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:
First Light for ED66
Neil Wyatt
I’ve Finished my ED 66 scope
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…
First Contribution to the HOYS-CAPS Project
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:
Perseids-ish – Apologies photos now added!
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:
The Sadr region of Cygnus
Here’s one from a few nights ago with my 130P-DS and cooled Canon 450D. 90 minutes worth of 5 minute subs.
Dark Star Dob
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!
Mars 25 July
Not sure Mars is showing more detail, but I’m gradually getting the colour better:
Some detail in Mars, Saturn showing off
Last night I got some detail out of Mars, at last, but still well away from what we might hope for. On the other hand, it was another good night for Saturn.
Jupiter 10 July 2018
I was lucky enough to get a long sequence of Io leaving Jupiter’s disc and the red spot moving onto the face of the planet.
I captured two videos at full frame to include all four moons: Europa, Io, Callisto and Ganymede:
