Orion Nebula

Although this object has been imaged by just about every astro photographer, I thought this particular image of M42 is one of my best to date.

Comet Lovejoy, C/2014 Q2 1/13/15

I am sooo far behind in posting to the blog. I've been posting to Facebook, but I really should update this site. I'll go ahead and try to catch up on the 2 years since I've posted.

I've been somewhat active in imaging the sky, and my images have been improving over time. I'm learning how to get better images from my own driveway which rival what I've done at Cherry Springs in the past. The first image I'm going to talk about briefly is this image I took on 1/13/2015. I dont image comets very often, but Comet Lovejoy was in the perfect location, almost at zenith when this was taken. The image was taken with a 6", f/5 Newtonian from my driveway in New Middletown, OH.

Comet Lovejoy is a long period comet, originating in the Oort Cloud.  It has a period of about 8000 years.

The blue-green color of the comet and tail is caused by water and organic molecules fluorescing under the ultraviolet light from the sun.  It peaked at about 4th magnitude about the time this image was taken.

September, 2014 Images

Its been a long time, but now that the nights are getting longer and getting dark earlier, I now have the time to image the sky.  On 9/5 I did a composite of the moon using 15 individual videos and stitched the segments together to get an image of the entire visible moon.

 Then took a few closeups... Crater Copernicus.

Schiller to Clavius 

Tycho

The Iris Nebula (NGC 2023) was imaged on 9/13.  Here is a full frame and a cropped closeup.

9/16.  Albiero, probably the prettiest double in the northern hemisphere....

NGC 6946, the Fireworks Galaxy.  This one is always a difficult one for me due to light pollution.

On 9/23, I got the CCD out and imaged  the Deer Lick Galaxy Group in LRGB.

9/24 it was the Cocoon Nebula's turn, but this one was shot using the Hα filter.

Then on 9/29, I imaged NGC 6939 and M15.   I also imaged the Fireworks Galaxy again, but the transparency wasnt as good as earlier in the month, so I wont duplicate it here.

and finally, M15.

IC443, The Jellyfish Nebula

I really didnt think I would be able to capture this.  By all accounts that I've seen online, this is an extremely dim object.  Although I didnt capture the entire nebula, I got a fair amount of it.

The skies have been cloudy, or the temperature has been way below normal this winter, I have been unable to image as much as I'd liked.  Because of that, I think I'm getting rusty.  Although this is a good image, I shot about a dozen frames to get 4 good ones.  I had a number of problems imaging this.  The scope was unbalanced, because the little refractor is so light weight that the tripod counterweights were too heavy to balance.  When I imaged with the object ascending the meridian, everything was fine, but when it was descending, the stars streaked.  Polar alignment was pretty good that night.  I was able to capture only 2 frames with the scope ascending before I had to do a meridian flip.  I did manage 2 decent descending frames out of 10.

This image was the raw monochrome, stacked and enhanced in Photoshop.

Here is the same image using Noel Carboni's  'B&W -> Ha False Color Black Space' tool in his toolkit.

I went back and reprocessed this with some dark frames.  Seems the darks increase the noise.  The only reason I used them was to eliminate the hot pixels.  I seem to like this image better than the above.

Imaging With a Guidescope

Anyone else except me have this genius idea to image using your guidescope ?  Well, I can tell you that if you use narrowband filters, it does work.  The only problem is... that if you want to guide, you need another guidescope, unless you have an off axis guider.  Therefore, I bought a very inexpensive 50mm guide scope from Orion.  Actually, the FOV of the little scope is pretty wide, and its brighter than the original 80mm Awesome Autoguider scope.  I found literally dozens of stars that were in perfect focus and plenty bright enough to guide on.  And the accuracy was just fine for the 400mm focal length imaging scope.  I'll let you know how it works with a longer focal length.

Now I'm using the old guide scope as an imaging scope.  It is not color corrected - its a simple doublet, and very inexpensive.  I think the price of the 80mm is something like $150, which does not buy a whole lot of refractor.  However, I was looking for a way to increase my FOV with the CCD, and it seemed like a logical choice.

Because it is not color corrected, I dont recommend any sort of wideband or one shot color imaging with one of these.  However, narrowband is a whole nother story.  Stars are pretty small in narrowband, because there is no color fringing on specific wavelength lines.

There is one quirk when imaging with this scope.  The FWHM readout during focusing is actually pretty worthless in obtaining focus.  I had to focus the scope for the roundest possible stars.    If I didnt focus that way, the stars sport a tail, all pointing in one direction.  It looks like a guiding error, but is, in fact an aberration in the low cost optics.  This occurred with MY telescope, yours may act differently.  This first image has oblong stars - caused by the way I focused.

Here you can see the stars are oblong.  It does look like a tracking error, however the next image is even farther South, and therefore farther from the NCP which would cause the stars to streak even more, however I made no changes to the polar alignment or guiding parameters.  In fact, I imaged longer frames - 15 minutes over the 10 minutes I imaged the above image.

In this image, the stars are nice and round.  I purposely focused on Alnitak, attempting to get it as round as possible, even if it resulted in a larger, degraded FWHM reading.  The FWHM actually wasnt BAD in this image, averaging around 1.75.  Best of all however, the stars are nice and round without the trails.  Could the focus be better?  I dont know - the nebulosity seems a little soft focus to me, but it is a pleasing image with the round stars.  But the point is...  I'm imaging using a VERY low cost scope.  Are the optics perfect?  Not by a long shot, but it still takes decent pictures.

3 Days of Imaging

Actually had a little bit of scope time the past few days.  The sky was clear and the seeing was excellent on 12/25.  I had the 8" out and imaged Jupiter.  Finally I got the red spot.  Its a lot darker this tear.

When I was focusing, I used one of Jupiter's moons, and noticed a good deal of coma, but it was too cold and didnt have the ambition to collimate.  I shot video anyway.  Still got some good pictures.  This was the first image, shot an hour or 2 before the GRS started rising.

This next image was shot after the red spot came into view.  I used the mjpg codec in the camera.  I wanted to see if I could detect any sort of visual difference between mjpg and IVUV.  There is a minor improvement with ivuv as you will see.  This is the mjpg image:

And this next image is the ivuv image.  It seems to be a little cleaner and the contrast seems a little better with a tiny amount more detail present.

 Not too shabby for a scope slightly out of alignment!


Now for some narrowband deep sky stuff.

These are from 12/26.  I did something a little different.  I used the guidescope as the imaging scope, plus I used the focal reducer, which I dont think does much good widening the field.  It also introduces coma.  You'll see it in some of the brighter stars.

I never was able to image the Heart & Soul Nebula.  I couldnt fit it in the FOV of the main scope even when using the dslr.  Interesting that I was able to do something with the CCD and guidescope.  The Soul Nebula was shot first, and was able to fit the entire nebula in one frame.  These images were shot in Hα only.  First the Soul Nebula:

 You can see the fan shaped brighter stars in this image.  This is being caused in the reducer.

Next is a 2 panel mosaic of the Heart.  Its a bit bigger than the Soul.

If I get the chance to image this again, I will try doing it without the reducer.

Then, on 12/27 I had the scope out for a nicely clear sky.  However, the seeing was pretty bad.  I did attempt to shoot Jupiter, but it was really very bad.  After seeing this, I came in for a couple hours to wait for Orion to rise high enough to try to get the core of M42.

I was using the 8 inch, unguided.  I shot some 30 second exposures in Hα which came out quite bright.  Here is a nice closeup in Hα:

I shot a series of 10 second exposures  after shooting the above image because about half of the 30 sec frames were bad due to periodic error and slight wind.

The 10 sec exposures were almost as good as the 30 sec exposures, so I shot 30 - 10 sec in Hα.  I shot in all 3 narrowband wavelengths.  10 sec in Hα, 10 sec in Oiii and 15 sec in Sii, 30 frames each.

For some reason, my Sii frames I had a lot of bad ones, so I only had  about 15 or so useable frames.

First I will share my Hα and Oiii 2 color image.  Hα is red, Oiii to green and blue...

I really like the look of these 2 color images over RGB sometimes, and this is one of those times.

I also did a Hubble palette in which I mapped the Sii to red, Hα to green and Oiii to blue.  Interesting as to the dispersal of the different elements.  Seems as tho all 3 are present in the core but look what happens as you move away from the core.

Lots of oxygen below the core, hydrogen and some sulfur especially to the left.  I'm going to have to do a full frame Hubble palette image of the entire nebula sometime!