Imaging in Wind

Winters in Ohio can be a bit breezy, although not so bad as some parts of the country especially out west on the prairies.  The past 2 nights we have seen 20 - 30 MPH wind, but the skies were clear for the most part.  Even with the wind, I had to try to image some things.  Only when the images were combined would I know not to try again under these conditions.

On 1/8/2013, I imaged a few objects using the Canon T3.  I havent used that camera in quite some time.  My hope is to send the camera in to have it modified for astro use.  I wanted to compare this camera to the 300D for resolution and overall quality.  I chose objects that are not rich with hydrogen alpha emission, so the targets were primarily star clusters and galaxies.

Here are a couple of images that I captured with the T3 (1100D)

I began with NGC 869 & NGC 884, the Double Cluster in Perseus.  This image contains a stack of 10 frames, 3 minutes each in duration at iso 800.  I noticed right away that there is a red shift in the center of the image.  I'm not certain that is a camera issue or if it has to do with local light pollution.  I do not believe I had my CLS filter installed for this image, but I did install it before shooting the next image...

M42 was then attempted.  This image gave me some insight as to the resolution that was possible with this camera.  The trapezium was better resolved using 5 second exposures for the core.  The stars do seem to be a bit bloated, although the focusing mask said my focus was spot on.  It was windy when this image was taken, so that could be why the stars were a bit "big".

My last image of the evening of 1/18 was this one of M105.  This is a cropped image showing the 3 galaxy cluster.

M105, according to Stellarium is the galaxy on the right.  Being these 3 galaxies are only a few arc minutes apart, I wonder if the 3 galaxies all belong to M105, as through an eyepiece I would think that they would appear as a fuzzy blob.  I did attempt to look through an eyepiece, but my ambient light was too bright and I didn't see the galaxies visually.
On the 19th, I imaged again.  I shot some videos of the moon and of Jupiter.  The Jupiter image did not come out too well, most likely because of seeing and the wind, which was even worse on the 19th than on the 18th.  Jupiter showed very little detail, the oval BA was visible as well as the prominent bands and zones, but with little detail in them.

The moon was also imaged, using the T3.  Clouds started blowing in, and the final video of the moon would not stack properly.

An hour or 2 later, the sky cleared, so I took the 300D out and imaged the galaxy NGC2903 in Leo.  I discovered a USB port problem in my imaging laptop, which lost connection halfway through my imaging sequence.  I only was able to obtain 5 frames out of 15 thaqt I had programmed, but still managed to come up with this image:

The stars are a little elongated most likely due to the wind.  The autoguider was going crazy, with tracking spikes that sometimes went off the graph.  The detail is still reasonable, especially with only 5 frames captured.

Messier Catalog Collection

Among the easier objects to photograph are the objects in the Messier catalog.  Although I have been imaging Messier objects all along, I've been pretty selective in the past as to which ones I wanted to image.  Up until a couple of nights ago, I've imaged 8 nebulae, 12 galaxies, 7 globular clusters and one open cluster.

As you can see, I was lacking open clusters.  It's too bad that I havent discovered open clusters until now.  Some of them are very nice imaging candidates.  I've also applied a little creative licensing and synthesized spikes on some of the star images, and  it seems it really makes a semi-dull starfield come alive.  Over the last 2 days, I imaged 9 open cluster Messier's and 2 more globular clusters.  I'll post the open clusters first:

M35

M36

M37

M38

M29

M34

M39

M52

M103

Then there are the 2 globular clusters, M2 and M15.

M2

M15

 

These objects were imaged with a bright gibbous moon high in the sky.  Being these are stars, the moon does not seem to affect them too much.  The globulars might be a different story, if one wants to get the faintest of stars near the outside of the glob, but the open clusters seem to fare pretty well.  This will show that these clusters would also be good targets for urban astronomers as well, being the light pollution should have little effect on the quality of these objects.

I have created a link to my catalog collection.  The link is at the top of the page, which will take you off-site to my album on a server operated by one of our local astronomy club members.

Messier 1, the Crab Nebula

My Second attempt at imaging the Crab Nebula was much more successful than the first.  This version consists of  20 5-minute subs at ISO-800.  I processed the 32 bit TIFF that Deep Sky Stacker autosaved.  This seemed to produce the best image.  It took several attempts to create this image, but once I discovered the 32 bit processing had a little more control over the beginning steps in the processing, I decided to use it for this image.

An excerpt describing the Crab from Wikipedia:

"The Crab Nebula (catalogue designations M1, NGC 1952, Taurus A) is a supernova remnant and pulsar wind nebula in the constellation of Taurus. The nebula was observed by John Bevis in 1731; it corresponds to a bright supernova recorded by Arab, Chinese and Japanese astronomers in 1054. At X-ray and gamma-ray energies above 30 keV, the Crab is generally the strongest persistent source in the sky, with measured flux extending to above 10¹² eV. Located at a distance of about 6,500 light-years (2 kpc) from Earth, the nebula has a diameter of 11 light years (3.4 pc) and expands at a rate of about 1,500 kilometers per second. It is part of the Perseus Arm of the Milky Way Galaxy."

"At the center of the nebula lies the Crab Pulsar, a neutron star (or spinning ball of neutrons), 28–30 km across,^[5] which emits pulses of radiation from gamma rays to radio waves with a spin rate of 30.2 times per second. The nebula was the first astronomical object identified with a historical supernova explosion."

I successfully imaged the Crab Nebula pulsar.  It is extremely faint, but according to what I've read, this next image points to it...

The pulsar is hard to see, but it is there in both images.  It is the extremely small star to the right and below a brighter star.
These images were taken with a 6" Newtonian Reflector and a Canon 300D DSLR.

Rosette Nebula (Caldwell 49)

After imaging Jupiter on 11/21, I waited until around midnight to start imaging the Rosette.  This is one object that I imaged back in January when I first got my T3.  I didnt have the C6 yet, nor did I have the 300D.  This time, I imaged it with a modified camera at f/5.  The autoguider was a little unstable, and that might have been because my polar alignment might not have been perfect.  I had plenty of stars in the field.  It tracked good enough, however to do a set of 5 minute exposures at iso-800.

One thing that I've not done yet is post a single frame as taken from the camera.  This picture was converted to jpg from the raw.  I stacked 20 frames that look identical to this one to create the finished image.  I figured it would be interesting to see what a single unprocessed frame looked like in comparison to the finished product.

Here is the raw frame.

Can you see the Rosette in this image?  Its there, but it is really faint.  This is what I had to work with starting out.

Now, after stacking 20 frames, using a set of flats, darks and bias frames, and some heavy duty histogram stretching and some color balancing, this is what I finally ended up with.

Pretty crazy, huh.  As you can see, there is very little noise in this image, even in the dim areas.  There was a small amount of noise in the stack, but the software can get rid of small amounts of noise.  A single frame wouldnt have been near this detailed and smooth.

Jupiter

Worked on the collimation again, I was not happy with my planetary images.  I found the secondary inward too far, which I remedied.  Star testing using a 9mm eyepiece with a 3X barlow showed near perfect alignment, so I ran a couple of avi's of Jupiter.  These are a few of what I got.

 

 Notice on the last image, the moon, Ganymede, and the dark area going from the top right, down to about the center of the moon.  Yes, its pretty small, but it is definitely there.  This is the first time I've ever had the resolution to capture detail on one of the moons.

Equipment used:  C6NGT (6", f/5), cascaded, Celestron 2X barlow, then a Meade 3X barlow feeding into the QC Pro 4000.

Stacked in Registax, wavelet sharpened, increased color saturation, adjusted brightness and contrast.

Orion Awesome Autoguider First Light

Received my Orion Awesome Autoguider a week ago, but last night was the first clear night to try it out.  I must say, the name lives up to its performance.  Although the mini guider probably would have been adequate for my small setup, for the small amount more money, I figured I would just get the full size scope, in case I would ever upgrade the imaging scope.

My first image taken using the guide scope was of M33.  The guider was able to lock on some pretty dim stars, I believe to be dimmer than 7th magnitude.I had 3 to pick from in the field of the guide scope.  I did not have to re-aim the guidescope whatsoever, on 4 different objects. 

This is an image of the complete setup in operation.  As you can see, the wiring setup has doubled, but the guidescope is permanently connected to the main scope, so the scope assembly is torn down and set up as one piece.  The only additional steps I have to do is hook up the usb to the camera and the cable going to the guide port on the mount.

Now for a couple images taken with the guidescope and 5 minute exposures.  The first thing I learned after the imaging session was over was that 5 minutes at iso 1600 was too much for the brightness of my sky.  The next set of images that I take will be at iso 800, but of the same duration, hopefully that will bring the background brightness down enough for the stacker to handle the images better.  Using some careful processing, and by also using a bicubic stacking method in deep sky stacker, I was able to generate this quite acceptable version of M33.

I'm not sure if this is my best yet image of this object, but it's got to be close.  I was able to resolve the major emission nebulosity in the galaxy.  This image consists of 19 frames.

The next object I chose to photograph was M77 in Cetus.  This is a composite of only 4 frames.

M77 is in the center. the galaxy at the top is NGC 1055.  NGC 1072 is also in the frame, but it is too small to resolve.  M77 is 7 arc seconds across.  M77 has a really bright core, but if you look closely there is darker nebulosity around the core.  The stars near this object are dim, and are tiny pinpoints which is showing that the guiding worked very nicely.

The next object I imaged was the Pacman Nebula, but I only shot 3 frames.  It does not measure up to the last Pacman I took, but it is an acceptable image.

I believe if I had taken 10 - 15 frames of this, it would have been a VERY good image.

The final image I took was of the Crab Nebula, M1.  This would have been a good image, but somehow, the camera focus got disturbed.  I must have bumped the focuser or something like that.  I was able to enhance it and I got some detail, but it could have been better.

The 2 bright stars in this image, especially the red one above and to the left has a tiny dark hole in the center, indicating the focus was out a bit.  This object might have been better had that star had been a pinpoint.

All of these images were shot using 5 minute subs.  I believe this guider will let me get much more detailed images, and will really shine the next time I get to darker sites.