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.

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

It is commonly suggested that when using a large format CCD, it may not be worth using a 3.3 field reducer as this creates a vignetted image. I.e instead of using the full ccd it creates a circular image in the middle of the ccd.  However while experimenting with my QHY8 camera and some meade field reducers, I disovered that there may still be an advantage to using a 3.3 field reducer with a large format CCD even though this can produce a vignette. This holds true especially if you are using a high mega pixel sensor as the cropped image would still be of a reasonable resolution. 

What I basically did was take a photo without a field reducer, then with a 6.3 and finally with the 3.3 reducer. I resized, aligned and overlayed these images within photoshop to give an idea of the field of view. For the heavilly vignetted 3.3 reduced image, I cropped the maximum square image I could get within the vignette circle. Even Cropped this gave a substantially wider field of view compaired to the 6.3 field reducer.

What I then did is simply create a image that shows the three fields overlayed as different colours to give an idea of the field of view proportions.

Important notes:

Even though the green 3.3 reduced image is cropped, it still offers a much wider field of view but the resolution of the image would be reduced. Still with high mp sensors this may not prove to be too much of an issue.

Due to bad weather I could not conduct this experiment with an actual astro image. I was actually taking photos of a power pole down thw street. This means that I am not yet able to determin whether the 3.3 field reducer would introduce too much coma to be of any use. I will update this when I get a chance to conduct the experiment with an actual astro image.

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.