we slewed round to M51 the whirlpool galaxy.... I tried a couple of 20S exposures....Nothing. Way too much light pollution.... Too many clouds. With that we packed up at about 0100 and left the observatory in the command of the Rabbits and Cougars!

M34 The Spiral Cluster

Last night before the moon had risen, I attempted to photograph a number of star clusters, M37 the Salt and Pepper cluster, M36 the Pinwheel cluster and M34 the Spiral cluster.

There was a lot of very high, thin hazy clouds, covering most of the sky and focussing was the main problem.

In each instance I focussed on an adjacent bright star and then repositioned the telescope to the actual object I wanted to image. I did this numerous times. But, on examining the photographs on a laptop, I was never fully satisfied with the focus. At one point, I placed a wire across the front of the telescope to produce a diffraction spike and focussed on that, but even on that exposure, the focus was iffy.

This is the best image of the night, M34 the Spiral cluster in Perseus, I did get M37 and M36, but the focus is just not there, only a smidgen off, but nonetheless.



80 mm refractor, Astronomik CLS filter and a standard Canon 10D. 26 x 60 seconds exposures, stacked in Nebulosity and finished in Photoshop CS3.

Moon shot

Tonight, I managed to shoot the gibbous moon between the passing clouds.








80 mm refractor with 2 x Powermate and a Canon 10D DSLR
PS (Ed) 1/125 @ f12 ISO 100

Saturn again

I was trying to improve the detail on the previous post in photoshop using curves and magically three moons appeared checking in sky6 astronomical programI have been able to name them as Tethys,mimas and Dione.

Saturn

It's a rainy day so I dug out old webcam files so here is a picture of saturn taken 22.3.06 re edited using registax and photoshop just to sharpen it up a little

M42 and the Running man NGC 1977

Last night, I spent time taking further exposures of this nebula with the intention of adding them to the exposures I'd obtained a few nights ago.

Below is the resultant image, I've also extended the area at the top of the photograph to show NGC 1977 the Running man nebula, which is now becoming obvious. Also a lot more of the thin wispy surrounding nebula is beginning to reveal itself.



80 mm refractor, Astronomik CLS filter and a standard Canon 10D DSLR.
42 x 40 seconds exposures at ISO 800, stacked and aligned in Nebulosity and finished in Photoshop.
These extra exposures were added to the image seen here.

M81 and M82 Bode's nebulae

This is my second attempt at imaging this pair of galaxies, which were discovered by a chap called Bode in 1774, at that time galaxies hadn't been invented, so they were listed as nebula.



The first time I photographed them I made 17 x 45 seconds exposures at ISO 1600, which produced a very noisy photograph.
So, this second time I made 99 x 45 seconds exposures at ISO 1600 which has smoothed the image out.

If you want to see a better image by one of our members take a look here.

80 mm refractor, Astronomik CLS filter and a standard Canon 10D DSLR, stacked and aligned in Nebulosity and finished in Photoshop CS3.

M42 again

This with the H9C and the 80ED with a .5FR, making an f/3.75 system of 300mm fl. Part of the reasonimg was that as I'd broken my guide camera, again, again, again, third time, I couldn't do much else other than take short frames so this was 82 frames of a mix of 20sec and 30sec.

You can see that the short frames didn't go deep enough to pick up the fainter nebulosity. The only way to crack this nut of such wide dynamic range is to take a mix of long, 300 to 600sec frames and a series of short, 10sec frames and layer them as Dave suggests.

M42 was a "fill in" job as I'd planned to work on a faint asteroid with the 14", but the poor drive of the Meade precluded frames longer than 10sec, so lots of 10sec frames. But the result wasn't showing any success, so I changed the plan. The sky was quite poor too with a very high wind rushing across the field, now less well protected by trees!

I was there today fielding comments and recounted to find we'd adjusted 12 trees that day. Possibly the growling the other night could have been the trees??

M35 and NGC 2158 a double cluster

A double cluster in Gemini, perhaps not as well known as NGC 884 and NGC 869 in Perseus, but can still be seen with binoculars. This image I took shortly after imaging M42 which can be seen in the posting below.

The larger of the clusters M43 is made of blue stars and NGC 2158 is the fainter and more distant and made of old red stars.





TMB 80 mm refractor, Astronomik CLS light pollution filter and a standard Canon 10D body.
28 x 30 second exposures at ISO 800, stacked and aligned in Nebulosity and finished in Photoshop CS3.

To do these clusters justice I think it needs more exposure.

The Great Orion Nebula, Messier 42 and 43

Third attempt at this nebula taken last night.



Taken with 80 mm refractor, Astronomik CLS filter and a standard Canon 10D DSLR.
37 x 30 seconds and 8 x 5 seconds exposures, stacked in Nebulosity and finalised in Photoshop CS3.

First Sunset of 2008

The Sky over Texas has now been completely cloudless for 4 days on the trot with a very dry air mass sat over Central Texas. I took this Yesterday evening.

Taken from FM1860 near Riesel. (FM stands for Farm – Market road) the equivalent of our 'B' roads. overlooking the Brazos Valley. Canon EOS 350D. 1/125". F16. ISO 100. In Hindsight it should really have been the first sunrise of 2008 but I was over the limit to operate my eyelids never mind a camera or perish the thought a car!

P.S. Happy new year Y'all........

Too many stars!

Sunday night the 30th I went out again to the Meyer observatory near Clifton, TX. The drive is about an hour to the West from Riesel. I was treated to an excellent sunset all the way out there. It was dark when I arrived and Willie [Strickland] had already been there a while and had the dome open and tracking Comet 8P Tuttle which was very close to M33, directly overhead. Willie had a pair of 15 x 70 Binoculars along with his own Celestron 11" SCT, a 10" Orion Dobsonian and a 80mm Meade Refractor.

The sky was very dark and clear. My first reaction was there are too many stars! The Milky Way was excellent stretching all the way from Orion in the East to Cygnus which was setting in the west. After about 10 minutes of literally staring into space, my eyes had started to adjust to the light and I had got my bearings. I used the 15 x 70 Binoculars and easily found M31, It was also just visible naked eye. This was by far the darkest sky I had ever seen, far darker than than in Riesel or on the Algarve in Portugal. On my previous visit to the Meyer Obs, the Moon was high and virtually full. Even so it does still suffer from Light pollution. The city of Gatesville to the South and the village of Clifton to the East.

After some more scanning of the sky Comet 17P Holmes was visible Naked eye, we viewed it through the Dobsonian although it looked far better through the 15x70 Binoculars. The scopes were then aimed at Comet 8P/Tuttle which was very close to M33 and once again the best view was in the binoculars.

After approx 90 minutes outside Willie was getting cold and we retired inside to start imaging both comets on 61cm RC scope using the Roper CCD. I will post more details of these along with Images when Willie has finished processing them and forwarded them to me. I pointed out to Willie that it was actually very mild (+8C), by comparison to some of the recent Friday nights with Brian and Co at Austerfield. I took numerous photographs of various parts of the sky out at the observatory whilst outside and I am not happy with any of them. I just could not get the focusing on my camera quite right, although on the LCD screen on the camera they looked ok once viewed on a PC they were actually very poor. This was the best of a very bad bunch.

Pictured is Orion and Taurus (Top) with Sirius just coming up over the trees. The light pollution is from the Clifton Village about 10 miles away. Taken at 2024 CST. (0224 UT). Canon EOS 350D 18-55MM lens. 10Sec, f5.6, ISO 1600. Processed in Corel paintshop pro.