I’ve been waiting for some time to see a Canon DSLR on sale so when I received an email showing a Canon 1100D + lens + memory card more than £100 cheaper than the body only deals I’ve been looking at, well I couldn’t wait any longer and dipped into my savings. WOW what a difference this is going to make to the quality of my astro-images.

Slipping under the radar at a mere £20 ($30) was another addition to my observatory collection, some software called Back-Yard-EOS which it would seem from my first light session is as ground-breaking as the change of camera!

Technical stuff: being an EOS camera it fits into the adapter I was using for the 300D so I literally unplugged the old and plugged in the new. I don’t have mains power for the camera yet so I’ll be running it from the battery which means I now only have 1 cable – USB – to the camera where previously I had 3. The shutter control is through the USB now so no extra shutter release which means my DIY shutter control has been dropped into a box never to be seen again – until I need to recycle the Arduino board for another project

The new camera has a 12 Mega Pixel sensor and 14bit ADC, low noise and low amp-glow. It’s at the cheaper end of the Canon range (maybe Cheapest of the DSLRs?) but seems to have a lot of functionality for the price.

What’s new: live view!! what a difference this makes to focusing and alignment. I can drop a mask over the scope, tweak the focus and I’m ready to go – that would have taken 30 mins previously with me finally declaring “that’s close enough”. Being able to align with a zoomed cross-hair in the centre of the target star means my gotos are very precise – another area where “close enough” would have sufficed previously.

Live view support and zoomed alignment are features of BYE that I’m really liking.

Some images: so here are a couple of first lights, there was a breeze early on which accounts for some egg shaped stars and being the middle of summer my viewing window is reduced to 2 hours from mid-night, so not enough frames to make anything special but a good test of the camera under worst case conditions.

M13 – The Pegasus Cluster
(9 x 60 seconds)

M51 – The famous Whirlpool Galaxy in Ursa Major
(8 x 240 seconds)

M81 – Bode’s Galaxy in Ursa Major
(5 x 240 seconds)

It’s been quiet here for a couple of weeks, partly down to the overcast weather but mostly because my observatory laptop stopped working. That shouldn’t be a show stopper, I could use a desktop PC rather than a laptop, but I’m lucky enough to have friends and family willing to part with their old equipment so I’m back in business (nearly).

I have an old Compaq (HP) laptop and spent a rainy weekend a couple of weeks ago installing all the required software and testing. I couldn’t test everything without opening the roof and that would have made me wet, so it didn’t happen. In hindsight I wish I had.

Tonight is clear (ish), certainly clear enough to run some first light tests on the new (old) laptop but after getting everything setup and running the system failed at the final hurdle. The camera control for the Canon tells the camera how many shots to take, what duration, how long to wait before and after each etc and that’s working but the camera goes through the motions without sending images back to the laptop. That’s a show stopper. I could sit down the garden until the early hours trying to resolve the issues or I could pour a pint of speckled hen and update my website – so here I am

More bad news on that Comet I had been hoping to take images of. Day by day it’s getting further away and fainter to the point where soon it will be beyond reach. My first slew of the scope this evening, before I found out the camera wasn’t working, was to an area just above the comet. Unfortunately it’s behind my neighbours shed, still too low in the North-Western sky. I think any hope of capturing an image of Panstarrs is slipping away, and with Summer and light evenings coming my opportunities to image will be few and far between.

I’ll see if I can fix the camera problem tomorrow and I have another laptop to fall back on if I can’t make progress with this one. Thanks to Tony and Jono for donating the equipment, I just hope I can do something with it.

Asteroid 2012-DA14 was on a collision course with Earth, that’s what the loonies were telling us, so I thought it would be a good opportunity to see if I could image the track of this passing lump of rock.

At only 45 meters across this isn’t a big asteroid but being closer than some of our communications satellites it was just bright enough to catch with my telescope and Canon 300D camera.

I use Cartes du Ciel as my “star map” these days and this asteroid isn’t in the catalogue so I was starting to think I was going to miss this “near miss” event.  Eventually I found some star charts on the popastro web site and by comparing star positions with those on the sky map I was able to work out roughly where the asteroid would be at a given time (give or take a minute).

I set the computer to take 60 second images with 30 seconds between each to allow enough time for them to download (USB 1 is very slow).  Starting at around 20:30 I ran some practice shots knowing that my best chance was when the asteroid was due to pass star HD109202 at approximately 21:35.

I followed the path of the Asteroid on my sky chart and every 5 minutes or so I ran a set of between 3 and 5 images to see if I could see the track.  After quickly reviewing some of the images while waiting for the telescope to slew to a new position, I wasn’t able to see any sign of the asteroid.  Even more of an issue was the thickening clouds that had started to roll in, this was beginning to look like a lost opportunity but I continued to shoot just in case.

I kept a log of image numbers in a text file so that I’d know which frames where from which batch so if I had to do any heavy processing I’d know which frames were most likely to contain the tell tail streak of an object moving at a different speed to the backdrop of stars.

Imagine my surprise when I copied the images onto my main PC for processing and found that I’d caught at least 1 frame from each of the sets I’d taken except the very last which was too cloudy.

Given the guess work that went into pointing the scope at an empty spot roughly between these 2 points and the guessing at what time the asteroid would reach that imaginary spot I’m very happy with the outcome.

Of course images with trails like this are usually discarded as they’re caused by satellites or planes so I’ll have to make sure these are labelled correctly so I don’t throw them away in the future.

So here it is – 2012-DA14 appearing to originate from HD109202 and travelling down towards the bottom left of the image.

2012-DA14  taken 2013-02-15 @ 21:35

and here’s an extract from the popastro image that I used to find it:-

Guide Chart

The apparent magnitude was expected to be greater than 9 at this time but I’ll have to update with more accurate info as I find it.

If you want to measure the apparent velocity of the asteroid you can do it by measuring the track (how far it travelled in 60 seconds) and using the pixel resolution of the Canon 300D and knowing my telescope is 1200mm F/L with an aperture of 252mm. The image has been shrunk form the original 3066 pixels wide to 1024 for the web so you’d need to adjust for that … I say you, because I’ll look it up on the NASA website

Here’s another image of it:

2012-DA14 Img18

2012-DA14 Img11