Winter Update
December 7th, 2011
Right, time to get back on with this and catch up on the last three months of work, though the past six weeks have not seen anything new due to a leg injury which the GP diagnosed as a bad sprain, and the specialist (with the aid of an x-ray) diagnosed as a fractured fibula, but only after I had been walking around of it for nearly five weeks.
Anyway, lets see what I have been up to.
NGC7380 – The Wizard or Flying Horse Nebula
43×5 minutes (215 minutes total)
250mm F4.8 Reflector
Canon 1000D (Modified)
A challenging object from my light polluted garden and really it begs for a better camera to really get the most out of it. I’ve been playng with this image in Pixinsight using some new tools in an attempt to get more out of it so there may be another reprocessing post at some point.
Caldwell 9 – The Cave Nebula
50×6 minutes (300 minutes total)
250mm f4.8 Reflector
Canon 1000D (Modified)
This came out much better than expected, and is a great region for imaging. This is also the image which saw my long running guiding issues with the CGEM finally sorted, which basically meant ignoring every bit of advice on the Yahoo CGEM users group and doing exactly as the PHD instructions recommend. No backlash correction, only guide in one direction on DEC and use a well trained PEC curve.
NGC7129 & NGC7142
58×6 minutes (348 minutes total)
250mm f4.8 Reflector
Canon 1000D (Modified)
NGC7129 is the reflection nebula,NGC7142 is the open cluster on the right.
Ngc7129 doesn’t appear to have a special name of it’s own, though I’ve heard it described as looking like a rosebud, personally I see a light bulb, with the orange glow of the edge of the bubble inside the blue reflection region being the filament. Reflection nebula, especially ones this faint are a real pig for me to process, I really didn’t expect to much form this to be honest. Although it’s not spectacular I’m happy enough with the end result.
Jupiter
Click on the images to see the animation
I spent a night testing out the OpticStar PL-131C camera as a planetary and lunar camera. I have been using it for guiding since August and for that purpose it is at least reasonable, though the sensitivity is a bit low so it does force you to hunt around for good guide stars. However I had hopes that it would make for a decent planetary camera, or at least an improvement over the modified webcam.
This animation is made up of around one and a half hours of data, a mixed bag of frames depending on the seeing but a nice result.
The same data, keeping those image in which Io was visible.
This is one of the videos which make up a single frame of the animations, the seeing was pretty good that night, very stable. I do need to invest in a 5x Barlow at some point though.
The Moon
My last image is a six frame mosaic of the moon taken with the Pl-131c through my 250mm F4.8 reflector at prime focus. To see this in it’s full glory I’d suggest clicking here to view the full sized image.
So that’s it for the last few months, hopefully now my leg is improving I’ll be able to get back to it, though the first thing I need to be doing is rearranging the shed to move the desk area to the door end so I have space to work. I’ll be doing that this weekend
