Bad Vibrations

Spent the night at SLKP (Secret Location- Kitt Peak) intending to image IC 4592 - "the Blue Horsehead" nebula in Scorpio with the 300mm and the 85mm lenses. When I arrived about 18:00 local - it was windy. Steady winds of 8 mph with gusts up to 25 mph swept the site from the east and south - though I believe this was a local phenomenon due to the high terrain all around. There seemed to be a degradation in sky transparency too - possibly from the dust kicked up by the winds and from smoke from the brush fires to the south and east of the site.

I considered bailing, but the engineer in me wanted to see how the mount would perform in the wind and how the cameras would perform at the increased ambient temperature (@ 67 degrees F). DSLR's are not cooled like CCD cameras designed for astrophotography and suffer from increased thermal induced noise as the ambient temperature increases. DSLR astrophotography in the summer in the desert southwest is hence extremely challenging.

I set up the mount and cameras and waited for twilight to deepen enough for sky flats - in the mean time I was treated to a beautiful moonset behind a nearby western hill.



After taking flats and darks I aligned the cameras on the region of scorpius with IC 4592. the autoguider was calibrated and I left the equipment to do the best it could in the poor conditions. All told I lost about 30 minutes worth of images from the 4 hour sequence due to wind vibrating the astrophotography setup. Below are the results - first the 300mm view of the "Blue Horsehead".



Second - the "widefield" view of the same region showing both IC4592 and the Rho Oph region.



Lastly, I stuck the fisheye on one of the cameras and acquired 55 minutes of data on the Milky Way.



Click on the images for a larger view.

Imaging in the weeds

As planned - I spent last night at the "secret location" intending on doing some long exposure astrophotography. All was well - the sky was clear, the equipment worked well, but the wind was an issue. Gusts up to 25 miles per hour ruined about 1.2 hours worth of exposures out of the 6.5 attempted.

My first target was Omega Centauri (NGC 5139) - a BIG beautiful globular Cluster. A challenge from my latitude as it never gets higher than 10 degrees off the horizon. I managed to get 2.1 hours of data on the bugger though.

Lastly, M20 and M8 - both in the field of the Takahshi E160 and the 5DII camera body but also never very high off the horizon. I was not happy with the results from my "one-shot" color system. The IR blocking filter and the bayer mask made the H2 regions look very blue and washed out. Sigh, I guess its time to consider something with a little more efficiency and red sensitivity.

Below are images of the observing site and my equipment as well as the final products for the evenings effort. Click on the images for a larger view.

An all nighter

For several weeks now I've been Jonesing to take my portable astrophotography system out and send some "quality time" with one of my favorite astrophotography subjects - the Rho Ophiuchi region of the Milky Way. I had to wait for the moon to wan enough to get dark skies, the weather to be clear and the winds to be mild to get the images I wanted.

The weather forecast for this weekend looked promising except for the winds. A Red Flag warning was out for Friday and Saturday with gusts expected to be 40 mph - not a good prospect for my little Takahashi mount. Thursday night looked like the best option - so I packed up the van and headed to Kitt Peak.

My target wasn't available above the horizon until after midnight so I spent the early hours of the evening taking calibration data for the later targets. Flats, and Darks were finished by 20:30 and so I decided to spend the remaining three hours until "Rho rise" getting a deep image of the Virgo cluster of galaxies centered around M87. The mount held my two Canon 5D Mark II DSLRs one with a 300mm F/2.8 L and the other used a 400mm F/2.8 L lens. Working at ISO 800 and at F/4.0, I made 36 five minute subexposures of the field - below is the result - a 3 hour exposure of the region around M87.



At 00:30 I started a 4 hour sequence on Rho Oph with both cameras. By 4:30 the sequences were finshed and I packed up for home - arriving shortly after sunrise. My first "all nighter" with my little portable system. Click on the images for a larger view.

M51 from the backyard

Well it finally cleared up tonight so I could test my 6" refractor and autoguider. It was a little brezzy but it didn't seem to affect the setup. I used ISO 800 and the telescope at F/9 for an effective focal length of about 1370mm. 8 ten minute exposures combined to produce the image below - taken through a LPR filter of course (my backyard is VERY light poluted). Click on the images for a larger view.



Below is a crop at 100% . . .

Long Glass

Well - finally got all the stuff I needed to test the 6" refractor's suitability to astrophotgraphy. I ran a couple of preliminary tests on M3 last night - five ten minute long exposures at 1370mm using a newly acquired Lodestar autoguider. Results were extremely promising. Stay tuned.

Orion's Belt

For a long time now I've wanted to do long exposure astrophotography in the field. To do this properly I needed to have my Takahashi EM-200 mount, my DSLR, my autoguider camera and my laptop all working simultaneously - for hours at a time. The quickest solution (for me) was to get a portable generator to power the whole lot. Last week I finally broke down and bought a Honda EU2000i. Great little generator, very quiet, efficent and puts out 1600W of power - far more than I needed for my current setup but there's room for expansion.

So - after work on Kitt peak last night I finally got to try out the new setup at the 6000 foot pull-off of the mountain road. Though there was a 25% waxing cresent moon nearby I attempted a 150 minute exposure of Orion's belt using a 300mm lens @ F/4. A standard Canon EOS 5D Mark II was used at ISO 800. Thirty - 5 minute exposures were combined using ImagePlus and PSCS5.

The three bright stars running diagonally across the field are the three belt stars of the constellation Orion. IC 434 (the horsehead nebula) along with NGC 2024 (the flame nebula) can be seen making up the environs of the left-most belt star - Alnitak - or Zeta Orionis.








Note:

If everything is working properly this kind of photography is pretty boring - I spent the nearly three hours it took to make this image watching "Avatar" on my DROID. Ha!