Saturday 9th February 2008

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Another clear night, I can’t believe it! I wanted to revisit Orion but have to wait for it to come around to the South West before I can get there without a meridian flip. While waiting for the heavens to turn overhead I took some images of the usual suspects, M29 (which is near to Daneb where I do my first alignment) followed by NGC6946, The Bubble Nebula, M76 for the first time and NGC891. After this I moved around to the Horsehead nebula, M42, M43 and also had a go at M78.

I spent some time on Orion, after capturing a half decent M43 I thought I’d move a frame southwards and see if I could stich the 2 images together. That led me to a frame to the east, then another and you guessed before you know it I’d taken 11 seperate images to form a partial mosaic of the area. I will revisit to finish this and will only show a rough stitching here for now:

The Great Orion Nebula
The Great Orion Nebula		 The Bubble Nebula
The Bubble Nebula		 NGC6946 Galaxy
NGC6946 Galaxy

Friday 8th February 2008

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It was forecast to be a clear night but there was too much moisture in the air and by 11:30 I couldn’t even pick out the brightest of objects and packed everything away.

The best seeing was earlier in the evening and I managed to get a few frames of NGC6946, I had my first view of the Iris Nebula and finished with M43 in Orion which is always overshadowed by it’s close neighbour M42 the Great Orion Nebula. My field of view doesn’t allow me to capture both M42 and M43 in the same frame so I was lucky to get these first images before the clouds rolled in. I had decided to try a mosiac of the area but this will have to wait for clearer skies (maybe tonight!).

On the 7th Feb I had a brief dry spell during which I re-collimated the scope using the Barlowed-Laser method and adjusted both the secondary and primary mirrors. Hopefully this will result in finer detail in both Nebulae in Galaxies.

The other thing that should make a difference is I cleared the huge donut off the CCD window! I’d noticed it from time to time and as it appears to be an image of the mirror I thought it was related to the collimation, but turning the camera 90° had no effect on the position so I knew it must be a speck of dust on the cover. I used a dry tissue to sweep it away.

Here are my latest attempts to capture the wonder of the heavens:

NGC6946
NGC6946
Spiral Galaxy in Cepheus		 NGC7023 The Iris Nebula
NGC7023
The Iris Nebula in Cepheus		 M43 - De Mairan's Nebula in Orion
M43
De Mairan’s Nebula in Orion

Friday 1st February 2008

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*Messier page updated

It’s all coming together tonight. A Friday, so I don’t have to worry about getting up for work, a clear sky and low temperatures and the mount is tracking nicely as well. I’ve taken advantage of the situation and gone looking for some faint objects to see just what I can see.

I’m currently on the 15th object and taking 3 minute unguided frames, but they look a little stretched. I think having the scope looking North is helping as the mount doesn’t have to work so hard to track across the sky.

Here’s a few images that I’ve done a quick process on, they’re all aligned and stacked in K3CCDTools and tidied up in Photoshop.

There are a lot of firsts here for me, such as fist Horsehead, Flame and Running Man, and knowing that I can get faint fuzzies opens up many thousands of new targets for me.

Galaxy NGC891
NGC891 Spiral Galaxy in Andromeda
21 from 48 x 15 second frames		 Horsehead Nebula
Horsehead Nebula in Orion
20 from 54 x 30 second frames		 M1 The Crab Nebula
M1 The Crab Nebula (Supernova Remnant)
20 from 55 x 25 second frames
Scope: 254mm Newtonian – 1200mm F/L on EQ6-Pro Mount using EQMODCamera: Atik 16ic monochrome

The majority of images are made from frames of no more than 30 seconds, I’ll work through the images and post numbers of frames etc as time permits – next time it rains :)

I learned that pointing the scope northwards allows me to take longer exposures and to have less movement in the shot. This is an indication that my polar alignment is out so I need to realign my polar scope or use the new polar align feature in EQMOD. I also noticed the option to add “sync’d” stars to the N-Star list, that offers me a lot of flexibility. If you have an EQ6 mount and haven’t yet looked at EQMOD I would suggest you read up on all the features. It’s incredible!

I finally gave in to sleep at around 3:30am but if I didn’t have a busy day ahead I could easily have stayed up all night.

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