I’ve been quiet for a while, largely due to car problems, hopefully behind me for now!
I’ve managed to image all the planets (except Earth and poor Pluto!) this year, although Uranus and Neptune were fuzzed up by poor seeing and Mercury is fairly random – I got a shot of it in the sunset above Barton under Needwood from the flyover on the A38! After darkening the background and resampling to three time bigger I was left with a red dot that is Mercury but I won’t pretend it’s ‘proper’ image.
I suspect I may have a LOT slower internet connection than most RAG members, and one problem I have is that large photos take a very long time to load. The ‘latest posts’ page typically takes 5-10 minutes is there are lots of new pictures that my computer hasn’t cached.
I’m afraid Ken’s very nice rosette is taking a few minutes on its own – which is what has prompted me to post this!
When you insert an image into a post you can select ‘link to media file’ and choose a relatively small display size.
This means the post loads with a smaller version of the image, but if you want full resolution you can click on the smaller image to see it.
Once you have chosen a setting it stays as a default until you change it.
If you have 50MB/s broadband you are probably wondering what I am grumbling about, but believe me, with my 2.9MB/s it makes a big difference 🙂
Thanks!
Neil
On Wednesday I got several hours of imaging with the new homebuilt scope, but I think my focus was off a bit and maybe a bit of tilt. Hope to do a bit of visual with it after tonight’s meeting.
This was the best image:
A couple of months ago I brought my ‘work in progress’ scope along to an introducing astronomy night.
I’ve had to teach myself anodising to finish it, I’m quite pleased with it, although I’m going to have to do some more tuning of the speed reducer – the ball bearings are causing the grooved stainless steel rod to distort making it go loose. I have a plan but it means making or finding a specially shaped grindstone.
Expect cloud for along time…
I managed to submit 110 minutes of Ha data for the Pelican Nebula to the HYS-CAPS (Hunting Out Young Stars) project. It was quite an adventure working out how to extract the red layer from my DSLR data to make an unstretched greyscale image and save it as a FITS image with the right header data!
I won’t upload the submitted image as being unstretched it is deeply underwhelming!
Instead, here is a processed version of the data. At some point I will try and combine this with the best of my RGB images. The target star is towards the top right hand corner:
Last night I got a similar amount of Ha data for the area around Sadr in the heart of Cygnus. Following some pretty detailed advice on the Stargazer’s Lounge forum I managed this combination with my RGB image from 4 August:
First an apology – for some reason the system wouldn’t let me upload any pictures, I thought I just gave up, but it’s published the post anyway!
My weekend went a bit pear-shaped so I ended up trying to get some Perseid images last night. I only saw one, and my very last shot of the night picked up a very faint one heading straight from the radiant near the double cluster, please excuse the awful coma, on 10th.
This appears to be an ion trail from a meteor that sneaked through between shorter exposures on the 14th
Having much more luck with the Graves Radar setup, thanks to Peter hill for his inspirational talk which encouraged me to take the plunge!
I ahven’t been as sophisticated in my counting of events – my brain isn’t up to checking several thousand screen gabs, so yes there are multiple counts in there as well missed counts from meteors arriving before the previous one finished, space debris and the ISS on multiple occasions. My assumption is that all these errors are effectively random and don’t affect the overall profile significantly.
These are my hourly counts, all peaking about 6:00am – UTC/GMT.
This is the average of the above graph, easier to see the overall daily pattern:
And all the data in a row, to show how the peaks rise and fall:
And an example of some detections:
Here’s one from a few nights ago with my 130P-DS and cooled Canon 450D. 90 minutes worth of 5 minute subs.
Oops! I’ve accidentally bought a 10″ Dark Star Dobsonian in need of much TLC for an incredibly good price. The owner was leaving the UK and glad to see it find a good home.
Google suggests that someone not far from RAG already has one of these scopes! Unlike the one in the PDF, this mirror appears to be glued onto a wooden triangle for the mirror cell – eek!
Not sure Mars is showing more detail, but I’m gradually getting the colour better:
