July 07 2011
The Eagle Narrowband Hubble Palette
Posted by Duncan at JD2455749.5959
One more time... this time with three filters: Hydrogen-alpha, Oxygen-III and Sulfur-II. The mapping to color channels is using the fairly conventional "Hubble palette", that is, Sulfur-II mapped to red, Hydrogen-alpha to green and Oxygen-III to blue (ie in spectral order). In this case, however, I also used the H-alpha as a luminance channel.
The H-alpha data is of much better quality, so I end up with a much crisper image this way, but may be losing some parts of the nebula, particularly in the fainter parts.
July 03 2011
M16, The Eagle Nebula in 2-Color Narrowband
Posted by Duncan at JD2455746.24473
Managed to get some data with the Oxygen-III filter last night to add to the H-alpha data from Friday. As before, I just managed to get in a little over an hour in the time that the nebula traversed the gap between the trees to the south.
Compared to the H-alpha channel, the [OIII] is extremely dim, and there's really not a lot of signal in the images. I should probably have binned the pixels 2x2 to increase the signal to noise ratio.
July 02 2011
Posted by Duncan at JD2455745.26379
Right on cue, it seems to have stopped raining in Oregon. Just in time for July. In any case, it means I was finally able to capture some new data last night. Hopefully the weather will hold and I'll get a bunch more data over the next few weeks.
Naturally, with everything having been not switched on for a while, I had all sorts of problems, starting with the mount which was behaving oddly. There's something very messed up with the EQMOD control software which will probably require a reinstall to fix (at least I'm hoping that will do it). In the meantime, it was showing slewing errors of several degrees on every slew, except when parking which returned to the correct point. Eventually I resorted to disconnecting the PC and plugging in the hand controller (something I haven't done in a year or two) which worked fine. Unfortunately, it also meant that the mount was no longer integrated into the control software, and Maxim had no idea where the telescope was pointing, making it essentially impossible to refine the framing. Hopefully I'll get that fixed soon.
Not only that, but I really couldn't get autoguiding working as well as I would have liked.
June 28 2011
Reprocessing : IC5070 - The Pelican Nebula in Cygnus
Posted by Duncan at JD2455740.63537
Still more clouds here in Oregon, so I'm still going back over old data and reprocessing it. There's still plenty to do, though; I've learned a great deal about how to extract more from the data in the last year, and I have quite an accumulation of older image data in need of reprocessing.
This one is the Pelican Nebula in Cygnus, otherwise known as IC5070. All of the images used here were captured from my back yard under extremely heavy light pollution conditions, and for that reason I used narrowband filters which can pick out just the brighter emission lines.
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May 14 2012
Counting Galaxies in Coma Berenices
Posted by Duncan at JD2456061.60211
My first imaging opportunity in several months thanks to an apparent early start to summer here in Oregon. Both Friday and Saturday nights were clear and uncharacteristically dry, resulting in some unusually transparent skies. This is galaxy cluster Abell 1656 in Coma Berenices, appearing quite close to dead overhead here in Oregon; at a latitude of 45 degrees or so, it can be found by looking due south at 11pm and almost straight up, at about 75 degrees from the horizon.
November 06 2011
The Black Fish Nebula from Skyview Acres
Posted by Duncan at JD2455872.38344
This was imaged from Skyview Acres just outside of Goldendale, Washington, a private site owned by Phil Reid of Vancouver, Washington that he generously makes available to astronomers. The skies are fairly dark and generally transparent, with just a little local light pollution from an outside light at a house about a mile away.
August 27 2011
Posted by Duncan at JD2455800.72167
A new supernova in M101... thanks for the tip from Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy. I wasn't sure whether I'd manage to get a picture of this because of the tree at the North end of my back yard. I got lucky - but I was only able to see it for a very short period of time and only managed to grab a single 10 minute exposure.
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Portland, OR
Indian Trail Spring, OR
Wapinitia Airstrip, OR
Goldendale, WA
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Moon phase image and data from the time service of the US Naval Observatory
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