Wednesday, September 24, 2008
Butterfly Nebula from bad night
Sometimes there is days (nights), when everything goes wrong.
Last night was one of them.
First I had problems with my laptop and I had to reboot it several times.
It's a old well served Dell and booting it up takes for ever.
Then one of the cord to telescope was damaged and it took about an hour to
figure it out. After that I was ready so start my narrowband imaging session with
three filters.
First I selected H-alpha filter and got everything ready for imaging.
Guider was working fine and I started recording. I went out and stepped on the main power cord. Total blackout to the telescope. Huh... After an hour I got all on and running again (reinstalling couple of drivers etc...)
There was no more time for all three bands anymore, so H-alpha was now my goal.
After 7 x 1200s (20 min.) exposure they all looked good.
BUT BUT... when I examined them more closely and extracted red pixels from RAW-images
(thats how it works with one shot clor camera), I notised DEW, all but firs image was contaminated by dew.
There is a heater for my filter drawer to prevent dewing and cord from the power unit
was damaged! I soldered it back together but there was not enough night left for anything.
I shot flat frames just to be sure, and went to sleep for two hours before work.
Image here is a one twenty minutes exposure!
Camera, QHY8
Filter, Baader 7nm H-alpha
Optics, Tokina AT-X 300mm f2.8
Exposure, 1 X 1200s + flats and bias
Guiding, LX200 GPS 12" + PHD-guiding and Lodestar
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
NGC7000 as a Stereo Pair image
Parallel vision Image Pair
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Cross Vision Image Pair-
Images are stereo vision image pairs.
They tell something about "true" nature of this object.
This is not a accurate presentation of the real 3D dimensions,
but gives an idea about real nature of three dimensional object
floating in three dimensional space.
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If you need istructions, please, look at the menu right side of the page.
Monday, September 15, 2008
My first ever narrowband color image!
This is a very modest example of three colur narrowband image. But I place it here, since it's my first one. At 11.09. I mainly shoot H-alpha, but before clouds rolled in I managed to capture 4 x 900s O-III and only single shot of S-II, 900s. I will shoot more O-III and S-III when ever weather allows me to do so. In this image the "Hubble paletete" is used where S-II = Red, H-alpha = Green and O-III = Blue
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NOTE
This image is taken by using QHY8 cooled 6.1mb color camera.
Its not an ideal tool for narrowband imaging.
Each color channel is shooted trough separate filter, this means,
that only 1/4 pixels are used for H-alpha and S-II.
O-III goes mainly to the Green and Blue
pixels of the Bayer matrix array, so about 3/4 of the pixels are used in this case.
How ever, very high quality narrowband images has been taken by using color cameras.
Sunday, September 14, 2008
11.09, the opening image of the season
This is a first light for my new equipment, Tokina AT-X 300mm f2.8 manual focus lens.
North America and Pelican nebula shooted @ f2.8 with Baader 7nm H-alpha filter.
I will shoot later S-II and O-III channels to this target (those two filters are new as well)
to create a false color narrowband image.
Even full open, this lens is very sharp and large diameter (112mm) combined to a
fast optics (f2.8) collects photons fast. Exposure time to this relatively deep image was
only 5 x 900s = 1h and 15min.
This fast lens has a very narrow critical focus zone, about 17microns. (17/1000mm !)
I updated my homemade focusing system for this lens to use it with FocusMax software.
Camera: QHY8 (Red pixels only)
Guiding: Lodestar guider and PHD-guiding with LX200 GPS 12"
Exposures: 5 x 900s with Baader 7nm H-alpha filter
Lens: Tokina AT-x 300mm @ f2.8
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NO STARS
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Here is a same image but all stars are removed.
This way more details are visible in nebula area
and total amount of nebulosity is revealed.
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