The Sun on 4.6.13

 

 

Another one of the Sun taken from Austerfield with the DMK camera and PST telescope, 60sec of video on two parts that had to be stitched together. I'm beginning to understand the settings to get the best of it.

Processed in Registax6 with final adjustments in Photoshop. The camera is monochome so the colour was added separately in Photoshop.

 

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.

29/30 -April 2013 Monday/Tuesday

Learning how to set RA and DEC with the Meade. Shame GPS is not working.
Some" twinkle" (reduced seeing). but overall a good night  -10 p.m. to 02.45 a.m.
Moon had now come up and sky was getting washed out.

C/2011 L4 (Panstarrs) - 4.4.13

This was taken on a finally clear night, through clouds close to the horizon and directly over Doncaster town centre, not the best of circumstances, but time was pressing.
Using the M25C and 106 and 25x20sec frames. Every frame was full of cloud, all different patterns, almost worth making an animation of the patterns of cloud passing in front of the comet, but not really, unless we return to the conditions we've had for almost a year, and the cabin fever.
Acquired in Nebulosity, stacked in Astroart and finished off in Photoshop.

M67 - 4.4.13

At last a clear night, lots of time lost in trying to remember how I did things when it was last clear enough to take photographs. This is a return to the M25C, lovely camera, after many trials with the DSLR, mostly failures, enamoured of its small pixels though I am. The telescope used was the Takahashi 106.
Not clear enough to work on nebulous subjects or galaxies, so open clusters fill the bill as I ease into the saddle again, hoping for a good long ride.
The exposure was 32 frames of 60sec each, stacked in Astroart and finally processed in Photoshop. Re-processed, 21.5.13, with more care for star colours and background.

More from Iceland

I have spent all morning trying to make a panorama of two of my aurora photos. It had to be done manually as the difference in time between the two photos meant that I could only merge the stars OR the landscape accurately. In the end the landscape had to win and the resultant picture covers a horizontal field of view of about 180 degrees. It gives a very good impression of how the auroral oval actually appeared (if you turned your head as far right and then left as far as it would go).

To the naked eye, the green of the aurora was obvious but all the other colours seemed to be silver and the “light pollution”was not obvious at all.

Bill Hughes

It seems we must get away from Britain to see clear skies, and another recent trip to Iceland by Bill Hughes this time, enabled him to take these.
He was luckier than others in having 4 clear nights with aurorae each night. His Canon 600D had a 14mm F2.8 lens set at ISO 1600 exposing for 25sec for each. Processed using Auto Smart Fix, Noise Ninja and Star Spikes, with a little help from Photoshop.

The Rosette Nebula

Taken by Rhys Owen, with a DSLR Canon 600, newly acquired and newly modified too, he obviously means business. The forecast was good, clear all night, but he must have had an inside source that told him it wasn't going to hold. He rushed in, set it all up and spent long enough focusing, and it takes some time to do it if you're using trial and error rather than software to do it.
A short couple of 30 sec shots to test and then on with a series of 20x60 sec frames at ISO800, followed by 4x60sec darks. He sat and ran them without any software control, counting them as they went. All I had to do was find the nebula and set the telescope to point at it and balance the mount suitably.
Almost as soon as he's done, the clouds started to roll in. He must have known.
The frames were stacked in Deep Sky Stacker and post processed in Photoshop to produce the final result.