Today I used a break in the clouds to test how the astro-modified Nikon D7000 works with a h-alpha Filter. As the weather was very unstable, I didn’t set up the laptop for guiding, so some images were unusable due to trailing and passing clouds and full cloud cover at the end of the exposure resulted in oly 83x30s unguided exposures. Which way too short, but I am happy with the result under these circumstances.
Category Archives: deepsky
Two Nights, Two Scopes, Two Targets
In the first night I used my 80mm f/7 ED Apo for unguided 30s sub-exposures, in the second night, the 127mm f/8 Apo with 120s guided exposures…
Full spectrum modification of a Nikon D7000 – Part II
On November 5th I had the opportunity to do another test, this time using the 300mm lens, I also used the California Nebula as the target.
The California nebula is hydrogen gas which is irradiated by the intense UV radiaton from Xi Persei, the bright star near the center of the image. It is about 1250 light years distant and is one of the intrinsically brightest and hottest stars visible to the unaided eye. It weighs in at about 40 solar masses. The surface temperature is a whopping 35000 Kelvin.
NGC891
NGC 891 is a beautiful spiral galaxy which is seen perpendicular to it’s rotational axis, so we see it edge on.
It is located in Andromeda, so there are many foreground stars.
I have seen it in telescopes as small as 15cm aperture, in my 250mm the dust lane becomes visible, but in a larger scope, like the 40cm I recently observed with, it is a really beautiful sight. But of course not as detailed as in this image.
Testing the QHY163c camera
The Vorarlberger Amateur Astronomen acquired a QHY163c cooled CMOS camera. It is based on a Panasonic Micro-Four-Thirds (m43) sensor, but has added cooling and an astronomical suitable ir-cut filter. Read More
Spring is here: Galaxies and Clusters
Springtime is galaxy time! After a frustrating friday night with incorrect mount setup, iAstroHub not working properly, which resulted in badly focussed and guided images, saturday evening proved much more successful:
The Leo triplet is a trio of galaxies which are physically near each other, a faint tidal tail can be seen to the upper left of M66, the lower right galaxy.
The distance to this galaxy group is about 35 million lightyears.
Andromeda Galaxy – M31
In Autumn the Andromeda galaxy is conveniently placed in the darkes part of the sky for my home, the eastern sky.
Due to the vibration prone location of my telescope on the top of our house, I had to throw away 2/3rds of the individual exposures due to trailed stars, so I ended up with only 22,5 minutes of data. Another possibility is, that the guiding didn’t work properly, calibration was suspiciously short.
Anyways, here is the Andromeda galaxy at 1016mm focal length, Nikon D750, 45x30s, ISO 1600, Astro-Physics 127mm f/8, Meade LXD 650 mount.
Supernova 2017eaw
Supernova 2017eaw, discovered by Patrick Wiggins is located in the so-called fireworks galaxy. The supernova is the tenth supernova in this specific galaxy to be recorded during the last 100 years.
This is the third supernova discovered by Patrick Wiggins, overall he searched 1051 nights and took about 500000 images of galaxies for his finds.
Testing a new guiding setup
This evening I did a quick test under the stars to see, how iAstroHub 3.0 works with my setup.
Apparently it works quite well, though I need to test with longer exposures.
Jupiter and Galaxies
At the beginning of the evening, a short session imaging Jupiter, then I switched over to some galaxies.
This is a short animation made from multiple AVI sequences: