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January 1, 2013 - My first light of the year!
By
m_j_lyons, in Observing - Reports
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By beka
Hi All,
Having had to move to an apartment where I could not use my CPC 1100, I decided that I have to see what I could do with my NexStar SLT 102 (alt-az achromatic 102mm f6.47 refractor). Setting up on my narrow balcony was challenging and the altitude bearing was so loose that it almost moved from the weight of the Canon 700D. I could not see M31 in the estimated 3.5 magnitude sky so I did a two star alignment and used the live-view to focus on a bright star. I then took a 15 second exposure after slewing to M31 which allowed me to see that I had it in the field of view. After a few more 15 second exposures and playing with the motion controls I managed to get it centered. The resulting picture is from 39 subs of 30 seconds at ISO 1600, 9 flats. The images were stacked and stretched with Siril and then I played with the curves on Gimp, cropped and scaled. Not too unhappy.
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By alanjgreen
Scope: 20” f3.6 Lukehurst Dob with Paracorr (fl = 2089mm & f4.1).
Night Vision: PVS-14 with Photonis 4g INTENS.
Eyepieces: DeLite 18.2mm (f5.8 x115).
I was out supernovae hunting last night with three SN targets planned
1= NGC109/SN2019upw
2= UGC11860/SN2019tua
3= UGC11979/SN2019tgm
I am happy to report that I observed 2 out of 3. Here are some notes to help others.
NGC109 / SN2019upw
This one is fairly straightforward as there are few field stars in the area. Once you find the three brighter stars in a triangle then the galaxy is easily seen in the centre. There are 4 faint stars on one side of the galaxy and one on the other. The SN is separate from the core. As I was only using x115 magnification then the split was not straightforward and time was needed to wait and observe for the split to come and go!
UGC11860/SN2019tua
This galaxy was really well placed at the zenith at around 1830 last night. The galaxy was not seen but the SN is there. It takes time to find the right spot but there is a field star "3D cube" just above, once you find the cube then you can find the SN. (See stars marked A,B,C,D on my diagram, the Supernova is X).
UGC11979/SN2019tgm
This is the toughest, there are so many field stars that it is hard to find what to match to the internet images. Anyway, it turned out that I was looking in the wrong place but the stars I drew do match the images so I was just a small way off.
Look carefully at my sketch and there are two rows of field stars (the 3+2 and the 3, the middle star of the lower 3 is a double), if you can find these two rows of stars at the eyepiece then the SN is in-between these rows as shown by the blue box (added this morning). I was looking further up in a tight cluster of stars where the tiny galaxy appeared to be (my mistake!).
Happy hunting!
Alan
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By MartinB
This has been a bit of a project. Last year I worked out that my 200mm Canon F2.8 lens and ASI1600 would frame the whole of the Veil complex quite nicely. I captured Ha and OIII data for the east and west nebulae with a Tak FSQ 106 and added this into the widefield image. Although the Tak data had to be shrunk down it did add a bit of extra resolution where it was needed.
The difficulty for me has been the processing. I have found it really difficult to tease out the faint wisps of detail and have tried the usual routines of micro contrast adjustments using curves along with Scott Rosen's Screen blend/mask inversion method but the results weren't great owing to the close proximity of faint and bright nebulosity. I'd heard about the PI process tool for removing stars, Starnet, so loaded this and had a rare foray into PI. This proved very helpful. It was a luminence created from Ha and OIII using the 200mm lens with the Tak data mixed in. Then the starless layer was added in PS with the screen blend mode at 50% opacity. The nebulosity detail was so well preserved I didn't need a mask. After blending I reduced the stars a bit more using the starless layer again and darken as the blend at 50%. I should really unleash some of the stars to add a bit of "punch" but I've wrestled with this data enough for now! I plan to use it further as I look deeper into the Gorgon that is PixInsight!
Telescope: Tak 106 for E and W veils. Canon 200mmL lens
Camera: ZWO ASI 1600 pro mono cmos, Gain 150, offset 50
Filters: Baader 7nm OIII and Ha
E+W Veil 10x30 mins each channel for each nebula. Whole complex 50x5mins for each channel
Captured with SGP, calibrated, aligned and combined with PI, processed mainly with PS but PI for Starnet. Ha mapped to red and OIII to both blue and green
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By Lead_weight
My M31. Shot over 3 nights. Only 11 total hours. LRGB only with Astrodon filters, ZWO ASI1600MM-C camera, and the WO Redcat.
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By Kronos831
Hey.. So last night i went to a beach that had one side completely dark ,and the other filed with light pollution . In the dark side,the milky way gqlaxy was pretty obvious and the sky was full of stars. Andromeda was rising and i wanted to take a peak, however , it was low on the horizon and had a slight haze(skyglow).It wasn't visible with the naked eye and in my 10x50 binoculars i could just resolve the core.
I heard Andromeda would be visible with the naked eye as its mag 3.3. But the milkyway was and Andromeda wasnt.What went wrong?
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