I started off with M46 open cluster tonight which has a planetary nebula, NGC 2438 within it. The waning Moon rose at 22:17, 88% illuminated and then started to affect my viewing, however I persisted.
M46 Open Cluster 2 Hours
Next I slewed to NGC 2403, a lovely spiral galaxy in Camelopardalis and let that run for 2 hours whilst I slept.
NGC 2403 1 x 300s
I also set the scope to then automatically slew to M66 and the Trio in Leo. However I woke around 3am and noticed that the sky was very bright with the Moon and there was some cloud around. I turned off the scope and went back to bed. None of the data for NGC 2403 and M66 was usable.
M66, NGC 3628 1 x 300s
I did take 300s darks for the previous night at -15℃ and some Flats.
I have decided tonight to start to retake the 6 objects from the previous two nights. The Moon definitely had a massive effect and so did the cloud. I want to see what it’s like imaging without the Moon and clear skies. The Moon comes up at 11:16pm so I will image from when it is dark until then.
I have had a few intermittent problems with focusing over the last few nights. I have now realised it is worse when their scope is pointing directly up so the ratchet focuser must be slipping. I have taken it to pieces this evening and then reattached the EAF ZWO electronic focuser and bracket. It now seems to be working fine. Due to this issue I lost the first 90 mins of imaging this evening. It’s now 9:30pm and I’m back up and running, but will need to delete the first 7 or so images from this evening that are out of focus.
I started with M38 the open cluster in Auriga and managed to capture around 1 hours worth of 120s subs.
120s M38
It’s worth noting that there is a large black circle on the flats, I thought this was due to a smudge on the filter, however I have now cleaned that and it is still there. Therefore it must be on the corrector plate so I will look tomorrow.
Also I had some problems tonight with the guiding suddenly jumping. I put this down to the stretchy USB cable running to the mount getting caught, however on changing how it was connected I still had the issue so I need to further investigate. I will change the cable tomorrow to using WiFi which I have just found out I can do.
I took flats and darks.
By way of an update, it transpired that some of my problem with the guiding jumping was the 4s exposure I was using, reducing this to 0.5s-1.0s resolved the problem in the main. The only time I saw this again was then when the scope was pointing low to the North Western horizon possibly being effected by the street lights.
Following on from last nights cloudy weather, I have setup again tonight, and it is looking clear. I am imaging M38 again, I will use 120s subs and take the appropriate Flats at the shorter exposure as with the Triband filter it suggested 750ms on Auto however these are far to bright so I will reduce back to 500ms.
After 3 hours I had not only gathered much better data for M38, but also the clouds once again on this mountain had formed. I waited until 1:20am and then packed up as it was not clearing.
Setup in the light polluted Adeje town north of the TF1. We are staying in a 3 story townhouse and I am imaging from the 2nd floor terrace.
New Camera
I have brought with me for the first time the ZWO ASI2600MC AIR and I am imaging with that using the small 220 built in guide chip for guiding and imaging through the Esprit 100 whilst trying to cut down the light pollution using the Antlia Triband RGB filter.
Light polluted Adeje
Focusing on completing my Messier collection, given the full moon, I am imaging M38 an open cluster. Taking 60s exposures to try and keep the chance of over exposing the stars, I am also West of the Meridian and at a starting imaging altitude of 55 degrees thus limiting the ingress of light into the telescope.
M38 Stacked and Annotated 101 x 60s
After 2 hours I moved on to M48 another open cluster. Again it was reasonably high at 42 degrees to allow for 2 hours of imaging before I hit the lights of the buildings. Imaging overhead is clearly what is needed after looking at the last few images of M38.
M48 Stacked and Annotated 102 x 60s
Another 2 hours completed and I then had a hard choice of what to image past the meridian, away from the Moon but before the lights of the buildings. I landed up targeting M109 to the left, along with NGC 3953 to the right of centre and NGC 391 to the far right. One of the stars making up the constellation of Ursa Major, 64 Gamma Uma can be seen. I went back to sleep and woke up around 7am to shut down the imaging run. A good first night.
By the time I had eaten and unpacked and built the telescopes on the mount it was 11:30pm, it then took another 30mins to decide where image from as Polaris was round the front of the property so not visible from the patio. it the. took me another 1.5 hours to sort out and calibrate the scopes and setup an image run on IC434. I had a problem with the focal length of the SharpStar 61 which turned out to be 275mm and then plate solving worked. I finally at 1:30am set about imaging and 30mins later Orion crossed the meridian. It then started imaging again.
The temperature tonight was around 6℃. I went to sleep at 3:30am and left it running but it lost connection to the mount and did not send guiding information to it so all my images from that point were no good. I will try again tonight on the same object.
My second night at the villa with the family. I’ve taken my Sharpstar 61 refractor with me this time with an effective focal length of 272mm. I normally use this a my guider for the Esprit 100 or 120. And I’ve placed it on the AM5 and have attached the trusty 50mm Skywatcher guide scope to it.
Ready to image
Luke has helped me setup this evening after managing to have an accident yesterday which caused me to have butterfly stitches to my shin 🤦♂️
So after about an hour of setting up, finding focus, working out the focal length and polar aligning we have set off to test the first image from this little setup. The FoV is 4.94 x 3.30 degrees.
Plate solve of the first image
NGC 7000 the North American Nebula that is almost overhead, thus removing problems with the pool lights that I have not yet worked out how to turn off.
We are taking 12 x 5mins with the ZWO ASI2600MC colour camera, cooled to -10℃ as the temperature outside is a balmy 21℃.
Single 5min exposure
Once done I will call it a night as I really need to turn off those pool lights.
Well after a great day out visiting amongst other telescopes the MONS where we have observed before, I setup and waiting for the last night to become dark. The night was truly stunning at 0.7’ seeing, warm and calm. Low humidity was effecting us, else all the other elements were playing ball. I setup and captured the Moon
Moon
before heading over to Comet Olbers first.
Comet Olbers
After this I set a run on the Dragons again so to add to my data from the other night.
NGC 6188 Dragons
Once this was set and the rest of the plan was in place I headed off to bed at 1am and left the setup capturing some additional data on both M30
M30 Globular Cluster
and M11.
M11 Globular Cluster
I then went on to image M54 which is really small at 1.6 arc minutes.
M54 Globular Cluster
Lastly I grabbed some data on M14 which is a slightly larger globular cluster at 2.6 arc minutes.
M14 Globular Cluster
In the morning I reviewed the data and unfortunately due to the altitude of some of the objects I did have to reject quite a few frames, however I did capture enough to create a decent image.
Very windy night with 1.6’ seeing! I started with NGC 5982 Draco triplet but the wind was too high at 48.25 km/s! Trailing stars everywhere and guiding was useless at 36”!! So paused imaging until the wind dropped slightly. I continued to monitor the situation from the Teide Observatory Grafana dashboard page here;
Back up in my room I can hear the wind whistling past my window. After another hour the conditions were no better so I set the mount to run all night across 3 objects and went to bed crossing my fingers the ASIAIR and AM5 mount behaved well.
I was then delighted by sunrise that I had captured some useful data, not as much as I had hoped but good news enough. I had captured ok data for M11 of 12 x 300s subs.
M11 single 5 min sub
I also grabbed 19 semi successful images of M22,
M22 single 5 min sub
and lastly only 8 not great frame of M30 at the beginning of the night which quite frankly need to be taken again.
Tonight started with 0.7’ seeing. I was going to start imaging on the Dragons of Ara, however when I slewed I realised it was behind the mountain to the South. So instead I moved slightly up to M19 to finish my run on that glob from yesterday for around an hour in the hope the Dragons would clear the mountain by then and still be West of the Meridian.
M19 single 5 min sub
So by 11:30pm the 🐉 nebula had cleared the mountain and so I started imaging it at some 10 degrees altitude. I was not going to bother capturing more data on other nights as it is very low and the stars are bloated to about 6 pixels rather than 3 pixels. That said, once stacked and Blur Exterminator process was run it was very pleasing. So I may try to capture some more data.
NGC 6188 Dragons of Art – 5 min sub
After 2 hours it was a mere 5 degrees above the horizon and the star size had increased from 3.32 pixels to 6.01 pixels so I decided to call it a day and move to the globular cluster M28 at the top of the lid of the teapot.🫖
M28 single 5 min sub
After that I went on to grab 10 frames of the glob M30 before twilight.
A beautiful night with 0.8’ seeing. Started with a set of globs, namely more data for M62,
M62 single 5 min sub
a new globular cluster M80
M80 single 5 min sub
and globular cluster M19,
M19 single 5 min sub
then finally the Crescent nebula which I managed to grab just shy of 3 hours on. I ran all the way to twilight at around 6am and then packed up for bed by 7am.
Very calm night 0.7’ seeing and at the start little to no wind. The temperature was around 16-17℃ all night.
Started with Markarian’s chain again to gather better data than yesterday’s. Captured 15 x 300s tonight. I’ll do another final set tomorrow.
At 23:45 I moved on to M4 a globular cluster in Scorpius. I will continue with this again tomorrow night as I landed up with about 1.5 hours of usable data.
M4 Globular Cluster – stacked only
At around 2am I moved to M55 as M4 had got fairly low in the sky so I will come back to that tomorrow night. I did find there was too much time spent refocusing so I have now changed this to only as the temperature changes and at the start of a new image rather than every 30mins as well.
M55 Globular Cluster – Stacked only
I captured 3 hours on this lovely globular cluster.
Beautiful night slightly windy 0.9’ seeing at first but then changed dramatically later to around 2.2’
Markarian’s Chain suffered from many satellite trails, more so early on.
View from the iPad
12 x 300s so 1 hour of Markarian’s chain
By the time I started to image M39 the wind had started to pick up and I found even guiding at 60s was causing star trails.
M39 single 5 mins sub
So about 3am I started taking darks and then by 4:15am the seeing which was really the problem had settled down from 2.2 arc secs to 0.9! I went back and took 30 x 60s subs for M55 and then another 30 x 60s for M39 before heading off to bed.
This evening started with the Moon high in the sky and waxing its way to half. Next to it Saturn sat, close in fact, so close I pointed the scope at it, around 22:30 and both the Moon and Saturn fit in the same field of view 🙂
So I took a few exposures, worried that either the Moon would be overexposed or Saturn underexposed. I settled on 0.001s and took a bunch of shots. Below is my setup by the light of my rather bright head torch, turned on only for this photo I might add.
Esprit 120 and MyT
Next it was back to trying to resolve the guiding issues that had troubled me the night before. The good news was Tom from the Software Bisque website (not the Tom Bisque, another Tom) had come back with a few suggestions and questions that made me think. I had a good set of guide stars to choose from.
Hw many guide stars!
The autoguide Setup window is where I would spend most of my time I was sure, changing parameters.
Guider settings
I recalibrated the mount, this time using 100arcsec as the parameter. The previous calibration run produced a rather short cross.
Poor calibration ?
This gave me a better ‘cross’ and I think should improve the guiding, although I am still skeptical about just how quick it calibrates, some 4-5 seconds.
Better calibration
Back to guiding the mount was still all over the place, I am convinced it is overcorrecting, on the basis if I don’t guide I get better stars up to 45s or so. I added in a much longer settle period and this seemed to help, but still the graph is a long way from the sort of guiding I was getting before they updated the software.
Poor guiding
The wind was a bit gusty tonight as last night and for sure this was not helping, you can tell from a few exposures it was wind related jumps and drifting
I sat back after a while of changing different settings feeling that it was not improving, so I took a whole bunch of images, only 90s of the Sharpless object Trevor had mentioned, SH2-101 which is called the Tulip nebula. Trevor had produced a lovely image from his 14″ in the UK so I thought I would have a quick go, knowing most of the frames would be lost.
Final set of guider settings
So by 00:30 I decided to start to pack up, the wind had picked up, I was cold, the guiding was still a problem, so by just gone 1am I was heading down the mountain, some 1 hour and 20min drive! The final view from the bridge as it were was this.
View from TSX
The next day I processed the data for the Sharpless object and it was ok, given the short amount of data. One for the 12″ I think.
SH2-101 Tulip Nebula
Meanwhile I processed a single image of the Moon and Saturn and was pleased with the result as seen above. Here is a version with Saturn as an insert.
So I have arrived in Tenerife and for a few nights only I am up at the MONS observatory, using the plateau (concrete platform with power) outside the dome.
It was dark when I arrived at 20:15 so I am setting up by head torch and given the tripod and mount and scope are all in bits it has taken some time to put it back together.
I setup in the corner where Bob normally sits as thee were a bunch of students using the scopes normally kept in the sheds outside. After setting up I panicked as I had forgot my UK to EU plug ! I asked the lady leading the student outreach and she let me in the MONS and I searched for a plug and found one, despite everything being emptied out due to the MONS having work done to it. However on testing the plug it did not work 🙁
A call to the operator did not produced anything. So I tore down the scope and packed in the car, very disheartened. As I was just about to head off the operator arrived with another plug ! I took my laptop and tried it, but it did not work either. It took a while to work out but of course the power had been turned off from the fuse box and flicking the RCD produced power and so reluctantly I emptied the car and went about setting back up 🙁
By this time it was approaching midnight and I had been at this for some 4 hours. I started the laptop, found I was pointing almost spot on to Polaris, so using my Polemaster it took a few minutes to adjust. I then set about slewing to a nearby object, syncing and then finding a guide star, at this point my troubles where just about to begin. It was now 1am.
So after setting the temperature of the camera to -25℃ and the gain to 7 and offset to 20 I found the scope would not guide. It was bouncing all over the place, some of it was the wind, but some of it was erratic behaviour of the mount, so it seemed like it was overcorrecting. I started to change some of the settings but t no avail. All I could do was to shortened the exposure to around 90 seconds and try and get some data, even if the stars were slightly trailed. I would try to take a longer look at the guiding tomorrow night.
Not so great guiding
So I slewed to one of the objects I was to target, a galaxy called NGC 891 in Andromeda and started collecting data. All in all I grabbed 44 images before the guider was causing so much of an issue even 90 seconds was too long (processed image below)
I then slewed to M45 in Taurus but still the guiding problems persisted. I took 4 x 90 second images and then decided to call it a night at around 3:30am.
Now for packing up the scope and the 1 hour 20 minute drive back down the mountain. How I miss observing from Hacienda on La Palma!
