Astro Imaging in the UK

Managed to see some clear sky on Tuesday, so Jamie and I went up to the fishing lake at the top of the village so we could have a good Eastern horizon.

West / North West is the worst direction from our village as Peterborough is only about 10 miles away and being a big city – it generates a fair amount of Light Pollution. But irrespective of the Light Pollution and the high and low cloud, we did get to see it.

It was Jamie’s first comet

This image has been resized, the comet can be found almost dead centre. A uncropped close up has been pasted into the corner. Might get to see it again on Thursday evening if I’m lucky.

My favourite image. Over 10 hours of exposure time, over three night. Made up 10, 15, 20 and even 40 minute exposures (subs) with literally hundreds of calibration frames to help process the image correctly. This image took four complete processing sessions from scratch to get it right – and in total took me over 2 weeks to process.

Ionized Sodium light for Red light, Hydrogen Alpha for green light and doubly ionized oxygen for blue – gives this amazing effect – called Hubble palette. Called that because this is the style of the images from Hubble Space Telescope.

The Crab Nebula (M1 NGC 1952) is a supernova remnant and pulsar wind nebula in the constellation of Taurus. The nebula was observed by John Bevis in 1731; it corresponds to a bright supernova recorded by Arab, Chinese and Japanese astronomers in 1054.

At X-ray and gamma-ray energies above 30 keV, the Crab is generally the strongest persistent source in the sky, with measured flux extending to above 1012 eV. Located at a distance of about 6,500 light-years from Earth, the nebula has a diameter of 11 light years and expands at a rate of about 1,500 kilometers per second. It is part of the Perseus Arm of the Milky Way Galaxy.

At the center of the nebula lies the Crab Pulsar, a neutron star (or spinning ball of neutrons), 28–30 km across, which emits pulses of radiation from gamma rays to radio waves with a spin rate of 30.2 times per second. The nebula was the first astronomical object identified with a historical supernova explosion.

This image was again from the first test evening with the loan FLT98 (cracking scope). 18 x 10 minutes through the FLT98, 7nm Ha filter with the H9.

The sun came out in February – I have proof

There was an amazing filament – it was at least 25 times the size of the planet earth! A stunning sight!

Taken through the PST with the DMK21 and 2x Barlow.

The Dumbbell Nebula (M27 or NGC6853) is a planetary nebula in the constellation Vulpecula, at a distance of about 1,360 light years. The Nebula is around 10,000 years Old and is around 1 Ly across.

This object was the first planetary nebula to be discovered; by Charles Messier in 1764. At its brightness of visual magnitude 7.5 and its diameter of about 8 arcminutes, it is easily visible in binoculars, and a popular observing target by amateurs.

This image was one of the first images taken through the loaned FLT98. Taken with a Starlight Xpress H9 mono CCD, through a WO FLT98 and 7nm Ha filter. 12 x 20 minute exposures.

There are some lovely Active Regions around at the moment… some small proms as well.

This is Active Region 11543 – this is the same region in differing frequencies…

Here are some more images from last weekend. Usual set-up, usual processing. Click on the images for a larger version.

This is a three pane mosaic showing just the Proms.

This image shows the effect of the different end of the frequency range of the PST.

And lastly most of the activity was in one central band, so I took half a dozen movies and created a mosaic strip.

Saw a great piece of processing on SGL a few weeks ago and just had to try myself. This involved inverting the Prom portion of a solar image so that there is a white background and then colourising… very odd, but strangely appealing!

From 28th July 20112

I sat out in the sun taking AVIs every 5 minutes for nearly 6 hours. I even managed to cook a bbq while doing it

This is the end result of 54.2Gb of date captured over 6 hours, I used a different capture program this time, called “Dave’s Solar System recorder” – still getting to grips with that, but a lot of potential.

Each AVI was stacked in AVI stacker, wavelets in R5 and further processing in CS5. I then used “Dave’s video stabilizer”. Don’t know who Dave is but he writes cracking software