Sunday 27th January 2008

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I’ve had a few hours of clear (ish) skies tonight, although the secondary mirror misted over quite early giving some strange results.  A close inspection of the Atic 16ic also revealed a small fingerprint on the CCD cover. I should be able to clean this with a cotton bud and alcohol, I’m sure I’ve seen something on Jan Timmerman’s site which I’ll have to read again.  The secondary is pretty grubby with plenty of dust as well as condensation so I’ll give this a clean before the next session.

So the results were disapointing but at least I’ve practiced the art again, and the more often I do that, the easier it gets (so I’m told).

Having just looked over my quickly processed results there are none that are good enough to make it to this page (and when you see some that have, you’ll get an idea of how bad they are!).

Thursday 24th January 2008

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A clear night woohooo, I don’t see too many on them!

I left work early thinking I’d make a start straight away, but found my wireless LAN wasn’t working. After an hour or more of un-installing and re-installing drivers, trying different adapters and eventually testing the LAN with a Nintendo WII(!) I discovered my new TV sender was interfering with the LAN signal. A quick change of channel on the sender and everything was working, but I’d lost precious time.

A hasty setup and polar align then straight into imaging. There was a breeze which from timw to time was an issue and later on some clouds, but apart from that it was good viewing weather. I don’t know what possessed me but I started looking around for faint galaxies and nebulae, but without a guidescope my long exposures are still limited to 10’s of seconds.

I’ve done some very rough processing so far but I’m sure there will be many rainy nights when I can revisit them.

Here are a few:

The Bubble Nebula

 

bubble_nebula2.jpg

NGC 7333 Galaxy Cluster

NGC 7333 Galaxy Cluster
NGC 6946

NGC 6946
I’ll get some more details on here when I get a minute.

All images taken with Atik 16ic Mono, 254mm Newtonian with 1200mm focal length on EQ6 Pro Mount.

I was contacted by Belfast University regarding my images but asked to keep it quiet as they’d discovered a Supernova (SN2008S) in NGC6946 and wanted to use my images to confirm it’s existence and estimate when it first occurred.  As a “thank you” they included my name in the list of authors – does that make me a scientist :)

Here’s an extract from the resulting paper:

We commenced monitoring SN 2008S shortly after the discovery
epoch and collected data for the following eight months with a sam-
pling rate among the highest ever obtained for such a peculiar tran-
sient. Data obtained before the discovery date by several amateur
astronomers are also included to constrain the explosion epoch of
SN 2008S. The unfiltered image acquired by D. Abraham on Jan-
uary 16 (JD 2 454 482) shows no object visible in the SN 2008S
location with a limiting magnitude of 19.20 in V band (18.60 in
R band), while the first detection of SN 2008S is eight days later
on January 24 (JD 2 454 490). We therefore adopt January 20 (JD
2 454 486) as the explosion epoch, the uncertainty being about 4 d.
The phases in this paper are relative to the explosion date (when we
fix ph=0).

The full paper is available here http://arxiv.org/abs/0903.1286

Wednesday 16th January 2008

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Finally I find myself between two weather fronts, after more than 2 weeks of non-stop rain I’ve had a couple of hours of almost clear sky this evening.  High cloud and a steamed up CCD cover made faint fuzzies too difficult although I did manage a few frames early on. As the clouds gathered I packed away the Atik 16ic and fetched my new un-modded SPC900NC. With the addition of a 3x barlow I turned the scope to Mars.

So here are 2 firsts for me, NGC6946 which is a magnitude 10.5 galaxy in Cepheus taken with the Atic 16ic. It’s a stack of 8×20 second frames stacked and stretched in K3CCDTools. The clouds may have parted but between the breeze and my not so good tracking most frames were unusable.

 NGC6496

My next “first” is the red planet. Previously I’ve viewed Mars through an eyepiece with a 2x barlow and barely been able to make out any surface detail, but tonight after a quick laser/barlow collimation and some lucky focusing I’ve managed a half decent image (IMHO).

Mars x2 Mars original size

Scope: 254mm Newtonian
F/L: 3600mm
Camera:     Unmodified SPC900NC

Wednesday 2nd January 2008

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Finally I got out with the new camera last night, it wasn’t the clearest of nights and by 1am there was complete cloud cover, but I managed a couple of hundred frames (FITS) which I now have to process.

The reason I have FITS and not an AVI is that K3CCDTools failed to work. I’d configured the software a few days ago and run some darkframe tests just to make sure everything was ok, but on the night it let me down. The menu let me select Atik and the camera was on the list but when I selected it the Atik control panel failed to open and the control panel icon was greyed out. I’ll have to look into this but it gave me a chance to look at ArtemisCapture which comes with the camera.

The first thing I noticed was that focusing took longer than usual, this was mainly because I’d left “auto-stretch” on which meant the image was very dark. Later I found the focus tool but I think I did an “OK” job without it.
M52 - Click for a bigger version

So here it is, the image that I’ve waited a month to see, first-light with the Atik 16ic. I was aiming North West after aligning on Deneb and after slewing star to star northwards I came across M52. The image is a stack of 9 from 12x10second exposures, stacked in DeepSkyStacker and processed in PhotoShop.

Field of View

I have an image of M52 taken with the SPC900NC for comparison but after putting the images together they are different orientations so while it’s difficult to demonstrate here it does give me a chance to show the difference in fields of view between the two cameras.

After taking 12 frames of M52 I moved around the sky for the next 5 hours, taking a few frames here and there just to see what I could see. What I hadn’t seen was the cloud coming over and it wasn’t until I went out to put the scope away that I realized there wasn’t a star to be seen with the unaided eye.

NGC457 - The Owl Cluster
I couldn’t resist taking a few frames of the owl cluster (NGC457) in Cassiopeiae which I’ve also taken with the 1004x and SPC900, but I think this is my best yet.

M1Here’s another from the same session, my best M1 so far. When you consider this was late in the session and almost certainly taken  through cloud it’s not that bad. Well at least it’s recognisable.