Lagoon Nebula - M8 (NGC 6523)

The Lagoon nebula is approximately 5,200 light years away. The full nebula is about 130 light years across. This image is of the cetral part of the lagoon nebula (approximately 1/3 to 1/2 of the full nebula).

 It was taken on from my suburban backyard obs on a nice cold winter night (about 3 degrees celsius). It was very low on the eastern horizon and I was not expecting to get that much detail but was pleasantly surprised.

The image is a total duration of 100 minutes exposure, about 25 x 5min on the 12" LX200R and a QHY8 Tec Cooled Camera. I did not take any darks (only because I forgot too, but the QHY8 camera is very forgiving with background noise as it is cooled to approximately -30C.

NGC 4945 in Centaurus

Now that I finally have the LX200R tracking properly, and I had a clear night last night, I had a go at imaging this spiral galaxy. As you can see I had a problem with an internal reflection from a bright object just out of field. I could have manually edited it out, but this was really a test run with the QHY8 TEC Cooled camera on the 12" scope. Now that it is tracking properly my stars are no longer elongated.

The galaxy is almost side on to us. It is 11.7 million light years away.   

The image is a stack of 15 x 5 min exposures and 5 x 5min darks. No Flats. It really needs more data, but clear skies are few and far between at the moment.

Periodic Error Correction on the LX200R

Well I finally got around to resolving the issue I have been having with this scope where it was always producing elongated stars, even when auto-guided. The optics seem perfect, I have never had to make any collimation adjustments, its always spot on (when the camera is mounted correctly). But watching the stars I can see them shift east and west over time. Sometimes quite quickly. Not just a few star widths, I mean like 5 to 10 star widths sometimes, and only in RA. The Scope is permanently mounted on a concrete pier and quite well polar aligned.

Firstly, a friend Andrew J. from the astro group I am in  'MelbMeadeScopes · Australian Advanced Telescope Users', came around and we replaced all of the gears and generally removed the excess slackness from the drive train. Thanks so much Andrew.

Then it was a matter of waiting for the weather to clear. TWO WEEKS later I finally get a decent night; clear and still. As a matter of fact it was the clearest night I have seen. It was the first time I have actually seen the milky way from my suburban backyard in many years.

Anyway, first attempt at a two minute exposure with autoguding and GAH!!! Elongated Stars again  Grrr!  Tried a few more times and no go. So I hooked up Pem Pro and let it run through a full cycle recording the PE for the scope with the PEC off. Let it calculate the PEC curve and downloaded the curve to the scope. Then did another PE analysis with the PEC ON this time and a much smaller curve resulted. Added the two curves and downloaded the corrected pec. Did this one more time. The three images below represent the Periodic Error as the night progress. I have not taken another since that all three adjustments have been made, but looking at the graph output from the autoguider software I can really see the difference. It has gone from Razor Back Mountain to a mild heart rate monitor :-)  And I did some 5 minute exposures and WooooHoooo Stars are round again.  Then around midnight I realised I had not eaten anything since lunchtime and was freezing to death so I packed up for the night. Content that I finally may be able to do some imaging.

There is a slight bit of drift.. but its quite small considering the time frame for each graph is 30 mins approx.

Full Moon

Well we finally got a clear night but it was also accompanied by a very bright full moon. I tried imaging a few fainter objects but the moon just kept getting in the way. So I decided to point the 12" LX200 with the QHY8 camera at the moon and take an image or two.

I ended up taking a 2x2 panorama. This image has been quite heavilly enhanced to bring out some details that you normally dont get to see with such a flat full moon. The saturation has also been boosted to highlight the various colours of different craters.

Click on the image below to see the smaller version of this panorama. The full size image (aprox 3400x3400) can be downloaded by right-clicking on the link below the image and selecting Save As.  This was just an experiment but it has motivated me to take a more detailed 4x4 panorama next chance I get.

Full size 809k jpeg

QHY8 Camera and 12" LX200R First Light

M83 Galaxy(QHY8 Camera First Light- more data added on March 28th 2009) Here is my second image using the QHY8 Tec Cooled Camera on the 12" Lx200r . It's the Southern Pinwheel galaxy(M83). The galaxy is about 15000 light years away. This is stack of about 3 hours (10x 15 min + 3 x 10 mins + darks + flats).  It has been fairly heavily processed to try and bring the details out of the murky sky. I appear to be having an RA distortion issue as well. Guiding was done through PHD Guider with a QHY5 guide camera an ED80. All seems to be working well. I had fine tuned the PEC and Polar alignment but I can't stop the stars from being elongated in RA. I think there might be some misalignment in the imaging train somewhere, others are indicating it may be due to flexure. The elongation of the stars does not seem to change with the exposure length (although I did not think to try a really short exposure to check out the theory of missaligned optics or camera somewhere).

Eta Carina Nebula This is another image I took on the same night to test the camera and scope. Its the heart of the eta carina nebula (the keyhole nebula). This is a created from a number of different length exposures ranging from 10 mins to 3 mins for a total of one hour. No Darks.

Cat On Guard in Observatory

I found the perfect sign to errect in my observatory and my cat is warning me to obey  .

Eta Carinathrough the ED80 (quickie)

Here is is another image I took on the first night out using the ED80 with a Canon 40D. It's the Eta Carina Nebula (NGC 3372) The Eta Carinae nebula is approximately 460 light years in diameter andis 8800 light years away. Itcan be seen with the naked eye as a grey cloud in the southern sky. It covers about three degrees of the sky. The imagewas created from 11 x 3 minute colour exposures at ISO800 with a canon 40D through the ED80 unguided. It was a full moon.

Orion Nebula (My First ED80 Image)

Here is my first processed image using the ED80 with a Canon 40D. It's the Orion Nebula (M42). The orion nebula is approximately 1300 light years away and 25 light years in diameter. It is one of the brightest nebilas in the sky. There wasa very bright full moon but I wanted to see how much of the nebula I could capture. The core is a little hot so there is no detail but I wanted to get more of the nebula in if I could. The image is composed of 9 x 3 minute subs at ISO600 along with 6 darks same exposure and no flats. Stacked with Deep Sky Staker and Levels adjustedin Paint Shop Pro.

Other things that have been going on:

• I haveconpleted construction of a backyard observatory. This has been all consuming:You can see the completed Obs here or Contruction Info here
• On mymisc page you will find Images of my catsRommie and Twitch.
• In Astrophotography you will find Some of my first Astrophotography images (fuzzies). With winter and the construction of my obs and a particularly cloudy year, I have notdone anything new ina long time. I am hoping things will change with the completion of the obs.
• Under 3D you will find some of my rendered 3D models. These are a bit dated now. I dont really have the time or patience for this stuff any more and I have not done much in this field for quite a while.