Steve’s Astro

Heart and Soul (Kelling/Borg/H36/Ha)

A while back, just after I received my Borg 77, I jokingly mentioned to a friend of mine who owned a Starlight Xpress H36 that it should illuminate his CCD reasonably well. We laughed, we joked… and a crazy idea kind of stuck in our heads.

I contacted Hutech and obtained the correct 72mm adapters and spacers to allow me to swap over from the SX M25C to the H36, and we chose a few targets. One that stuck out as an obvious choice was the Heart and Soul area, which is always done as a two pane mosaic. It would be in a good location in the sky as it got dark, and a great place to start.

So, when it started getting clear and dark on the Friday at the Kelling Heath Star Party, the plan sprung into action.

A few things to mention before we get to the image itself.

– Many thanks go to Paxo (Steve) for lending me the camera to attach to my Borg for this project.

– This was really a proof of concept to show whether it would actually work or not. I think it did 😀

– The H36 wasnt aligned squarely with the OTA, something we only noticed in the subs after they were stacked. We should have checked the collimation screws on the H36, but were too excited at the time! The stacked version had much larger stars at the bottom of the image than at the top, which meant I had to get creative with the star reduction routines. Its not ideal, but it certainly looks a lot better than the version I first saw on screen.

– We were unable to plate solve in Maxim using this configuration, nor was PoleAlignMax. As such, the polar alignment is fractionally out, and field rotation is just visible in the very corners of the uncropped version. Unsure if this was due to such a large area of sky to solve for, or the large number of catalog stars it tried to retrive from the catalogs before it tried solving. I doubt I will get another chance to try this specific combination out, but I know Paxo now has a Pentax 75, so there will be similar projects coming up soon which will require PAM to work.

Mount: EQ6 via EQMOD
OTA: Borg 77EDII @ f/4.3
Guiding: SW ED80 + SX Lodestar + PHD
Imaging: Starlight Xpress H36 + MaximDL, 30×600s, Astronomik 13nm Ha (101 bias, 101 flats)
Stacked: DeepSkyStacker
Post Process: PSCS2

(Click on image for larger version, or click >>HERE<< for the MAAASIVE version… 4445 × 2635!!)

Posted by Steve under Astronomy | Comments Off on Heart and Soul (Kelling/Borg/H36/Ha)

M31 from Kelling Heath

The Kelling Heath Autumn Equinox Star party has always been lucky for the weather, and this year was no different. Of the 4 nights I was there, it was clear on 2 of them. Thats more clear nights than I have seen in the previous month!

I do have at least one other image from Kelling that I need to do some extended work on before it sees the light of day, so I started on this one first.

Mount: EQ6 via EQMOD
OTA: Borg 77EDII @ f/4.3
Guiding: SW ED80 + SX Lodestar + Maxim
Imaging: Starlight Xpress M25C + MaximDL, 24×600s, Hutech IDAS  (101 bias, 101 flats)
Orchestrated: CDD Commander
Stacked: DeepSkyStacker
Post Process: PSCS2 + PixInsight

I know that the camera isnt quite square to the OTA (hence the crop and the slightly larger stars in lower right corner), but thats something to work on at some point in the future.

(Click on image for larger version)

Posted by Steve under Astronomy | Comments Off on M31 from Kelling Heath

IC1318 and friends

You know some nights when everything goes right, and all you really remember is the imaging? Yes? Then you also know the soul destroying, life sucking nights where a long list of things that worked just fine last time decide to conspire against you. Last night was the latter option. I wont bore you with details, but I nearly packed up at 11pm and went to bed.

Thankfully (almost) all the problems went away after I rebooted my laptop, so I managed to get everything working, left it running for ~6 hours, and still went to bed  🙂

Seeing wasnt great, a fair amount of vapour in the air, lit up by the moon, but it was quite still in the sky, breeze free on the ground… and bl__dy cold! Not “winter” cold, but autumn has definitely arrived with the fresh mornings leaving everything covered in dew.

Mount: EQ6 via EQMOD
OTA: Borg 77EDII @ f/4.3
Guiding: SW ED80 + SX Lodestar + PHD
Imaging: Starlight Xpress M25C + MaximDL, 24×900s, Astronomik 13nm Ha (101 bias, 101 flats)
Stacked: DeepSkyStacker
Post Process: PSCS2

Note: the lower right corner in the mid sized image shows some odd curvature, which I pretty convinced is due to me overtightening the front tube ring on the Borg and pinching the objective. Next time out, I will have to keep an eye on that.

(Click on image for larger version)

Posted by Steve under Astronomy | Comments Off on IC1318 and friends