Very Amateur Astronomy

Winter Galaxy Pairs

April 11th, 2012 | No Comments

Spring certainly seems to be on us here as of the last few days, and by that I mean it’s finally raining. However it does mean I am left reflecting on a rather unproductive start to the year with few updates to the site and few new images to show for my time. I did however try to make the best of a couple of reasonable nights, one from home and one out at the Basingstoke AS Messier marathon night. So here is what I got :

M81 and M82

44 x 300s

Bodes galaxy (m81, right) and the Cigar (m82, left) is a target I have imaged before way back in 2010 to reasonable effect given may limitations of equipment and knowledge. This is a bit of a different image though being as it was taken with my little William Optics ZS66SD. I like it though, the wide view sets them out amongst the stars and captures several other distant galaxies not normally seen in images of this pair. There is also a decent amount of detail to be seen within both objects, especially given the tiny scope this was captured with.

M95 with Supernova 2012AW and M96

48 x 300s

This was taken under rather murky seeing at the Basingstoke Astronomy Society’s annual Messier Marathon. Now generally we would have been celebrating at the though of a clear night however the seeing was actually pretty terrible and only got worse as the night wore on. heavy due led to many people giving up early. However as I had, for the first time, taken the time to pack my complete imaging setup including CGEM and 250mm reflector I had to have a go anyway. The result isn’t great to be honest which is a shame, processing this was a real chore.

However the aim of the image is there and marked, supernova 2012aw, the first time I have captured a picture of a supernova in progress, so for that at least I am thankful.

My aim now is to increase my productivity for the rest of the year, and see if I can spend more time on the planets.

The CGEM is Fixed!

February 6th, 2012 | No Comments

Fixed! All my thanks for this to Bob, my friend and colleague from Basingstoke AS for supplying his time, tools and expertise to the problem.

This turned out to a be a failed MOSFET on the MC Board (component marked Q2 – Fairchild FDS8449 MOSFET). A trip to a Bob’s, who had the knowledge and required tools to trouble shoot the components quickly identified the failure. Under the microscope the chip was obviously damaged, split slightly along one edge and showing some slight discoloration on two of the pins, not something you would have noticed looking at it unaided.

It was easily replaced, RS Electronics in the UK had the part for £5, and it all appears to be working OK now.

On replacement MC boards, finding one in the UK was proving to be extremely difficult, I did however track one down in Germany through Telescope Service for 129E. So if you are in Europe and find yourself in the same situation I’d suggest checking with them first.

I located one in the US as well at Woodland Hills but they wanted $434 plus shipping, which combined with import tax and duty comes to a quite stupid amount of money.

MY CGEM Has failed

January 20th, 2012 | No Comments

I was out having a mildly successful evening on Monday night, freezing cold but dark and clear, imaging the Witches Head nebula when all of a sudden my laptop reported a lost connection with the camera and the guiding failed as it lost contact with the mount. Not a good sign.

Out in the shed it quickly became clear that something had gone badly wrong, the regulated power supply which powers the mount, camera and dew heater was still up and running as was the dew heater, but the camera and mount were worryingly devoid of life. I turned everything off at power switches and mains then sequentially brought everything back on, checking first to make sure the PSU wasn’t outputting any weird voltage levels. Thankfully the camera came back up and shows no issues, the mount however remained dead.

Even more unfortunately it is now out of warranty so the simple task of returning it to a dealer is not an option, instead I have to figure out what has died and then source a repair or spare part. Initial investigations show that the motor control board which also contains the power switching components is the point of failure. If powered on while connected to the regulated PSU the output voltage of the PSU drops to around 2.5v, if connected to my leisure battery it instantly blows the mounts fuse.

So the plan of action here is as follows :

Ask a friend who knows about these things to take a look at the board, it may just be a failed component which can be replaced, probably one of the two Fairchild PowerTrench MOSFET chips.
If that doesn’t work find a UK or EU supplier who can source the board or..
Source the board from the US if that turns out to be cheaper (around £250 delivered plus the tax and duty .. ouch)
The last option is to find a local dealer or supplier who can carry out a repair, Celestron have linked me to hama who as it happens are right here in Basingstoke which would be handy.

So all very annoying and if the board cannot be repaired by my clever friend then likely to be all very expensive.

In the mean time I will need to move the Sphinx out of it’s between holiday downtime and get it mounted in the shed for widefield work. This will mean making an adapter to mount it on the pier, probably something out of plywood for the time being. I’ve also noticed that the slew rate on the Sphinx is extremely slow, so it may need a quick service to get it back into working order.

This may be the push I need to invest in the NexSXD mod for the Sphinx as well as I have a Nexstar handset from the CGEM. The Starbook is fun but it has never felt that competent compared to the Nexstar, plus it would allow for permanent PEC on the very excellent mechancals of the Sphinx which would be a definite advantage.

Heart Nebula – Reprocessing

December 23rd, 2011 | No Comments

That was quicker than expected, I normally leave it for a week or two before starting all over again but this data is actually alright and I wanted to spend more time playing with Normalization and DBE tools.

Anyway, some results, first an attempt to remove the stars as much as possible using star masks and the Morphological Transform tool.

That came out OK I think, though some colour fringing on stars is causing some weird artifacts, I need to spend some more time investigating how to do this.

The second edit is a standard edit just attempting to bring out more of the nebula and control the stars, it’s an improvement I think.

The Heart Nebula IC1805

December 22nd, 2011 | No Comments

This has been on my target list for quite a while now, and is a favorite imaging target along with it’s partner the Soul Nebula. I have picked up both previously in my widefield image of Cassiopeia and finally got round to doing the heart justice on a couple of evenings in between the clouds last week. Ideally I would like to do a multiframe mosaic with the 250mm reflector but given the lack of clear nights recently I figured I had best stick with a single shot from the ZS66SD for now instead.

46 x 300 seconds
35 x dark, bias, flat frames
Canon 1000d (Modified)
Astronomik CLS-CCD
William Optics ZS66SD

I will confess to being happy with this image though I still have a few issues which need resolving.

Even with the MkII flattener the field still isn’t very flat with bloated stars around the edges.
This is made worse by the poor focusser on the ZS66 allowing flop and flex on the draw tube so it’s not centrally aligned with the objectivelens.
The background due to light pollution and camera noise mostly is a mess. I need to investigate better ways of managing this with Pixinsight.

Fixing the first item requires either a better flattener or a better telescope entirely, both options I would rather avoid. However sorting out the focusser on the ZS66 would really help, however I have tried sorting it out before and never quite managed to get it much better than it currently is. The last issue needs to be managed by better work with the Background Normalization and DBE tools in Pixinsight, expect a reprocessed version at some point soon as I work that out.

Reprocessed Cave and Cocoon

December 14th, 2011 | No Comments

I’m pretty happy with these, I sat down last night intending to play Skyrim and instead and instead spent and hour or two playing around with the new MultiscaleMedianTransform and HDRMultiscaleTransform tools in Pixinsight. I based my approach off of the short tutorial on the Pixinsight forums.

First off the Cocoon.

I’m finally happy with this image, the dust clouds which have so long evaded me and now there and the dark nebula is really standing out.

I applied the same technique changes ot the Cave as well:

And again the improvement in clear to me, much more depth and contrast in the fainter areas. Now all I need is a clear night on a weekend without a bright moon so that maybe I can take something new!

Winter Update

December 7th, 2011 | No Comments

Right, time to get back on with this and catch up on the last three months of work, though the past six weeks have not seen anything new due to a leg injury which the GP diagnosed as a bad sprain, and the specialist (with the aid of an x-ray) diagnosed as a fractured fibula, but only after I had been walking around of it for nearly five weeks.

Anyway, lets see what I have been up to.

NGC7380 – The Wizard or Flying Horse Nebula

43×5 minutes (215 minutes total)
250mm F4.8 Reflector
Canon 1000D (Modified)

A challenging object from my light polluted garden and really it begs for a better camera to really get the most out of it. I’ve been playng with this image in Pixinsight using some new tools in an attempt to get more out of it so there may be another reprocessing post at some point.

Caldwell 9 – The Cave Nebula

50×6 minutes (300 minutes total)
250mm f4.8 Reflector
Canon 1000D (Modified)

This came out much better than expected, and is a great region for imaging. This is also the image which saw my long running guiding issues with the CGEM finally sorted, which basically meant ignoring every bit of advice on the Yahoo CGEM users group and doing exactly as the PHD instructions recommend. No backlash correction, only guide in one direction on DEC and use a well trained PEC curve.

NGC7129 & NGC7142

58×6 minutes (348 minutes total)
250mm f4.8 Reflector
Canon 1000D (Modified)

NGC7129 is the reflection nebula,NGC7142 is the open cluster on the right.

Ngc7129 doesn’t appear to have a special name of it’s own, though I’ve heard it described as looking like a rosebud, personally I see a light bulb, with the orange glow of the edge of the bubble inside the blue reflection region being the filament. Reflection nebula, especially ones this faint are a real pig for me to process, I really didn’t expect to much form this to be honest. Although it’s not spectacular I’m happy enough with the end result.

Jupiter

Click on the images to see the animation

I spent a night testing out the OpticStar PL-131C camera as a planetary and lunar camera. I have been using it for guiding since August and for that purpose it is at least reasonable, though the sensitivity is a bit low so it does force you to hunt around for good guide stars. However I had hopes that it would make for a decent planetary camera, or at least an improvement over the modified webcam.

This animation is made up of around one and a half hours of data, a mixed bag of frames depending on the seeing but a nice result.

The same data, keeping those image in which Io was visible.

This is one of the videos which make up a single frame of the animations, the seeing was pretty good that night, very stable. I do need to invest in a 5x Barlow at some point though.

The Moon

My last image is a six frame mosaic of the moon taken with the Pl-131c through my 250mm F4.8 reflector at prime focus. To see this in it’s full glory I’d suggest clicking here to view the full sized image.

So that’s it for the last few months, hopefully now my leg is improving I’ll be able to get back to it, though the first thing I need to be doing is rearranging the shed to move the desk area to the door end so I have space to work. I’ll be doing that this weekend

Not Forgotten

November 25th, 2011 | No Comments

I’ve not forgotten this, really! It’s just been a bit busy of late and the blog has been left on the wayside. I’ll update this weekend with all the recent images, there have been a few.

Reprocessing (I have nothing better to be doing)

September 22nd, 2011 | No Comments

The wife’s television schedule is causing more time hiding in the office than normal of late, and Fallout New Vegas can’t hold all of my attention, so instead I’ve been spending a bit of time browsing the Pixinsight forums looking into some alternative methods of imaging processing. Mainly of interest to me was the very excellent Masked Stretch script. I’m not the person to give a detailed description of how it works, but in a nut shell is performs a non-linear stretch of an image to reach a set median background level whilst controlling object growth, namely stars bloating.

I’ve also been refreshing my memory on the correct use of HDR Wavelet Transform, ACDNR, DBE for images without much background and Colour Calibration. Putting that all together I have taken a second look at three recent images to see what comes out of the other end.

The Elephant’s Trunk Nebula I think came out the best, showing cleaner detail, better colour and contrast and a more uniform background.

My Cygnus Core image also shows great improvement I think, though I may have let a small green tinge in whilst dialling back the red. However overall I think it’s a solid step forward.

The Cocoon nebula once again, this image has become the bain of my life and even though this is a major improvement it’s still not where I want it to be. Faint dust clouds seem to be a problem for either my location, equipment or processing skills, I’m just not sure which.

The Elephants Trunk Nebula

September 6th, 2011 | No Comments

A bit of sneaky in between the clouds work netted me a few hours over the weekend of reasonably clear viewing, and a good chance to test that everything was working after the trip down to France and back. As it turns out the only thing to have given up is the PC in the shed, which has had intermittent problems with video output for a while despite being tried on three separate video cards. A new motherboard may be in order there, or perhaps just an ST4 to USB converter so I can use my new laptop down there instead as it is much faster. For this weekend I dug out my old and somewhat unstable laptop as at least if has both serial and parallel ports and can talk to everything!

There is something to be said for makers of astronomy equipment taking up a method of connectivity which is actually to be found on modern computers. The inclusions of a standard ethernet port on the Vixen Sphinx is perfect. The iOptron IEQ45 mounts have USB connectivity as standard as well, so perhaps there is some movement towards this, a pity Celestron didn’t push further with the CGEM to make it stand out more from the EQ6 it is cloned from.

Anyway, hunting around for something to image I went back to my copy of The 100 Best Astrophotography Targets for inspiration and decided upon the Elephants Trunk nebula in the IC1396 region of Cepheus. I managed to grab a couple of hours on both nights, though some strong winds, annoying clouds and unwanted movement whilst imaging near the zenith caused a few lost frames.