20:45 – 00:10
Focused with Ha this evening at 18,486.
Imaging SH2-142 Wizard nebula in Ha. I still have the problem with the camera so I have gone back to ZWO and asked for the next steps after I have changed the USB cable to no avail.
Test Image 5min Ha – Needs rotating
21:11 – 01:12
Focus on Red was 19,562. I then slewed to M2 and took 30+ RGB frames. I do not need Luminance as it added very little to M15. Position angle for this and M15 was 239.580
21:32 – 00:58
Using the 12″ in the dome this evening to see if I can quickly grab some frames for M15 the Globular cluster in Pegasus.
I’m capturing 60s exposures due to not wanting to oversaturate the stars. I will attempt to get 30 x 60s for LRGB.
Focus position for Luminance 17,131 and RGB 19,505
I captured all frames with the Moon around 88% waining. Some frames were marred by the noise problem on the camera. I have put a ticket into ZWO to see if we can resolve.
M15 processing
20:14 – 23:22
Gingergeek came over this evening with his travel rig to setup and test again before our trip. My travel setup is packed away so instead I will image with the 12″ this evening, the first time since May!
Guiding setup was an issue. I did not need to re-calibrate, however TSX kept guiding on a hot pixel. I realised after a long while this was because there were no bright guide stars in the FOV so used the rotator to find one then everything just worked.
Then had a bug with taking a set of images where the run kept using the blank filter. I added another row in TSX and deleted the original which solved the problem. Cloud came in just after 11pm to shut the dome up.
M15 5 min exposure
23:00 – 02:00
4 Epsilon Lyra Double Double star – 31mm I can see the double but not split the 2 stars; 13mm Ethos allowed me to split the doubles and the 10mm whilst slightly dimmer afforded me a slightly wider split
Cat’s Eye Planetary Nebula – 31mm very small not quite pinpoint of light visible nicely without a filter, OIII filter makes it slightly more apparent and Nebustar filter it looks marginally better; 13mm Ethos provided brighter nebula, again the filters provided a better view with the Nebustar being brightest; 10mm is the best view of them all with a definite oval shape East or West, right to left but now OIII produced the brightest and clearest view although it is pushing the seeing tonight
Turtle Planetary Nebula – Not seen
Rasalgethi Alpha Hercules Double Star – 10mm too much for tonight, could not get good focus but could easily split; 13mm Ethos the best view with brighter primary in yellow, very striking and smaller secondary blue; 31mm Nagler just splittable but both components look yellow.
Albireo Double Star – Bright large yellow primary and smaller but still bright blue star in the 13mm Ethos
M13 Hercules Globular Cluster – lovely in the 31mm Nagler; 13mm Ethos much brighter view and obviously larger with resolving more core stars; 10mm darker background so contrast better and even brighter core and stars more obvious with direct vision, including nice pair at 10pm on the cluster
M57 Ring Nebula – planned but not attempted
61 Cygni Double Star – planned but not attempted
NGC 6891 Open Cluster in Lyra – not seen in 31mm Nagler
NGC 6702 & NGC 6703 Galaxy pair – planned but not attempted
M56 Globular Cluster – 10mm dim resolvable , 13mm slightly brighter resolvable averted vision
NGC 6765 Planetary Nebula – planned not attempted
A really good night overall, the eyepieces lent to me from Bob are excellent and make the viewing more pleasurable being able to switch with my wider field of view ones.
23:00 – xx:xx
So the 22″ Dob is still out of action with the encoder cable needing repairing from a recent issue with snagging. I’ve ordered some RJ9 connectors to replace the one on the RA axis that is broken. So instead I thought I would open the dome and given the perfectly clear weather with no chance of rain, I would image Arp xxx with the 12″ that Bob Trevan had recently imaged with his 17″ and leave the scope running.
Due to the brightness of the sky when I started it was impossible to find a guide star, thus I have decided to perform almost lucky imaging of 1min exposures. Again given the background brightness this time of year, if I were to try lucky imaging of this faint object of say 1/10th of a second, it would not appear.
So I have set the scope running with 240 images to take in luminance and will come back in the morning and check the results.
22:34 – 01:00
Tonight was a visual night. GingerGeek and I used the 22″ Obsession Dobsonian to view some of the wonders of the late Spring sky.
We started with Venus with the aid of a Moon filter. Whilst Venus is bright and not too overwhelming in the eyepiece, the contrast afforded by the addition of this particular filter aids the clarity of the image as Venus sits on the bright backlight of the night sky this time of year. Venus is in a gibbous phase and you could clearly see a concave arch to the edge of Venus that was missing. The seeing was very steady and we were able to push to 179x with the 13mm Nagler.
Next up was Mars. Whilst it took a while for it to appear in the astronomically twilight sky, I swept the area North East of Venus and landed the target after a few moments. Mars was so very small compared with Venus, obviously red as seen without a filter in this case and slightly shifting in colours due to the seeing. By the time we had finished looking, Mars had appeared in the night sky.
Now the sky was getting darker we wanted to start on the deep sky objects. It became apparent very quickly there was a problem with my alignment. This was a problem I faced the last time out and the trouble is with he RA encoder. The RJ11 cable has been pulled and needs recrimping. So for tonight it was about star hoping only 🙂
We then went on to look at globulars M3, M92, planetary nebulae M57 the Ring nebula and M97 the Owl nebula. We tried to get M101 but the sky brightness would not allow it. We also looked at Mizar and Alcor that I could see from 11:30pm as a double, and we looked at Polaris and it’s double star companion SAO 305 through the scope.
The planetary nebulae were seen through an OIII filter and Tele Vue Nebustar filter. I thought the view was slightly clearer through the Nebustar filter, maybe due to the slightly wider bandwidth which includes H-Beta. The Ring nebula was very crisp and I thought I could discern the central star which is 12th magnitude. Our friend Bob was kind enough to lend me a set of eyepieces he recently acquired. The Tele Vue 10mm Radian eyepiece gives 230x through which we could see the central white dwarf.
Whilst looking at the globular clusters we pushed the magnification to 288x with the 8mm Tele Vue Radian. Both this eyepiece and the 10mm gave fantastic views with the globulars sparking with pinpricks of lights from the 1,000s of Suns!
22:14 – 03:00
GingerGeek came round again tonight for another full night of imaging.
Focus position at 19,506 for Luminance at 22:30 hours.
Started with M100 a galaxy in Coma Berenices. LRGB at 300s sub frames as I have not imaged this galaxy before. However I found this was too close to the Moon so I will revise another night. So I moved onto M10 for RGB, as I have luminance data from Spring 2020 I took 4-6 of RGB as M10 was then too low as it passed the Meridian.
Unfortunately due to the Moon and on reflection looking at the luminance data from April none of the data is of significant quality to be able to use, so I will have to reshoot.
22:47 – 03:15
M101 for me this evening to try and get there RGB data in one night. GingerGeek has come round to test out his travel setup, he has a Takahashi FSQ85, QHY268C and the Pegasus NYX-101 harmonic mount.
Focused at 20,105 on Luminance so RGB will be 21,105
1 x 300s Red
Taking 2 minute exposures for each colour at -25℃. I then realised 5 minutes is so much better. So at 1:30am I then started exposing at 5 minutes with the plan to combine both data sets. The SkyX worked brilliantly as can be seen below, looking after the guiding and image capture.
The main challenge I had early on was the the dome shutting unexpectedly. I will attempt to find out why over the next few months. The camera noise continues to be an issue but less so tonight so I think it may be USB related, again I will troubleshoot and check there cable lengths.
GingerGeek had a productive night troubleshooting a multitude of problems on his untested travel kit and was pleased with the results including taking his first image of a supernova in M101.
22:27 – 03:12
Imaging from IMT3b this evening using the 12″ CDK. Decided to test and see what my image scale would look like compared to Bob’s 17″ CDK. Bob had recently taken an image of Hickson 68 and in particular NGC 5353, a spiral galaxy in Canes Ventatici.
So I’m out and all is clear and calm, temperature is around 12℃ after a pleasantly warm day of 21℃. I am now shooting 1 minutes exposures as did Bob and I will take 70 of these. Of course to be comparable I would need at least 4 times the amount give the light grasp from Bob’s 17″.
By 1.13am I had finished 70 x 60s exposures for NGC 5353 including flats and darks. Then I slewed to M101 to start collecting RGB frames, however I needed to get the camera rotated back to the right position. Firstly PixInsight’s plate solving script had gone from my install since the recent update so I need to fix that. So instead I used image link in TSX. Using the following process I managed to correct my FoV frame and then sync the rotator to the current view. I then opened the M101 image from the 21st April and used that as a reference to then rotate the rotator to align.
Finally got the imaging run on M101 started at 3am for RGB taking 2min subs. I remembered to move the focus position out by 1,000. So I went from luminance at 19,329 to Red 20,329
Need more flats and darks for M101 later tonight.
21:48 – 05:47
Out imaging M101 in Luminance again to gather more data before I move onto RGB. I already have some Ha which to be honest is probably not all that useful due to poor signal.
5 mins exposure of M101 uncalibrated
So admittedly the biggest challenge tonight was not having sorted automating a meridian flip, falling asleep and waking up after 1 hour to find I had 50 mins of star trails as the mount had come to a perfectly safe rest and stopped tracking. A quick manual flip and I was back in action
Not tracking at the meridian
Another problem I had, especially on the West side of the meridian was a jump every now and then in the autoguider causing the resulting image to have a jump in it. I eventually suspected the star brightness of the guid star being the issue so I increased the exposure from 7s to 12s. This resulted in an increase in the Relative Star Brightness as shown on the Autoguider Graph increasing from 40 to over 100. It also seems to have resolved the issue.
Relative Star Brightness increased with increased exposure 7s to 12s
The last problem I had tonight was the camera was set to GAIN 139 OFFSET 10 rather than OFFSET 21. This seems to reset in TSX every time I reconnect the camera. So from now on I will make it part of my startup process to set the OFFSET correctly. The impact is slightly dimmer pixels as it is not adding the additional 11 to each one and thus the times for Flats I have need to be increased.
In total tonight I managed to grab around 4 hours 15 mins of good data once I removed problematic frames so 51 x 300s subs. I also took calibration frames, darks, flats and flat darks.
21:29 – 00:53
M101
Luminance 19 x 300s
M101 5 x 300s Luminance no calibration
8th April 2023
After a successful morning of Luke helping me rewire the 12″ due to the removal of all computers apart from the Mac Mini, I looked at why the guider kept disconnecting last night and then not calibrating. It transpired to be the length of the USB run. I was hoping through 3 hubs and many meters of cable. On replacing the cable with a shorter one and plugging it into a single hub, the connection error went away. The only thing left to do was test auto guiding at night.
So roll on evening and I went out early to catch the first starts. Luke and I had replaced the All Sky Camera during the day so we wanted to see what that looked like, It is fair to say the ZWO ASI178MC is an amazing upgrade to the rubbish little ZWO ASI120MC I had been using.
New ASC with wider lens
So after much messing about with trying a camera other than the SX Lodestar, trying several pieces of software including PHD2 that I could not get working, I settled on TSX for guiding and managed to get it calibrated. On swapping the side of the mount and recalibrating I had a similar problem, however I think the brightness of the guidestar, along with the exposure time and the order I was doing things in had caused the issue.
Below are the settings used for the working system, note the calibration distance is 30 arcsecs which is fine if you calibrate on a star rather than a hot pixel.
Relay Settings including Direct Guide! 30 arc seconds for calibration distance
Successful calibration East side of mount
Successful calibration West side of mount
Guide Target Method
Settings
X2 Plugin and remove hot pixels
Autoguide tab – long exposure and subframe selected
more settings
Final settings
Success!
So you must select a bright enough star.
You must put a subframe round it.
You must them expose on that subframe.
You must then calibrate that subframe.
18:20 – 03:00
Before sunset I wanted to reset the dome parameters in TSX as these had got corrupted since loosing the NUC. I now have a set of working settings.
So I have managed to get the dome rotation working. The settings can be seen here for the OS12 and are documented for the other 2 scopes which are piggybacked in my TOSA manual.
OS 12″ Dome Settings
Skywatcher 120 Esprit Dome Settings
Skywatcher 5″ Dome Settings
Serial Device used for Dome
Unfortunately the night did not produce any images as the last thing I could not get working was guiding, I will take and look tomorrow. The main problem was I could get TSX, PHD2 or a 3rd party piece of software to calibrate the guider.
Between 9pm and 12:30am both nights
A week with the family in Tenerife afforded me the opportunity to test out for the 2nd time this year the Skywatcher 100 Esprit on the AM5 harmonic mount with the ASIAIR in control and the ASI2600MC with a new Antlia Triband RGB Ultra filter.
Over the period of the week I picked 2 nights when I wanted to observe. Because of the clement environment of Tenerife and the Canaries and unlike the UK, you can decide when to go out and image as almost all nights are clear, the weather warm, around 22 deg Celsius and the bed not that far away from the pool. Given when we were on holiday which was decided around other activities, the Moon phase was Full.
The one problem with renting a villa is when the owners will not pinpoint where on a map it is. There is normally a reason. In this case it was because of the proximity of the local sports buildings. A swimming pool to the front of the villa including a floodlit pitch and 2 more flood lit pitches to the left and right of the villa at the rear.
So yes it was bright, very bright, as can be seen on the villa party wall.
So given all that light pollution I was then pleasantly surprised how well the final image came out of the singular target I chose. NGC 2244, the Rosette Nebula.
I exposed for some 75 x 300s over the 2 nights. All the images were on the West side of the Meridian to make it easier without a flip.
I found stacking 75 images instead of just the first night of 30+ images gave a much smoother background and nebula, much less noise and easier to work with the data.
So not a bad photo for Full Moon and 3 flood lit pitches. I look forward to testing out the kit at the top of the mountain later in the year under New Moon dark skies.
I wanted to compare 2 filters this evening as I have recently purchased the new Antlia Triband RGB Ultra filter. The original filter I had for the one shot colour was the ZWO Duo-Band filter.
As can be seen above the difference without a filter is quite dramatic (Top – No Filter, Middle – Antlia Triband RGB Ultra, Bottom – ZWO Duo-Band). There is more broadband light captured. The red nebula is less apparent and the background sky is much brighter.
The above image from the running man nebula, NGC 1977 demonstrates that without a filter a reflection nebula comes through best (Left – No Filter, Middle – Antlia Triband RGB Ultra, Right – ZWO Duo-Band). The ZWO filter gives a more green image over that of the Antila, which in itself reduces the reflection nebula but does start to pick up some of the red emission nebula within the Running Man.
The inverted background above gives a sense of the reduction in star luminance that is allowed through without a filter.
This image shows the background with the details of the readout from each of the pixel across the colour channels. Here you get a sense of the green seen in the ZWO filter is less the extra green coming through, moreover the lack of blue being allowed through. Without a filter the background sky is swamped with all colour channels.
With no filter the full effect can be seen above, much brighter background, nebula less colourful and less detailed.
With the Antlia filter above, the final single image I personally find is much more pleasing.
Finally with the ZWO filter you can see quite clearly the green effect.
So in summary I would say the ZWO filter is better than no filter except when imaging reflection nebula, however the best filter is the Antlia filter when paired with my one shot colour ZWO ASI2600MC camera.
Below is a random drawing of a scientist with a Tak laser beam.
22:00 – 01:00
Tonight was all about further testing of the travel scope which is now the Esprit 100 refractor. M78 would be the target along with a quick peak at Comet C2022 E3.
Moving to the Comet and having a quick look I could see how green it was and the the stars were very sharp.
I then slewed to M78 and took a single 600s exposure, however I remembered I had the ZWO Duo-Based filter left in so the reflection nebula is not very apparent, whilst part of the Orion molecular cloud can be seen clearly to the upper right.
So overall a good evening testing the equipment and ready for another trip to Tenerife in March.
23:00 – 00:20
So it’s about time I tried to find a replacement for SGPro, given the continued problems with it, it’s less than intuitive design and find something that does not cause friction in my desire to capture more photons from the distant universe! So after looking at NINA briefly earlier this year, I have gone for it this evening to see if I can indeed capture some images.
The problem that set me back once before with NINA was the lack of connection to the FLI focuser. I just simply got an ASCOM error (I really dislike ASCOM). So after some educated guessing I got it connected. Instead of connecting to the FLI focuser directly I actually went through ASCOM which bizarrely cured the error.
With that done. I could now run autofocus, and only the 2nd time in my life this astronomy programme focused on the first go. The only other piece of software that good is the ZWO ASIAIR that I really enjoy because it just works.
I have now connected NINA to PHD2, also to TSX and left TSX to control the dome. I may change this later, however it works just fine and has not caused any problems. The only reason may be to further automate the dome for closing and reporting on status if that is a feature of NINA, something to look into later.
Managed to take 5 or 6 Ha images of 600s this evening before the cloud rolled in. I can use the flats from yesterday. A good evening testing given conditions including the almost full but waining Moon.
19:01 – 03:05
Dome open on the freezing night, currently -2℃, and I have fixed the dome slipping for the 2nd time this week, this time putting new grip tape on a hole that had appeared due to the wheel slipping.
Started out imaging M76 which is near the Zenith whilst we watch Harry Potter in the warmth of the lounge buy a roaring fire. After 11 frames of 600s in OIII I have stopped and slewed through Meridian flip and now started on Ha as I have 84 frames of OIII already……
So at 1:15pm I had 23 x 600s Ha on M76. Whilst I need much more and then RGB frames, I want to go to bed and M76 will set shortly to a less than desirable altitude. So I took my flats, darks and flats darks and closed the dome up for the night as the Moon was still fairly full.
19:43 – 22:29
For a long while I have had the observatory turned off. All the computers, mount and dome, due to the energy crisis. However, tonight I wanted to make sure the dome still worked and I could image an object so I turned most things back on. There are some things I can do without, including the ASC.
I managed to fight with SGPro to get it to image and slewed to the Soul Nebula. In particular a star galled GSC 4048:1298 which is near a nice Ha region. I found a guide star through the off axis guider and set about imaging 600s subs. I took around 7 before the dome closed due to the moon being so bright the weather statin reported it being too light to image! So the dome closed. I did reopen and get some more data but now it is too late and I need some sleep for work.
I took flats, darks and flat darks.
