Chasing a cometary visitor

On October 24th, Comet 17P/Holmes brightened suddenly from magnitude 17 to magnitude 2.5. Saturday night was clear in north Texas so I decided to try getting a picture of the comet. I set up my Televue NP 101 with my ST-237 camera using a flip mirror arrangement to center the image on the sensor. You can see the nucleus of the comet and the dusty halo surrounding it.

I am going to have to experiment some with the Meade Flip Mirror to get the camera and eyepiece at focus at the same time. I'll probably need to get a small extender to move the camera back about 1/4 of an inch to get both the eyepiece and camera into focus at the same time. The helical focuser on the flip mirror does not have enough inward travel to accommodate the eyepiece when the camera is in focus.

Visual Observing and a BBQ

We had a few friends over for dinner tonight. We barbqued steaks and set the Televue NP101 refractor up to cool down while we ate dinner.

Since we planned on visual observation of planets and the moon tonight I didn't go through the usual stringent polar alignment routines I normally use so setup was pretty quick.

Dinner was the steaks, mixed vegatables, ice tea, and a visit to Marble Slab for ice cream! We all were bad and ordered big bowls of ice cream.

After dinner we looked at the Moon and Saturn then went inside and watch several SLOOH missons.

It was a pretty good time...

Big Mount and Small Scope

Here is a picture of my HD200C mount and Celestron C8 SCT. The mount barely notices that it has a scope attached! I have a JMI NGF-S focuser as well as a small motorized control for the main mirror focus. This makes it easy to image from the kitchen table in comfort.

The HD200C is really the mount for my big scope the "Behemoth" as my family has named it. It is a 17.5" newtonian that I built from the optical parts of a Celestron Dobsonian and new high quality Mirror Cell, Focuser, Aluminium Tube, and Spider. I learned a lot about my scope by rebuilding it. you can see a picture of it on my web site (Big Telescope)

It looks like the clouds are clearing off tonight so off to take more pictures!

Polar Alignment

Tonight I set up my 8" Celestron SCT on my Parallax Instruments HD200C so that I could try using PemPro to drift align the mount.

It was an interesting adventure -- the graphs from PemPro are very sensitive. I was able to align the mount to the pole and take a few pictures, but it took most of the night. That was expected since this is the first time I have tried aligning using a CCD camera and software with my HD200C mount.

I'm hoping for a clear saturday night so I can take advantage of the alignment to shoot some good pictures tomorrow night. I was able to get a short color shot of M13 before going to bed at 5:00am. I am slowly learning how to optimize my equipment and technique.

We'll see what the rest of the weekend brings.

Cleaning up Images and Subscribing to SLOOH

Tonight was a short evening. I took out the scope to check on an update to PemPro that fixed the trackbox problem some of us were having.

I didn't plan to do too much as it was pretty clear that clouds were going to invade my sky before too long. I set up the Teleue NP-101 with my ST-27 camera and used FocusMax to bring Pollux into focus. Then I started the test run with PemPro. It worked perfectly, tracking the star just as it should. Bug fixed!

After the successful test, I decided to try imaging M95 before the clouds got too bad. I took 60x30 second images with varying degrees of success at dodging the clouds that were moving in. I stacked the best of the images to produce the picture above. As you can tell I will have to learn how to take flats to clean up the circles caused by dust on the detector. Of course I'll also figure out how best to clean off the detector itself.

Toward the end of the photo run, the images starting getting dimmer so I knew the clouds had finally caught up with me. So tonights astrophotography session ended early.

My folks were up visiting so I decided to bring up the SLOOH telescope on the big screen TV so we could look at some of the objects being observed. I subscribed to their system for 100 missions so we could check out the telescopes and try out the service.

SLOOH calls their observing sessions missions. Since they are located in the Azores, they are in darkness in the early evening and clouds here don't mean clouds there!

We watched several missions, including some very nice nebula. I will start observing through SLOOH more often.

Well it's not too late, but we have to get up early tomorrow so goodnight all!

Saturn's Majesty

Tonight I wanted to get some closeup picture of the planet Saturn. I'm using a Philip's ToUCam Pro II web camera with K3CCDTools software.

I configured the camera using a 15mm Televue Plossl for eyepiece projection. After aligning on the moon, I was able to locate Saturn and center its image on the camera's chip.

I shot 20,000 frames and stacked the resulting images using K3CCDTools planetary wizard. A lot of work to produce the image shown above, but seeing tonight was really poor.

I'll have to come back with one of my longer focal length scopes and try again. But for now, off to bed.

Better to be lucky than good!

But unfortunately tonight I was neither...

I started the evening wanting to try out FocusMax and see how it well it would work with my JMI Smartfocus. I pointed the scope and camera at Procyon to test out FWHM Monitor and FocusMax. The bright spot of the evening is that both worked and worked well.

Part way through the testing I slewed the camera back to the start and the mount flipped! I didn't realize it was so close to the meridian. This was the first of many quirky tribulations for the night. I resighted in on Procyon (the mount doesn't handle crossing the meridian that well -- fouls up its pointing a bit) and started over. For some reason I decided to abandon my original plan and try out PoleAlignMax and PemPro for a bit. I moved the mount away from Procyon to Regulus so I would not risk another flip/slew across the meridian for a while.

PoleAlignMax did not play well with CCDSoft -- it only waits 20 seconds on the picture but for some reason always redownloads the autodark processing -- and it wouldn't let me turn off the autodark setting in CCDSoft. Hmm -- I'll have to email the developers about that -- seems strange since FocusMax works quite well with CCDSoft. So I switched to MaximDL to see if I could get a Polar alignment reading. With MaximDL it would not let me turn autodark processing on! Oh well -- a few more attempts convinced me that I still have backlash issues on the declination axis. I could not get a consistent polar alignment reading. I'll keep at it, I'm sure most of it is operator error.

Next I decided to take a break from software and just image for a bit -- I took some shots of M96 -- none of them that great -- and decided I wanted to tackle the mount's periodic error with PemPro.

I slewed back to Regulus and fired up PemPro -- Oops! Since I joined my laptop to our domain, my user id was no longer a local account and PemPro decided my evaluation period was over. Well, I was planning to purchase it anyway so out came the credit card and you guessed it -- the equipment junkie had another new toy.

So when I purchased PemPro I found out there was a new version -- 1.7 so I downloaded it and tried it out. Arrggghhh! Now it keeps losing the star from the track box!! I checked the mount and other settings and couldn't figure it out. So on a sudden inspiration, I backed out the 1.7 version and reinstalled the older 1.6 version.

I had to reboot my laptop and the when I tried to connect back up to the camera CCDSoft wouldn't find it -- nor would MaximDL!! Huh?!? A little poking around and I realize my laptop has associated with the wrong wireless network -- the camera was on the other one. So I switch back to the main network and... Yippee! it works! (I later posted on the CCDWare support forums about this and Ray Gralak quickly found and fixed the bug -- Thanks Ray!!).

Ok, enough software games, I want to take some pictures. Slew the scope over to M13 and start imaging. I'm going to shoot a color sequence of about 50 pictures to stack.

Uh Oh -- the older laptop that is acting as the camera server has automatically downloaded and installed windows updates -- and it want to reboot! Grrr.. Well nothing to do but restart the session. I decide to take BW images instead this time -- 200 x 15 seconds each. I get the run started and then I notice the title bar of the images window does not have a filename on it -- Oh No -- Somehow in fiddling around with the other software, CCDSofts autosave got turned off -- I'm taking lots of images and not saving a single picture to disk! Ouch!

Oh well, by this time it is really early in the morning so I decided to call it a night and turn in. Better luck next time!

Dodging Clouds

Tonight I decided to concentrate on just imaging some clusters. I set up the scope and watched with some trepidation as clouds began passing overhead.

Things did not clear up until around 11:45 so I spent some of the time testing out EthSrv program for my ST-237 camera. This camera using the parallel port to download images, and my new laptop doesn't have one. So I put the camera on my old laptop and set up the EthSrv. It worked great! I was able to run CCDSoft on my new laptop (which is much faster) and connect to the camera on my old one.

Once the sky cleared off I aligned and synched the scope on Procyon. Then off to saturn -- I've not had good luck getting planetary pictures with the ST-237 so I just wanted to see what would show up. Sure enough, I got an over exposed planet but I could see several moons. Oh well, I usually use my Phillips ToUCam Pro II for planetary imaging and thats not what's on the scope tonight.

So I moved on to Arcturus to try and see if I could get CCDSoft to work on my Windows Media Center PC so we could watch the images come on on the big screen TV. My friends call it the worlds biggest laptop -- with a bluetooth keyboard and mouse I can relax on the couch and watch the images come in from the camera. It's a lazy way to do astronomy, but has a high wife acceptance factor since she likes to see the pictures as much as I do. Then it stopped working?!? Hmm... on a hunch I walked outside to check and sure enough -- the clouds were back.

Fortunately they did not stay long so I was able to move on to M3 to try taking a long run for stacking. 100x 30 second exposures. I left that running while we played Lara Croft Tomb Raider Legend on the Xbox 360.

By the time the imaging run finished it was time to go to bed -- 5:12am in the morning. It had been a pretty good night.

Equipment Fun

I have a Televue NP-101 refractor mounted on a Vixen GP-DX equatorial mount and Skysensor 2000-PC goto package. Tonight I checked out the backlash and adjusted the compensation on the declination axis. I'm not sure I have it set correctly so I'm going to have to do some "indoor observing" to fine tune things a bit.

But tonight I had two software packages that I wanted to evaluate -- PemPro and PoleAlignMax. I alligned my rig using the polar alignment scope and synched the SkySensor on Pollux. After that I tried out PoleAlignMax with my CCD Camera (an ST-237) to see if I could get plate solving to work with The Sky ver 6. It helps if you get the pixel size right for your camera, I thought it was 9 microns but it turned out to be 7.4 microns for the 237. That mistake caused some problems getting the plate solving to work reliabiliy although if I exposed the image long enough (5 seconds) it worked -- even with the wrong pixel size.

I quickly discovered that without really good backlash adjustment and compensation that the polar alignment evaluation is problematic -- I kept getting different results each run even though I did not touch the scope. So I'll have to come back to this after my "indoor observing" sessions later this month (some cloudy night).

Next I tried PemPro and was able to get a curve -- but I had trouble getting the calibration routine to work. The DEC reading remained red indicating I was not pointing to the best area of the sky for calibrating the periodic error correction. I'll keep trying because it would really help to have good periodic error correction when photographing deep sky objects.

Finally I got down to imaging some faint fuzzys. First M101 40x 1 minute exposures. One minute is about the longest I could do without getting elongated stars. I'm using CCDSoft version 5 to control my camera. Next I slewed around to M3 and tool 50x 30 second images. Then on to M51 taking 100x 30 second images. Finally to M108 one 5:30 image just to see what I'd get.

After that the clouds came in, shutting down things for the night. It was about 5:00am in the morning. I'll be sleeping in on saturday.

Where have all the stars gone?

It's been cold and grey here at Magnolia Manor and I have been spending my time reading and browsing the net for astronomy ideas. That's how I stumbled across astronomy blogs and decided to set one up. I need to be more organized in my observation technique and keep a better record of what I have seen and photographed