Tuesday, May 23, 2017

#84 - Tuesday, May 23, 2017 - Texas Star Party Night 3

It was cloudy again in the first part of the evening, but not too bad.  I re-aligned and re-polar aligned both scopes, and this time I used the Borg to align the AVX since that’s what I’d be imaging through.  This time, I did 6-minute subframes on the CGE Pro, which worked great.  I imaged M104, the Sombrero Galaxy, first.  
Date: 23 May 2017
Location: Prude Ranch, TX - Texas Star Party
Object: M104 Sombrero Galaxy
Camera: Nikon D5300
Telescope: Celestron C11
Accessories: f/6.3 focal reducer
Mount: Celeston CGE Pro
Guide scope: Orion ST-80
Guide camera: QHY5
Subframes: 8x360s (48m), ISO-1600
Darks: 15
Biases: 20
Flats: 20
Temperature: 41F - 50F

Once that was underway, I set up the D3200 on the Borg to image Markarian’s Chain while I waited for the Milky Way to rise.  It came out okay.  One nice thing with the shorter exposure times is that I got 57 usable subframes in less than four hours.  
Date: 23 May 2017
Location: Prude Ranch, TX - Texas Star Party
Object: Markarian's Chain
Camera: Nikon D3200 (Miqaela's)
Telescope: Borg 76ED, piggybacked on C8
Mount: Celestron AVX
Guide scope: N/A
Guide camera: N/A
Subframes: 51x150s (2h7m), ISO-1600
Darks: 18
Biases: 20
Flats: 20
Temperature: 45 degrees F 
See on AstroBin (plus galaxy labels)

Sooooo many galaxies!

Once the Milky Way was good and up, I moved over to M8 & M20, the Lagoon and Trifid Nebulae, and some of the gorgeous clouds of the Milky Way.  The tracking let me get away with 150 seconds (2-1/2 minutes) on the Borg, which is pretty decent since its focal length is 500mm.  It slowly drifted, but not too bad.  When I stacked it, I discovered that the Borg has some serious field curvature.  I don’t know if it’s that my camera chip size is too big for it or if I need some additional corrective optics, but I’m going to need a field flattener if I want to do much more imaging with it.  Unfortunately, they’re really expensive – I did a brief search, and the lowest focal reducer I could get (it’s already got a pretty large FOV with a DSLR attached to it) is like $350.  Yikes.  I’ll have to keep poking around.  Still pretty much in love with the result, though.
Date: 23 May 2017
Location: Prude Ranch, TX - Texas Star Party
Object: M8 & M20, Lagoon & Trifid Nebulae
Camera: Nikon D3200 (Miqaela's)
Telescope: Borg 76ED, piggybacked on C8
Mount: Celestron AVX
Guide scope: N/A
Guide camera: N/A 
Subframes: 37x150s (1h32m), ISO-1600
Darks: 18
Biases: 20
Flats: 20
Temerature: 42 deg (darks taken at 39 degrees)

Sooooo pretty!  Colors look great, the stars that are near the center at least don’t look like they show any chromatic aberration (I mean, it is an ED apochromatic triplet), and that FOV is great for all those large gorgeous nebulae out there.  And with a small chip CCD like the ASI120, it gets a similar FOV as my C11 does with a DSLR, so I should be able to do some awesome stuff with galaxies and smaller things with a camera like that.  I should try my QHY5 on it sometime.   
            
While the first round of targets was going, I brought my sister Melody with me to the Upper Field to see what was happening up there.  It was packed!  So many people plugging away at observing lists or photography.  We wandered around, hoping to find someone who’d lend a view through their scope.  We eventually came across a pair of absolutely massive binoculars that I just had to look through!  They were 6 inches in aperture apiece!  The guy was really nice and pointed them at a few things for us and whatever I wanted to see.  We looked at galaxies M95 & M96, Comet 41P, Omega Centauri, the Leo Triplet, and the False Comet cluster, which I’d never seen or even heard of before.  It’s two closely-spaced star clusters with a tail of stars that could probably be mistaken for a comet in a smaller aperture.  It’s not in SkySafari as the False Comet Cluster, but its NGC number is 6231.  It’s too far south to see from home much at all – it only gets as high as 8.5° there.  I couldn’t really see Comet 41P either; I thought I saw where its nucleus might be, but I wasn’t sure.  Leo Triplet looked great.  After that, we wandered around some more, but the legendary 36” Dob that was up there was closed down for the night.  So we went back down to the lower field, getting a snack at the snack bar along the way.  Bob highly recommended the brisket burrito, which was delicious but messy, and it was kind of weird having brisket in a tortilla, lol.  Talk about Tex-Mex!

            
When we got back down, it was time to change targets.  I’d looked at the Needle Galaxy through Derek’s scope I think earlier that evening; I didn’t realize how bright and big it was!  So I made that my next target in the C11.  So this was a night for edge-on galaxies.  Both images came out great!
Date: 23 May 2017
Location: Prude Ranch, TX - Texas Star Party
Object: NGC 4565 Needle Galaxy
Camera: Nikon D5300
Telescope: Celestron C11
Accessories: f/6.3 focal reducer
Mount: Celeston CGE Pro
Guide scope: Orion ST-80
Guide camera: QHY5
Subframes: 14x360s (1h24m), ISO-1600
Darks: 15
Biases: 20
Flats: 20
Temperature: 39-41F
See on AstroBin

I’ve never gotten much detail on the disk in M104, but the dust lanes in the Needle Galaxy came out spectacularly for my DSLR!  And the colors!!
            
Now, I will pause here a moment – the nice dark backgrounds in all my pictures aren’t really that dark in the subs, I do have to trim off the left of the histogram a bit to get there, or use the light pollution tool in the Astronomy Tools toolkit for Photoshop I just bought (only $20 and you get the actual files, so I was able to install it on both my laptop and desktop for the price of one).  Here’s a subframe of the Needle:

But it’s still not bad!  And there were some clouds roving through, and it was pretty low. 
            
While images were going, I tagged along with Bob and Jim as they did their TSP observing list, and saw several things in Bob’s refractor: galaxy NGC 4631, NGC 4565 (the Needle Galaxy) M20 Trifid Nebula, M8 Lagoon Nebula, M17 Swan Nebula, galaxy NGC 4655, the Wild Duck Cluster (in Derek’s Dob), M7 Ptolemy’s Cluster (also in Derek’s), galaxy M83, and galaxy M101 Pinwheel Galaxy.  I think next year, I’m going to bring the C8 on the NexStar mount and do visual observing while the imaging is going.  I’d love to earn some pins.  I’m thinking about either getting crossbars and a cargo hold that goes on the roof, or maybe renting a little tow-behind trailer.  Derek bought one for like $1300, and he said he barely even noticed he was towing anything.  It’d give me a lot of extra space, and I’d pack the lighter stuff in there so that it’s easier to tow.  It’d be good practice for when I eventually get a camper, too. 
            
Earlier that evening, I had the D3100 set up for timelapse when Jim announced that the ISS was making a pass.  It was a long one too – SW to NW, and it got pretty high.  So I took a series of 30-second exposures.  I’m not sure what I’m going to do with it yet – maybe I can make some kind of hybrid image. 
            
Went to sleep at 6 AM again!  Ahhhhh yeahhhhh!

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