Astro Imaging in the UK

Pretty much everything rises in the East and sets in the West. The stars in the Northern hemisphere appear to revolve around the North Celestial Pole(NCP) and those in the Southern hemisphere around the the South Celestial Pole(SCP).

Where the Southern hemisphere meets the northern hemisphere you get an odd effect. I’ve still to get a decent image of this, but this’ll give you a good idea of what I’m talking about.

All the stars above the back line revolve around the NCP, all the stars below the line revolve around the SCP.

Might have to try again tonight!

The maximum for this years Lyrids falls at the weekend and also at almost full moon. Fantastic! Shame about the clouds though! This is a 2 minute exposure.

Managed to get some pictures at the beginning of the evening – even got a meteor I think.

And a little video, 10 frames a second.

My spare laptop is all setup an working so the old laptop sit out in the cold while I sit indoors with the new one in the warm . I managed to get another three panes added to the Makarians Chain area.

These three panes are all 10 x 5minutes through the Vixen 140mm (really must finish writing the review!), with the exception of the final pane (top most image) which is 4 x 5minutes.

Uploading the image to astrometry.net resolves 21 galaxies – but there are many more. I count at least 54 galaxies. Just need to fill in the gaps and get more data.

To give an idea of scale, the mosaic below is 2 degrees 40 minutes high – that about 5 and a half full moons high.

Here is the image 50% it’s original size (once you click on it).

And this is the resolved image from astrometry.net.

Markarians Chain is a group of galaxies on the Virgo / Coma Berenices border. It’s a huge area of sky with hundreds of galaxies in it.

I thought it might be fun to do a multi year project to image to area. To start I’m planning on just taking quick overlapping images and registering them together to give me the final field of view that I’m aiming for. Then I can spend more time capturing better quality data and adding that to the initial file, which will improve the signal to noise ratio and enable better processing and more detail.

I might even add some colour data and Ha.

I counted at least 45 galaxies and that with just 30 minutes of exposure per pane – there are 5 panes in this image, damn the clocks going forward It’s quite a large image so click on it!

Had another go at processing the data for M51. Now using Photoshop CS5 but cannot for the life of me work out how to correctly add in the Ha layer to the Red channel. I’ll keep working on it!

But this I do think is better than before!

My first attempt using a mono camera and R G B filters, cloud did cause me quite a lot of trouble throughout the night. Half a dozen times between 9pm and Midnight I lost the guide star. But the result was that I didn’t get as many as I hoped in each channel, and some of the frames that I used weren’t the best quality.

9 x 10m Red, Flats and Bias.
9 x 10m Green, Flats and Bias.
6 x 10m Blue, Flats and Bias.

Captured used the H9, SW FW, SW OAG, Baader RGB filters. Through the Vixen NA 140SSf.

Stacked in DSS, processed in PSCS2. Final alignment in Registar.

Very happy – looking forward to getting better quality subs and keeping the blue channel (stars) under control.

Having a few issues with Maxim , but things are starting to go to plan. Having the lodestar has made a great deal of difference It’s great to have a choice of guide stars!!!

Two evenings imaging with few issues really tells me that I’ve made the right choice of guide cam

I don’t really do Galaxies – so have been hunting round for a nebula to image in the east. Found Abell 21, a very large planetary nebula.

Guiding was spot on for the whole evening. But I have strange stars

A 200% crop of one of the stars is below. I have a thread running on SGL >>HERE<<. I'm also going to contact Telescope House and see if they can give me some pointers on loosening the cell a little.

This is from a previous imaging run, showing that it isn’t tracking!

Left is 10 seconds, middle is 1 minute and right is 10 minutes all stretched to show the defect!

Just using the Christmas holidays to do a little tidying up of my images and found some that once again I completely forgot taking

Used the instructions found here http://bf-astro.com/hubbleP.htm for some final tweaks to the colour balance.

2 x 10m in Ha, 5 x 10m in OIII and 2 x 20m & 12 x 10 in SII (20m/50m/160m).