24 December 2017

Tried the Orion Bahtinov Focuser today, and I love it... more on that later

Imaged M33 using the QHY5III174M camera with the Orion 80mm f/5 scope and the Star Adventurer mount.

This is a two-minute capture, no filters, just a single monochrome image.

The three-minute capture was too saturated to provide much hope in the available sky-glow.

Tried capturing images using SharpCap 3.0 as well... Looks like a very promising technique, will develop that capability next time.

Also, a single attempt to image of M45 on my friend's 12" dobsonian...

Will work on the images, and edit this post if I can improve on this quick processing.

ISS Lunar Transit
On 20 Dec 17, the International Space Station transited the waxing crescent moon shortly after sunset, from the point of view of north-western Louisiana.  I found this from the very-handy ISS Transit Finder web app:
https://transit-finder.com/

The interface is very easy and the output makes it simple to optimize your selected location within the transit corridor.  Here's a re-calculated map for that transit...

Interestingly, it has changed by a couple miles today, versus the calculation I did prior to the actual transit.  I don't know if the orbital elements changed since Wednesday or the back-calculation introduces some error...

I used the Orion 80mm (f/5) scope and the QHY5III174M camera again.  Here's the video of the transit, at 10% speed, plus a few zoom-ins and a 4% speed playback:

Thanks to the professionals at Camp Minden and in particular, SFC Jowers for the support at the location.

Since this worked, I'll next plan for a solar transit as well as another with the big scope.

Northern Lights

My wife and I decided to travel the coast of Norway back in 2011 to view the aurora.  As March and October appeared to be the best months to view them, we chose March for a cruise on the Hurtigruten Ferry line from Kirkenes near the northern border southwestward to Bergen.  Six days and five nights aboard the MS Trollfjord visiting about 23 ports along the beautiful Norwegian coast provided us with a very memorable vacation.

We had armed ourselves with a Canon 16-35mm II f/2.8 L-series lens for our Canon 5D mark II and hoped the weather (terrestrial and space) would provide some opportunities, unlike the sailing immediately prior to ours which had been socked in with clouds the whole time.

Sure enough, dinner on the first night of the sailing was interrupted by the Captain announcing the presence of the aurora.

This kicked-off five nights of more and more auroral activity, which we did our best to capture on the usually-moving large ferry.  Varying the exposure lengths and taking as many as we could while docked at ferry ports produced some images I'm kinda proud of, but the next time we will definitely try to have opportunities by land to improve the chances of crisp image.



Also, here's an interview I did with KTBS on the aurora...

https://www.ktbs.com/news/arklatex-indepth/northern-lights/article_75208998-c11b-11e7-a182-b3aaac7c7335.html

Well, it's been a few years, but...

On 23 November 2017 I set out to capture M31 (Andromeda Galaxy) using my latest rig.

Here's a photo of the rig...  It consists of a SkyWatcher Star Adventurer tracking mount head on a SkyWatcher wedge, supported by a Velbon tripod.  The scope is an 80mm Orion short-tube (f/5) 400mm focal length which I'd gotten as a guide scope for the 12" LX-200.

The camera shown is a Canon 5D Mark II, however I really only used that camera to course-aim the scope.  For imaging, I used a QHY5III174 Monochrome camera... For that camera, I used an Orion extender tube to enable focusing.

Here's a processed image from the evening...

To get to this image, I first captured a 120 second exposure with the QHY, controlled as an ASCOM camera with TheSkyX.  The program saves images in FIT format... To further process I used FITS Liberator to re-save as a TIF file (both as Windows applications in Parallels), then worked levels and histogram scaling with PixInsight (Mac Version).  I also used PixInsight to export the images to PNG format for sharing.

Out of curiosity, I examined the image to see what objects I could identify...  Below are a few Globular Clusters orbiting M31 which can be found on the image.  I used Sky Safari to identify those, and marked them up on the exported PNG image using the MacOS Preview editor function.

Waiting for another clear night (probably following the full moon) for another deep-sky imaging night.

Mark J.

First Image, and OAG repairs

Great clear full-moon nights throughout the weekend.  Even on clear nights, the dew forming on the corrector plate each night around midnight pretty-much terminated each session.  Just one photo to show for it, but I learned much and configured my gear better than any previous session...

The moon, using my Williams Optics 80mm refractor, piggy-back mounted on an un-guided polar-aligned LX-200 12" scope.  I didn't record the exposure time.

So, what did I really accomplish this weekend?  First and foremost, I figured out a lot about my off-axis-guider.  The Orion OAG is now focused for my reticle 9mm eyepiece (for guiding) and my 5D mark ii, for the first time ever.

Thoughts on the Orion OAG...  The prism-adjustment knob is poorly designed, with the net effect of my wasting at least 10 hours trying to get an image of a star into the guiding eyepiece.  The prism adjustment screw was incorrectly offset around the prism adjust-plunger, so that the prism remained pointed completely off the optical path of the scope. The knob would do nothing to deflect the prism, hence I saw nothing through the finder eyepiece.

A helpful blog post by Tom Polakis in cloudy-nights from 2004 showed the same problem.  I did some minor surgery on the OAG, got the adjustment pin in the correct position, and voila...  I now can see images in the eyepiece.

As for the image above, I learned all about Maxim DL's screen-strech functions and saving options to adjust the image to make the details visible.  Pre- screen-stretch, nothing was visible except a white circle on the image.  The image is noisy, and not ideally focused, but hey, it's a first.

Finally, after sunrise and dew-evaporation, I used some daylight landmarks to finally get the OAG focus adjusted for the two paths.  With that accomplished, I'm now ready to do some long-exposure photography on the next clear night.  Gotta put all the equipment away now...

Haywood

The first entry in my Astrophotography Blog...

This Blog is intended to be a record of my developing skills, successes and failures in capturing images of the night sky.  I'll make a separate entry describing who I am and what my astro-photography experience is... Suffice to say, I have had very few successful attempts to capture images, especially when weighed against the equipment and software I've acquired in my previous attempts.  Here's a brief list of the equipment I currently possess:

Meade 12" LX-200GPS-SMT (2004-era scope)
Coronado SolarMax 90 Double Stack Hydrogen-Alpha scope
Meade Ultra-Wedge
Canon 5d Mark II
Williams Optics Zenithstar 80mm refractor
Losmandy dovetail-plate system for the Meade scope
Orion Off-Axis Guider
Meade 1:1.6 focal reducer
Orion Flip Mirror
12volt car-battery charger - powers the Meade
Vixen Alt-Az manual mount for SolarMax scope

Notice there is no dome mentioned in the above list... I have to drag this out and pack it up before/after every observing session.  This will continue for at least the next 3 years, so no permanent installations are possible for the foreseeable future.

Late-May weather in VA-permitting, I'll be attempting to improve the collimation on the Meade tonight...  So far, the meade's performance has been weak for many years due to my incompetent previous collimation attempts.  The replacement of allen-bolts with Bob's Knobs last month has gotten my meade scope as collimated as it's ever been, so I think I've got a good chance during my next session to finally get some quality (for me) images out of the setup soon...

That's it for now.  I'll post some previous pictures from our Solar Eclipse trips, Venus Transit images, and the better of my images from the un-collimated equipment I'd been trying to tweak over the past few months.

Thanks for reading, and hope this blog is worthwhile.  I realize this may only be read by me, and in that case I hope it serves as a means to collect lessons-learned which I can use to build up my skills.

Cheers,
Haywood