After a long day of building the new astronomy building with a few friends, I opened the dome on this clear night and start off by imaging SH2 132 until midnight for which I grabbed 18 x 600s Ha images at Gain 139 Offset 21 and temp of -25℃. I then switched to SH2 183 and went to bed.
All Sky Camera
On waking this morning I realised I got 22 x 600s Ha images at Gain 139 Offset 21 and temp -25℃ before the clouds rolled in ands the dome shut around 4am. The seeing was particularly good as can be seen from the satellite image from skippy sky.com
Grafana dashboard was not reporting anything from AAG, this turned out to be a bug in the code from Gingergeek which he will fix. First image from the camera came out blank from SGPro, restarted a new image and problem went away. Started imaging SH2 132 but clouds rolled in.
With a near on full Moon, the choices for deep sky were limited so I set about looking for Sharpless emission nebula. First on my list was SH2 136 in Cepheus. I slewed, aligned, selected the Ha filter, rotated the camera to find a guide star, tried to run autofocus which failed (I set the focus point to 18500 for Ha manually) and then imaged a few subs at 600s, which is when I realised the problem.
FoV from TSX for SH2 136
Nothing but stars….. I googled around and it transpires that some fo the Sharpless catalogue is emission and the rest is reflection! Now I know this useful fact I will double check each image I go after.
SH2 136 Emission nebula in Cepheus 300s Luminance
Before I moved on I took a single 300s luminance frame just to see if I could see anything at all. The answer was not a lot, so I moved on. This time I choose an emission nebula, much larger than my FoV but still it should be a pleasing object, SH2 132, an emission nebula also in Cepheus.
SH2 132 Emission nebula in Cepheus 600s Ha
I set about imaging 14 x 600s in Ha and then went to bed at 23:48 leaving the system running for another 2 hours before hitting the meridian, as I have not setup the scope to flip yet.
It’s been a while again due to work and the weather. A quick look around the sky this evening and make sure I still know how too use the telescope. So after getting focus
Focus achieved at 17,000 (18,000 here was incorrect)
I slewed to Saturn as it was up and as expected it was very small.
Small Saturn
I then slewed to the Pacman nebula, NGC 284 also known as Sharpless SH2-128. I switched to narrow band and the Ha filter. I plate solved, centred
Solved
and then proceeded to take 300s shots.
NGC 284
The camera was called to -15℃, the outside temp was 16.2℃. The focus position was at 18,000. The camera itself was set to Gain 139 and Offset 10, the rotator at 345.560°.
TSX
I took 75 x 300s images until I closed the dome, by which time it was very light. I went to bed in-between the start and end of the imaging run, but then realised the dome safety does not work due to the cable from the ASC being severed due to a Stanley blade incident with weed matting.
The good thing is GingerGeek and I managed to focus the ASC during the day on some trees in the forest across the valley and we managed to get it in focus.
Focused ASC
I will process the data last some point and see what it looks like.
