Tŷ Du Observatory - Wales, UK

I had a chance to play with EQ-MOD last night but didn’t get too many images as I spent most of the time perfecting my remote control and getting to grips with drift alignment. I was able to turn my camera so that the image moved along a guideline in K3CCDTools but all the movement appeared to be left and right (PE) not up and down (Polar Alignment). There was a slight up and down movement of the image but with the amount of PE it wouldn’t be worth trying to fine tune it out. I think a regrease will be needed before I can do any serious imaging, and on that subject I’ve dropped a hint that I’d like an Atik 16ic for Christmas so fingers crossed things will improve in the new year (just in time for M42 and Mars to be visible before midnight!).

When imaging M57 I usually only get 20 or so frames, but last night I left the camera on while I went to watch the Rugby (well done Argentina!) and collected 76x20seconds which gave me more options with the processing. The result though is not as good as some earlier images I’d taken but ok for now.

I had a look at CCDInspector which shows my collimation is out and the FWHM was 2.9 which is not great but I know this can be caused by being out of focus, poor seeing as well as poor collimation so I need to check my optics again before my next session.

 Before finishing the session I turned the scope to a faint star at the end of the Veil Nebula (NGC6960), another on the edge of the North American Nebula (NGC7000) and a third in the Crescent Nebula (sh2-105). Only the images from the Crescent Nebula show any signs of nebulosity but my field of view is far too small for these targets anyway. Perhaps when I get the Mosaic software working…

This image of M27 seems to show some structures but I’m not sure how much can be attributed to post processing and how much is really there. 

I seem to have been imaging M57 and M27 for ever, I’ll be glad when some new targets move into my field of view. M31 is not far away and M45 and M42 will be here within months. I’ll use the time between now and then to fine tune my optics and maybe tweak the mount to reduce PE.

I haven’t looked to see if it’s clear tonight, a late finish last night followed by an early start this morning and Karate midday mean I’ll be ready for an early night tonight. And the Rugby World Cup is on so I’ll be glued the TV, but I won’t say who I’m supporting as I don’t want to upset my English or South African friends!

It’s been a little overcast for the last week or so, but Friday was clear and although there was some high cloud I managed to get a few hours imaging before the bigger clouds rolled in.

My plan was to get more familliar with the EQMOD software and also practice remote control to make sure there were no issues to overcome. As it turned out the system worked like a dream, I did an initial n-star alignment which uses the information from your first star alignment when slewing to the next so after finding the first star it’s a piece of cake to find another 2 or 3. Once aligned I returned into the house to see what I could see.

It seems the trick to being able to align EQMOD whilst peering through the finder is to use a wireless game controller, someone has managed this with a Wii controller but I’ll be happy if I can get a cheap gamepad from PC-World to work.

The sky was still light when I started viewing so I panned around a few clusters just to make sure the goto was accurate and also to tweak the camera settings. This done I managed to image M29 which was missing from my chart and also re-imaged some of the big globular clusters noteably M13 and M15. These have turned out better than my earlier efforts and will be appearing on my Messier chart shortly.

I’m still having trouble imaging above 30 seconds which appears to be down to inacuracy with the mount. All the forums suggest stripping the mount, removing the goo that has been smeared over the moving parts and replacing this with a high quality lubricant. There’s also a good chance that steel (or whatever alloy they’ve used) from the castings can get into the gears which can be removed at the same time as the regreasing so I think this will be somewhere near the top of my next things-to-do list. The downside of fixing the tracking will be that I’ll need to add amp-off to my modded camera but that’s something I can live with. Alternatively I may be looking at the Atik 16ic, or Canon 350D but maybe not until next year.

Now that I can use Starry Night and EQMOD to locate targets I thought I’d have a look for some non-Messier targets for a change. I managed to get a small planetary nebula caled NGC6210 which shows as a small fuzzy blue ball. I also got NGC7027 which was too bright to pick up detail from but which appears as a stretched star, or perhaps 2 stars very close together. A short exposure of Cygni 52 in the Veil Nebula didn’t pick up any nebulosity but I think a much wider field of view would also be required to do this target justice.

My verdict on the EQMOD is a big thumbs up. It does everything you would need it to do and works as well for the static observatories as it does for people like me having to setup the mount every session. I need to get the MOSAIC add-on working next to see if I can pickup larger structures like the Veil and Pelican, but there’s no rush, with so much to learn I’m sure I’ll image all these things in time.