So opened the dome to cool down however there was cloud early evening and it took int 11pm to clear. I was due to image M107 however I found out that the new setup has a much shorter mount than my previous ME II and therefore the scope cannot see the object due to being obscured by the bottom of the dome. So I will have to image the objects below 30 degrees South with the mobile 100 Esprit setup. So for now I have decided to go after M102 which is a galaxy in Draco to the North West and much higher, Albeit a small galaxy for my 6” scope.
I have a problem with the dome rotation which means I either get dome runaway or the dome slips and does not move. I need to revisit the tension on the dome motor and subsequent rollers to see if I can fix this. Meanwhile I managed to grab 45 x 300s on M102.
Once again I will be using the Esprit 150 this evening. The sky is very milky so there may be some cloud around. M29 is the next Messier on my list to go after, I took a single shot some 4 or so years ago with the 12″ but only a single 2min tester. I will use 120s tonight and attempt to capture 4 hours of data.
After a day out it is unexpectedly clear. So after being notified as such from some friends at Basingstoke Astronomical Society, I opened the dome and uncovered the 22″.
I set the 150 Esprit in the dome running on M57 again to grab some more data as the night before. I do like to have at least 4 hours on each object now.
M57 6 hours of 72 x 300s
I then started cooling down the 22″ for the specific purpose of viewing Saturn at around 2:30am.
At 2:30am I started viewing Saturn.
I needed to move the scope back away from its usual place away from the Workshop as Saturn was behind the roof. I used the 31mm Nagler to start with, Saturn was fairly small but crisp in the FoV. I then swapped to the 13mm Ethos, refocused and Saturn appeared much larger, however the detail came and went with the seeing. Saturn was pretty low at this point, only 23º above the horizon. The rings were clear and obvious, the Cassini division easily seen between the A and B rings. I could not make out any surface detail. I spent about 20mins observing with my observing chair which was very pleasant on this summers night at 14º.
I finally looked at Neptune at 3:20am. I star hoped from Omega Pisces down towards Neptune.
Screenshot
I could just make out Omega Pisces in the night sky due to the approaching dawn. Neptune was extremely small but an obvious planet rather than a star.
Screenshot
Finally here is a crop of M57 and the galaxy IC 1296
This evening I have chosen another Messier object as I try to completed my list. M57. The Ring nebula is very small and as such appears small in the Espirt. I did want to get this with the 12” before I sold it but never got around to taking a great photo. Instead I will image with the 6” and zoom in.
Full screenZoomed In
The Seestar is also out, this time I have removed the tripod and thus it allowed me to perform a mosaic of the Milky Way. It is not immediately or at all obvious how to decide which bit of the Milky Way to mosaic, however I will go off and find a YouTube view. Meanwhile I have started the mosaic based on a random placement of it. I found the outcome to underwhelming to say the least. The total exposure for each frame in the mosaic was 10s of seconds and I could not seem to find a way to increase the total exposure or frame count.
Tonight I have the 150 Esprit in operation and the Seestar S30 Pro. I am imaging M56 again with the Esprit to gather an additional 1.5 hours of data.
On the S30 Pro I started with a Milky Way shot, It was meant to be the mosaic, however the scope was on the wedge and the mosaic only works when not using the wedge. So instead I went for a single image. Clearly seen is the cloud in the distance.
Once this was completed I went to image the Lobster but landed up on the Bubble instead. So I imaged that until 3am at the end of darkness as it is.
Tonight was about using both the 150 Esprit from the observatory and the Sky-Watcher 180 Mak outside. I setup before darkness fell and then proceeded to send the 150 Esprit to image M56, one of the Messier objects I had still not imaged. I decided on 120s exposures and in the end took 90 of them, with a handful or so having to deleted due to movement issues, probably when I stood next to the pier.
M56 120s Exposure
The dome would not rotate at sidereal tonight. Every time I set it to 1x sidereal it would after a while run away and just keep turning. This meant I had to manually move the dome every 15mins or so during imaging.
With the Sky-Watcher 180 Mak I imaged Saturn. This time I caught it before 3am, but I also managed to work out how to use the ADC and apply colour channel shift before saving the image.
Saturn best 30% of 8,000 frames
Whilst I had a lot of frames and the colour shift is much better than the other night, the seeing was not as good tonight. The Jet stream is still out of the way, however the air was very turbulent, thus the gap in the ring cannot be seen as well tonight.
I opened the dome tonight and looked to image something with the Esprit 150. I quickly found a Lynds Dark Nebula in the Milky Way just rising, LDN 621
LDN 621 – 1 hour 30 mins of 300s subs
This was particularly low down when I started imaging at 23º altitude. The sky was still rather bright as we were approaching the Summer Solstice in the Northern Hemisphere on 21st June. There is definitely some interesting structure within this part of the sky, I will surely revisit once astronomical darkness returns and the altitude is higher.
Tonight I thought I would continue my testing of the ZWO ASI2600MC Duo camera for performing photometry on T Coronae Borealis, HR 5958, as Wednesday night I realised the Antlia filter was in the imaging train and because even with the filter in, at 1s the maximum the star was, was .1 in green so far from saturated which gives a chance of being able to compare to a mag 2.2 star, Epsilon CrB in the same field of view.
I took 100 x 50ms of TcB, stacked them and this increased the signal to noise which helped. I then downloaded AstroImageJ for the Mac which I will use to perform photometry. Now I just need to learn the software.
Started work on my first photometry project tonight which I will do with my friend GingerGeek. T Coronae Borealis, which is also known as HR 5958 in that constellation is the target. I have been working on the information provided by the BAA
Both the above have proved useful in understanding both the situation and the comparison star/s to observe too. In my case I will attempt to image T CrB along with Epsilon CrB as this is a non variable mag 2.2 star.
T Coronae Borealis
Tonight I managed to take a few different subs at varying exposures, both to characterise the behaviour of the camera on this Field of View, but also to create an annotated overlay to help pinpoint T CrB on other frames.
After taking exposures ranging from 1s to 300s, the latter being for the annotation, I slewed to the Moon to take my first image through this new Sky-Watcher Esprit 150EDX.
So given it was a non-work night and predicted to be clear Dave invited me over to test the gear/setup prior to the BASEG Tenerife 2024 trip.
Given we are fast approaching the summer solstice, the nights are getting shorter and lighter. The Annual Darkness chart for IMT3 shows that we currently have no astronomical darkness and the nautical darkness lasts only for some 3.5hrs (left image) and now compare that the darkness graph for Mount Teide in Tenerife (right image) and although we lose some dark hours around the Summer Solstice it’s not as much as is lost being located at 52°N.
Setup – added BlueAstro stick station to measure pressure as Pegasus have not exposed the pressure measurement from the NYX101 mount to the ASCOM layer … why not ? Added weight bag to NYX-101 and GL.inet travel router to top of the scope as MS Windows keeps messing up the Wi-Fi hotspot on the Mele Quieter3C if it does not detect a internet connection ….. how stupid is that. Now I have a permanent hotspot thanks to the instructions given by Cuiv the Lazy Geek on his YouTube channel.
When attempting to polar align when using the QHY PoleMaster I noticed that the sky brightness below 15 mag2/sec (measured by a Unihedron SQM) produced a white screen due to over exposure – the minimal exposure in the now aged the QHY PoleMaster software (> 4yrs since last release) was 50ms which is too long even though I could eyeball Polaris in the early evening sky.
NINA 3.0 start up had not detected the QHY native driver and after I shutdown and restarted the app it then was able to detect the QHY 268C camera. However, it disconnected when it could not cool to -10℃ which I’ve never encountered before. I did eventually managed to get it cool and stay connected.
During guiding calibration OpenPHD2 would constantly complain about losing the star. Again the star was clearly visible on the PHD display and after downgrading from 2.6.13dev4 to dev3 and then I suddenly realised the value the error was referring to. I changed the minimal star HFD down to 1.0 from 1.5, also recreated the dark library to remove the possibility of the guider attempting to guide on a hot pixel.
Once guiding, the guide graphs were reporting 0.08 – 0.19 arcsec total polar alignment error. Hopefully I will learn to improve that and maybe repeat the polar alignment procedure or use PHD drift align to refine it.
I also forgot to change filter at the start of the evening from the Antila Quad Band filter to the Baader UV/IR filter. I noticed a halo from the bright star Arcturus in the constellation Bootes which I was testing autofocus on but I decided to continue regardless as I was only testing.
The goal for the night was to grab a base image of T Coronae Borealis (“The Blaze Star”) before it goes nova – it’s a reoccurring nova with a 80 year cycle. The star is currently hovering around 10.2 magnitude and it is predicted based on previous eruptions to reach around magnitude 2. As I ultimately wanted to perform some photometry on the star using the UV/IR cut filter I did want to blow out the cores of any bright star so I opted to use the ExtendedFullWell2CMS mode at gain 0, offset 30 with 60 second exposures. During the sequence I forgot to watch HFR/Star count graph and it rose above 5 which meant I have to refocus to (HFR ~2.0) and so due to my oversight due to chatting I will have to dump a lot of the early subs.
At the end of nautical darkness I stopped the sequence and used the NINA flat wizard (dynamic exposure) with the old PegasusAstro 120 flat panel at 100% brightness to create 25 flats and flat darks for a target of 33% ADU. After packing up and the with the pre-dawn temperature hitting 4℃ just before 4am I was looking forward to getting to bed.
At the next clear non-working evening I will attempt to grab some subs again but this time using the correct filter. Thank you to Dave and family for hosting me once more.
NB – NINA 3.1 was formally released the following day (09/06/2024) !
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.
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.
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.
Take a photo and Image Link it
Rotate the FoV Indicator to match the position angle and synch it
Unlink the image
Open the original M101 photo
Rotate the FoV Indicator to match the linked photo and tell the rotator to rotate
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
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.
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
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.
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.
Another go at Jupiter tonight. The jet stream from netweather.tv is out of the way. I got really good focus. I managed to use the atmospheric dispersion corrector and get good alignment of the channels. I then took a mixture of 90s and 120s movies. I stacked in Siril and process in PI all on the Mac. So seeing has been my real problem.
