Imaging report for 27/28th July 2011

I arrived at my dark sky site at around 22:35 and conditions were a little hazy but clear, there was a weather front moving in from the West but I was sure I had a few hours before it arrived. I quickly got the scope set up, I took the SkyWatcher 120mm short tube imaging refractor with me tonight instead of the 200p.

I checked polar align app on the Iphone to get the correct alignment position and polar aligned the scope and started with a 2 star goto set-up, which used Arcturus and Vega, this was successful 1st time and my first alignment test was M13 followed by Capella and I left the scope tracking Capella for 10 minutes while I sorted out the rest of my gear. On returning to the scope Capella was still centered in the 32mm eyepiece and I swung the scope over to Arcturus for a final alignment and focus test, fitting the Bahtinov mask and Canon 350D at prime focus.

Once I was happy with the alignment and tracking I swung the scope over to M16 and open cluster in Serpens and at 23:27 proceeded to take 10 images at 20 second exposure @ISO1600.

At 00:00 I swung over to M31 The Andromeda Galaxy which was located in the North East and well above the horizon, it looked very nice through the camera viewfinder and once I was happy with the equipment I started imaging. I took 25 30 second images @ISO1600 and then 20 Blacks. M31 is 2.5 million light years distant from us, and is made up of 300 Billion stars and is a spiral galaxy.

At 00:43 I did another refocus test on Arcturus and then moved onto M17 The Swan Nebular and Images were 10 20 seconds exposures @ISO1600, and 10 blacks. M17 was located in the South-West but still suffered slightly with distant light pollution but nothing to spoil the image. The nebular is 10 light years long, and 40 light years wide and at a distance of 5,000 light years away from us.

I also tried to image NGC 7662 and Pluto, but these images need further analysis and maybe put to one side for a future session, especially the pluto wide field image.

I ended the session at 01:25 and packed up and headed home, conditions by this time had worsened and the cloud from the West was beginning to encroach on the horizon.

26th/27th July

Image of Jupiter and Moons

Ray