That rarity, the Sun

I took this today, 25.5.13, at Austerfield, with the DMK and PST, using my Dell laptop. The other one will be left out on a hillside some quiet night.
1200 frames processed in Registax6 and fiddled with in Photoshop. The DMK hasn't a large enough chip to cover it all so it has to be done in two halves and stitched together, not too easy with the PST's "sweet spot", or rather hot spot.

M81 and M82

Taken on 15.5.13 on a night without clouds, some haze of course, but a goodish night. The DSLR is giving me alignment problems, in focus one side and not the other, so I reverted to my old M25C, which never seems to drop a beat or get upset with my rough treatment, nice job Terry.

I took 27x300sec frames and the usual flats, then sigma averaged them in Astroart, and finally processed the result in Photoshop.
M81 has a large dynamic range though it may not appear so at the start, and adding the 27 in Astroart produced a burned out core which processing cannot correct. So I'll try again later by adding subsets of 3 or 4, then averaging the subsets.
The lower one is a crop from the upper one, but though that composition isn't the best for this pair, I was trying to get other fuzzies in too, and there are some near the edges. The equipment uses was the 106 and M25C, guided by the H9C in the Vixen, all sat on the 900GTO mount.

30th April.
Working through Astronomy now -May.

Observing Chart

Date 30 April 2013

Sky conditions Seeing 2-3 (scale5) Transparency 2-3 (scale 5)

Telescope Meade 356mm f10

Object	Type	Const.	Eyepiece	Observations/Comments
M39	OC	Cyg	40 mm	About 30+ bright stars could be seen, the remainer merging into a nebulous looking background.
M57	Neb	Lyra	20mm	The Ring Nebula. Good clear view of fuzzy ring. Also good, if a little dimmer, with 17mm eyepice.
Beta	Dbl	Lyra	17mm	3.5/7.2 Mag, 46” sep. Brighter is variable due to v. close eclipsing brown dwarf
M3	GC	Can Ven	17mm	Really beautiful. Individual stars well resolved.
M63	GX	Can Ven	17mm	Very faint, averted vision helped to bring it into focus and show the centre bright area.
Rasalgethi	Dbl	Herc	9.7mm	M class S. Giant (400x Sol). Var.3.1-3.9. Secondary G5 Giant +F2 Dwarf 5.4Mag @4.5” sep. from primary. Orange red/Green. Colours seen . Somewhat “spiky” at this high mag.
NGC6210	PN	Herc	9.7mm	With 17mm -Small and fuzzy. Almost like blured star. 6,500 Ly distance. Slightly bigger in 9.7mm but less bright
M13	GC	Herc	17mm	Focusing very critical and averted vision needed to see many scattered stars. Not very bright. Tried 80mm Skywatcher with 17mm eypiece- nice but no differentiation.

Abell 39

This is tiny, well, not so tiny as planetary nebulae go (2.8 arcmins), and faint. Almost invisible in single frames of 5 mins, so I had to add 33 frames of that length, during a surprising night without cloud. In fact almost the whole of the week was without cloud. The Cloud God must be on holiday.
There was some haze though and I had 8 frames that I should have dumped because of that, but included, and have had to make processing adjustments.
Taken on 1.5.13 with the M25C in the Tak106, guided by the H9C in the Vixen260. The fat Moon rising in the dawn put a stop to it all, in fact some of the 8 hazy frames were due to that. It needs more data so I may do it all again. It hangs there in space like a green bubble. Love it.
The data was acquired in Nebulosity, then pre-processed in Astroart and finally processed in Photoshop.