Datalord

Last weekend I got a used 10Micron GM2000QCI delivered and switched it in for my distrusted old Celestron CGX. I mounted my 11" RASA on it and for the first time tried the f/2 Ha filter from Baader with the QHY247C camera. I'm well pleased. This is a stack of 14 images, 180s each, for a total of 42 minutes. No calibration frames at all. Just the stack, a quick AutomaticBackgroundExtractor, arcsinh stretch, nothing else.

Hmm, tried it. I prefer the rich version in these narrowband images.

I posted the Ha version of this image a few days ago and now I added the O3 and S2 to the image. Truth be told, there's not all that much oxygen in this, so it is mostly an Ha and S2 image. Intersting that the jets from Herbig Haro 555 are so easily visible in this image:

I'm pretty sure it is a flats problem. I haven't taken new flats for my O3 filter for about a year, so better get a new set. I got around it this time by cloning these blobs out of the stacked image.

They are in all frames, at the same places, stacking makes it worse. Agree, it could be something I might be able to sort with better flats. Shot on the same night, yes.

I'm processing an NB image using SHO and after combining I find these very odd patches of colour in the O3 data. Top left is stacked O3, right is the combined SHO and the bottom is the raw sub. They are all over image. What is going on here?

Good fun. Just did the math. Got the length of the jet to be 133kly long at 11", which seems to be confirmed by that wiki article. Crazy. I should be able to comfortably capture that...

Really?! That would mean I could capture 23 pixel long jet at bin 2. Are you sure it's that long? We're talking about an object 2.5 billion light years away.

I'm going to guess it needs to be some serious amateur hardware. This is Hubble's version at 52,000mm focal length: I wouldn't even try it with my 12" RC at 2400mm. It would be only a few pixels long, if I could even get lucky enough to catch a few photons from it.

I decided to process my Ha data on the center of the pelican nebula. There's something about the monochrome images I like. That said, I will add O3 and S2 when skies permit. 51 subs of bin2 600s Ha with my 12" RC. Processed with PixInsight and Topaz DeNoise AI. I haven't really worked on the stars in this one, as I expect to make a SHO image in the end.

Hmm, sort of. It's multiple nights stacked, but it is at maximum one or two days off. I guess I have to play around a bit.

Those scripts are brilliant! Except... The generated mask is off by 3-4 pixels, which means it is in the wrong place for all the stars. So close... 😕

you mean, get encoders on it?

The Centaurus tripod is part of the deal, so I should be covered.

It was dumped in my lap by Rupert from Astrograph. I think one of his other customers upgraded and had this one up for sale.

Where is this script? I can't find it in my Scripts menu?

Last night I decided to have another go at M13. I have always been fascinated with globular clusters, but my images have always been kinda meh, bordering bad. Not this one. I'm happy about it. Just for comparison, here's one I took last year... And this one is from 2017...

Wow, that's a lot of money tied in holding paper down. I really feel for you. The mounts are no good doing regular guided tracking?

You're probably more lucky trying google for the Abell catalog. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Abell_clusters They're quite faint. For example, ARP 122 is magnitude 15. ARP 272 is 15, 16 amd 17.

I went to an OAG and tried the ASI120 with many tears as result. Once I got the LodestarX2, everything just worked.

This is Abell 2151 aka The Hercules Cluster of Galaxies. It’s 500 million light years away and it has about 200 galaxies. 123 galaxies annotated in this image with my field of view and some of them are very special. Let’s have a look at some of the more interesting galaxies. NGC 6041 is the brightest galaxy of all of them. It’s 220,000 light years in diameter, way bigger than the Milky Way and it is 480M light years away. A bit above we find ARP 122, a pair of interacting galaxies. It’s not obvious in my image, but NGC 6041 is a bit distorted towards ARP 122, so all three galaxies are interacting. ARP 122 is in a category where the elliptical galaxy is distorting a spiral galaxy. Further down the image we have ARP 172. These are in the category “Galaxies with diffuse counter-tails”. You can see how the tails of both galaxies are diffuse on opposite sides of the galaxy centers. ARP 71 is in the category of “Spiral galaxies with small high surface brightness companions”. It’s an oddly specific category, but definitely applies to this pair. NGC 6045 is 180kly in diameter and the pair is 447MLY away. ARP 272 is probably the masterpiece of the Hercules Cluster. Three spiral galaxies are in a beautiful dance (or dance macabre if you will), where they will devour and distort each other. These are 500MLY away. I wanted to note the large star in the top of the image. It’s poetic name is TYC1507-998-1 and it is of magnitude 6.75. So it’s actually not visible with the naked eye, but it is blowing out this image. Loads of other interesting galaxies. Go explore, I’ve spent a few hours on this image and more can be found.

I should update this thread. I managed to get myself talked into a GM1000 being the only sane choice, but then I looked at my budget and concluded that I probably shouldn't do anything at all. Until by chance a used GM2000 QCI + upgrade package + tripod for £6k, exactly my budget. So I'm waiting for delivery on that baby. The GM2000 doesn't have encoders, but it has a 50kg payload and everything tells me it will perform great!

The idea is that that no matter what you do, you can't beat the seeing. In my case I seem to have a seeing of 2.5-3, so imaging at 2.08arcsec per pixel in bin4 is still lower than my seeing. Adding higher resolution on the gathering side will not actually add more data on the individual sub. Drizzle on the other hand will add the data all the slides and produce more resolution out of the "knowledge" of multiple frames that have been carefully dithered. Will bin4 be my goto for all my images? No. But I think it is pretty cool to be able to gather so much data in such a short time.

You can have a look at the first one I did:

Thanks! Yeah, bin4 on this camera means 24um pixel size with 12" aperture. That collects a lot of photons. Good luck with it!