Clear Night Tonight - Whos Out

[avtaram]

According to the weather forecast it was going to be mostly clear here between 9pm and 11pm.

So decided to take the grab and go ZS71 and managed to look around Orion, the Beehive Cluster ,The Pleiades and Jupiter for half an hour before the clouds rolled in. After putting the scope back in the garage, decided to have a quick look outside and would you believe it, it was clear again. This time I grabbed the Bins and went outside and had a good hour looking at the Double Cluster, Alpha Persei Cluster, Meisa, Orions Sword, The Pleiades, Beehive Cluster and The Coma Cluster.

These seemed to me to be much better in the Bins than the ZS71.

Avtar

[SnakeyJ]

Glad I stuck with it - got 45 minutes of pretty good conditions and pushed the focal length up to 4.2m (F22).    This is pushing things for the QHY5L-IIM, but hopefully I have a couple of good sets to process after PIPP does the pre-sorting.

Really good to be out this evening, even with work tomorrow - hopefully we may get a couple more reasonable nights over the next week..

[JamesF]

Glad I stuck with it - got 45 minutes of pretty good conditions and pushed the focal length up to 4.2m (F22).    This is pushing things for the QHY5L-IIM, but hopefully I have a couple of good sets to process after PIPP does the pre-sorting.

Really good to be out this evening, even with work tomorrow - hopefully we may get a couple more reasonable nights over the next week..

Absolutely.  Looks like it might be good tomorrow night, too.

I now have eighty capture runs to wade through to see what I've got.  I suspect the earlier runs will be best, but I wanted to have a go at capturing the entire GRS transit.

James

[ChrisLX200]

I got about 3 hours worth of Ha on the Crab Neb, had to abort a few of the 15min subs because of intermittant clouds. I should have stopped out longer but the cold beat me in the end. I must figure out a remote system so I can sit in the warm and do this.

ChrisH

[daverave83]

Last night was worth it, 2 hours of data of IC 443 but my oh my hard target or what!!

Tried both OII and HA filters just can't get the nebulosity.

Also had a problem with my laptop, does anyone get this problem that if it's too cold it stops responding???

[SnakeyJ]

Also had a problem with my laptop, does anyone get this problem that if it's too cold it stops responding???

Not had one that stops responding / hangs in the cold, though do have problems with my thinkpad that won't charge and beeps loudly once the temp drop below 5C.     The beeping is obviously a major issue in the garden late at night.

Might be worth cleaning and reseating mem modules and any peripherals as it could be a poor connection - do you get any Stop Error or debug from these?

[Luke]

It was a good night despite going a bit misty our way. My DSLR run did not last too long so I got it taking darks and when the sky improved a bit I grabbed some frames of the moon. The image on the laptop looked better than I expected given that it wasn't properly clear, maybe the red filter was helping to cut through?

[lensman57]

Hi,

I spent 5 hours last night trying to image and I have nothing to show for it, first was a run of 7X600s on NGC 1333, the problem was that the  mount did not find NGC 1333, and I did not check the subs, I got bunch of stars devoid of any colour, then I  changed the scope and tried to do a super wide of the M42 and IC434 together, nice framing but because of haze or something the stars were bloated and my DSLR also is showing dark bands, total right off. Then I slwed for M106 but by mistake I had got M108, after 20 minutes I changed to M109, surprise, the dim galaxy was bang in the middle of the CCD sensor, atlast I had something, wrong 20 minutes later  clouds arrived. Packed up and went in, an hour later it was crystal clear but I was in no mood to set up again, a total waste of time. Tonight it is already cloudy .

Regards,

A.G

[daverave83]

I am doing the some clusters tonight M35 & M37 should be easy targets.

fog is early tonight 11pm.

[Guest]

I just finished processing the California nebula from last night - 2 of the 8 15min captures were ruined by high cloud - but I did get more data than I had before and managed to frame Menkib properly this time  :-)

(see https://sites.google.com/site/welfordobservatory/home/updates/asupernovaremnantanopenclusterandanebulawalkintothebar and https://sites.google.com/site/welfordobservatory/home/updates/backtothecalifornianebula

[daverave83]

Thats a superb image, love the colour

[Guest]

Thats a superb image, love the colour

Thanks - crazy red ain't it! LOL

I found that this object seems to lend itself to this brightness - if I tone it down it doesn't look as good - I think :-)

I haven't boosted the saturation - and I pretty much lined the histogram up (ish) - I actually toned the red down quite a bit

Hope we get some more clear skies soon - Rosette is next

David

[daverave83]

I wanted to do the cone nebula but need the longpass 495nm Filter to get rid of most of the CA with my scope.

However the Skywatcher Quattro f4 Imaging Newtonian is the scope i want, when i have the funds that is!