What is new at Jarek's Amateur Astronomy Site
Sunday 6/28/2009
Weather is still not as good as it used to be in the past years -
maybe it is just a new observatory curse
? Nevertheless I was
able to do some observing and imaging over last few weeks, but not
many. I have both imaging scopes going now, especially Orion 10" is
doing great, with a careful collimation it produces fantastic
images. I have imaged with it 3 targets so far:
M5,
M8 (Lagoon Nebula)
and M17 (Omega or
Swan Nebula). The stars are round throughout the frames and
image scale allows for quite tight stars as well. So far I used
Orion 10" with Canon 40D only, I will try Q453-HR soon. My goal with
C14 was to do some higher resolution imaging at f7, but it was very
difficult due to some flexure in the system. Q453-HR allows for 10
minutes exposures at my location, and at this length the flexure
became quite evident. I have installed C14 flop stoppers, tightened
down C80ED focuser, but it still wasn't enough. Turned out Lumicon
Giant Easy Guider was the culprit, the lens cell was moving quite a
bit, and I wasn't able to tighten it up ... I went back to Celestron
f6.3 focal reducer and finally 10 minutes exposures were within the
reach. The last image I have done with GEG was
M16 (Eagle Nebula),
you can clearly see star elongation on the top of the image due to
miscollimation, the next one was
M20 (Trifid Nebula)
and this one finally looks much better.
Sunday 4/5/2009
Weather has not been good since the end of March, the only new image I took at the very end of March and it is the Needle Galaxy (NGC4565), it came out better than M104, despite the problems with guiding and wind. I have finally found a way to stream a reasonably good video embedded in the web page - Comet Lulin animation is now available without downloading ...
Sunday 3/22/2009
I have finished my first Hα-RGB image on Friday
- it is Christmas Tree
Cluster: 2 hours of Hα and two hours of RGB. So far I think it
is one of my best images
. I have also shot my first image with
CC-Labs Q8 (Q453-HR) camera - it is
Sombrero Galaxy.
It is OK for the first image, I will keep the gain lower next time.
It is also my 100th image since I started imaging in Ithaca in the
summer of 2005!
Wednesday 3/18/2009
As you can read below I had some technical difficulties to overcome before I could attend to regular imaging. Well, I imaged Comet C/2007 N3 (Lulin ) on March 4th, but it took me some time to process the data. Here is the image tracking the comet, while the stars are trailed in the background. I made also an animation of comet movement (over 2 hours period): compressed RealPlayer format (300KB) or original AVI file (LARGE: 47MB).
Saturday 3/14/2009
I have done some further experimenting with my H-alpha filter and
tried to image Christmas Tree Cluster (NGC2264). Unfortunately the
resulting image has these dreaded reflections as well ... I
investigated more and it turned out that the reflections are
only in green and blue channels, not in the red channel!
So instead of just converting to mono I split the frames into the
color components, and then used only R part. Here are the original
single frame color components :
R,
G and
B. And here is the
final version (30x4min). The final one revealed that my
collimation was a bit off, but certainly it doesn't have anything to
do with the reflections
! So this solves my reflection problems
for now and I am back into imaging
.
Sunday 2/15/2009
I have just tried to image M42 with Hyperstar and Astronomik 13nm Hα filter. As you can see on M42 image there are big reflections around bright stars, they look like a defocused images of those stars, there is an example on the bottom of this page. So it looks to me that there was an out of focus image of these stars formed on the filter which was then captured on the image. Is it normal for H-alpha and Hyperstar (I hope not!)? Or my filter was fogged/frosted (it was 14 degrees)? I made an image of M42 last year with no filters and it didn't have such problems. I shot the Moon at the end of my imaging session through the same setup (Hyperstar/H-alpha/C14) and it doesn't show any reflections, which puzzles me a bit ... Here is the Moon shot, at least this one worked.
Tuesday 2/10/2009
Last Sunday I was finally able to come out and do some imaging! Unfortunately in the short time before the clouds rolled in I was only able to capture some high resolution Moon images. Full Moon is the most difficult time to image the Moon since there are very few shadows making the pictures quite flat ...
Saturday 1/23/2009
Finally I am back to my hobby! After the good beginning of 2008 with
lots of new images and observing sessions I had a long break - from
May to almost December. The biggest reason was the fact that we
moved to a new house (also in Ithaca), but I also had to spent a lot
of time at work. Well, although I wasn't able to practice amateur
astronomy I was very well able to prepare for the new chapter. The
new house is located much farther away from the city on a two acre
lot, and for the first time backyard observatory was within the
reach ... So the observatory has been built in September, and I also
acquired a new imaging scope (Orion 10" Newtonian) as well as a new
visual scope (Obsession 18" Classic Dobsonian). Of course with such
a large investment it is to be expected that clouds will cover the
sky for a very long time - and indeed that happened
. I was able
to us my new observatory exactly 2 times so far, but I am a patient
man and I know the spring will come and the weather will improve,
while the new observatory and new telescopes will wait. As for now I
have bought most of the stuff I wanted in the coming days and months
I will focus on using and enjoying them. I also hope I will be able
to update this website often and write some more about the
equipment, and hopefully publish new images.
I have updated several pages on the website, mostly under "Equipment", and of course I have added pages about my new observatory.
PS: Along with the other stuff I have also got a new TeleVue Ethos 13mm for use with Obsession - it is a fantastic eyepiece!