Both galaxies show much more natural colour than before, and allow for a greater stretch and a much easier to manage background colour.

The same with the Leo triplet, m66 especially is showing more detail in the structure.

I’m very happy with the progress on these two images, thanks to a great deal of assistance from John Murphy in the use of Iris and some very useful directions for taking better flat frames. The next step is to image a g2v type star during imaging session to work as a correct reference for my colour correction.

The Leo tripet is a small cluster of galaxies sitting next to each each in the constellation Leo, they are M66 (top left), M67 (bottom left) and NGC3628 (right).

This is the first image using the new CGEM mount and the second image using the CLS CCD filter and it shows a few problems. Visually the first problem that I see is the colour balance, this is a direct effect of using the new filter which has shifted the colours way over into the blue and I’m having trouble working out a good method to correct it.

The second problem is the slight stretching of the stars along the RA axis, this is primarily a result of periodic error which I need to work on. I’ve gone back to using guidedog for guiding on this image as guidemaster was giving me a lot of issues, it still needs a bit of fine tuning. I also want to test out the guiding facilities in EQ Align to see how that deals with the mount.

Also as a direct result on the horrible street light over the garden the images all had an awful amount of gradient in across them, happily however Pixinsight was able to deal with that problem. I’ll have to remember to stick my big cardboard box over the light next time.

Tonight though I got this whilst imaging the Leo triplet :

It looks like a satellite flare but from which of the many hundreds of objects in orbit I couldn’t say.

On the first night I used the excellent EQAlign to get my polar alignment as close as possible. The guiding after this was massively improved in declination with very few corrections required, probably the best dec guiding I’ve seen from the sphinx. The RA however was all over the place with very rapid oscillations that the guiding had problems with.

Second night, I spent a lot of time getting the balance of the mount as accurate as possible, had another go with EQAlign to tweak that side then tried again. The result? Excellent RA guiding, but now the declination is a mess showing a slow oscillation as it seems to drift first one way then the other. The horrible declination backlash of the sphinx made this very difficult to manage and adjusting the movement speed or aggression settings only sped up or reduced the oscillation period.

I really like the sphinx, I’ve had a great time with it and learnt a lot, but I think the time is coming for it to be replaced. It is overloaded these days, and the performance of the mount suffers because of this.

Anyway, before heading to bed on Saturday night I took a stack of 100 images of the full moon through the 250mm reflector.

• Orion Optics 250mm F4.7 Reflector
• Vixen Sphinx SX Mount
• Baader MPCC
• Astronomik CLS CCD Filter
• Canon EOS 1000D
• 24 x 5 Minute exposures at iso800

Guiding Setup

• Vixen A70LF refractor with 0.6x Focal Reducer
• Modified SPC900NC
• Guidemaster auto guiding software

A slightly different processing from a stack with different options :

Imaging Setup

• Orion Optics 250mm F4.7 Reflector
• Vixen Sphinx SX Mount
• Canon EOS 1000D unmodified
• Astronomik CLS-CCD Filter

Guiding

• Vixen A70LF F12 Refractor
• Modified Phillips SPC900NC webcam
• 0.6x Focal Reducer
• Guidemaster

Images

• 11 x 3 minutes @ ISO800
• Darks and Flats x 15 each
• Aligned and Stacked in Deep Sky Stacker
• Processed in Pixinsight

I’m pretty happy with that, it’s not perfect, there is a slight stretching of the stars. But this one one of 10 test images and they were all of equal or better quality. The stretch is along the RA direction which means the likely causes are periodic error and over correction by the guide software. The dec axis is working beautifully despite it’s frustrating backlash.

Experimentation has shown me that the automated aggression control of guidemaster doesn’t function very well on this mount, disabling that option helped enormously.  Adjusting down the RA autoguide movement speed also reduced the stretch. The next testing step will be to do the PEC recording, however Vixen really need to improve PEC on the starbook, I don’t want to have to do it every time I want to do some imaging!

The other data I wanted to process was a set of 30 full frame raw format images of the moon taken with the canon 1000D. These were then stacked in registax, tweaked with wavelets and then dumped out to gimp to adjust the colours. In this case I pushed the saturation levels right up, this brings out more of the subtle changes in the moons surface that the human eye really only see’s in shades of grey but the DSLR picks up.  It’s an effect that I really enjoy and not possible with the mosaic above where every individual section has it’s own balance and variation.

No joking, it was clear, in England all night on the 30th, and properly cold as well. It’s been so long since we had a good clear night that I had the roof off the shed just as soon as I could get out outside. The only real damper on this otherwise perfect evening was a big bright moon, which of course ruined any chance of me doing any deep space work. But I have a webcam, and I have EOS movie record, so I figured I would make the best of the night and try my hand at some lunar imaging.

The first thing I wanted to try was capturing a few minutes of video from the Canon 1000D using EOS Movie Record. I set that up and left it running whilst I got myself sorted for the night. A few minutes in I noticed a flicker on the screen from the corner of my eye and made a mental note to check it the next day. This is what I found when I reviewed the video :

So that was a bit of pure luck on my part, but it makes for a striking image I think.

Next I setup the webcam on the 250mm reflector to try my hand at lunar imaging. At first I thought I would just stick to one area but after a little while I had started to collect connected sections, and from then on it turned into an attempt at a mosaic. This was my first attempt doing this and unplanned so naturally I missed a bit, which I shall kick myself for later.

• Philips NPC900NC
• Baader UV/IR cut filter
• Orion Optics 250mm reflector

The image is composed of 27 individual frames, each of which came from a 1000 frame avi video, the data was captured with k3ccdtools and stacked in Registax.

In order to build the complete image I first spent a long time in photoshop and came out with something I was happy with. Then out of interest I tried the photostitch tool in Windows live photo gallery. In about three minutes it had aligned, colour corrected and stitched the whole image together far better than I ever could. I was really impressed as about a third of the frames were at an angle compared to the rest due to the scope reversing half way through. So if you have images to align, give it a go, you don’t need to do anything more than select the images and click go, it works out everything else by itself.

The full scale image is some 3360 pixels across and I shall locate some hosting for that soon.