Michael A. Phillips' Astro Blog

Friday, February 19, 2010

Owl Nebula (M97) & M108 Galaxy

This is my single most amount of DSLR data in a single session or night to date.
5min (300s) x 42 = 3.5 hours at ISO 1600

For those not yet introduced to this part of the sky. M97, the Owl Nebula, is a planetary nebula with a small (visible in this image) 16th mag central star that has gone supernova. It has pushed out two lobes of space amongst the shell of gas that make the nebula appear like owl eyes.

In the lower right is a nearly edge-on galaxy, Sc type galaxy and about 45 million light years distant.

Optics: Meade LXD55 6" Schmidt Newtonian OTA
Mount: CGE mount on JMI Wheely Bars
Camera: Canon XTi with Hutech LP Filter (LPS-P2-FF)
Focusing Aid: STI focuser
Shutter control: Hap Griffin long exposure cable
Software: MaximDL
Guiding: DMK21AF04 with a piggybacked 4" SkyWatcher via PHD and ASCOM drivers
Operating System: WinXP Lenovo T61 driven via RDP remotely
Pre-Processing: Iris per automated Jim Solomon's Cookbook
Post-Processing: PS CS2 with tips from Jerry Lodriguss

Small PS, the AAPOD today is the same field of view, but much better done! 'Grats!

http://astronomy.fm/aapod/2010-02-20_M108-and-M97-widefield.html

Thursday, February 18, 2010

Mars 20100217 v84

Retooled my Mars processing routine again and got good results in avg seeing. I stacked in Iris per my v8 routine and before handing to AstraImage I 'pretreated' with some light wavelets. I think this came out quite well (calling it v8.4 for now) :)

I noticed the line or front coming off the NPC and thought it was a cloud, but it looks bright in red too, does that mean it's a dust storm??

Tuesday, February 9, 2010

Mars 20100208 0613UT

Best seeing of the season so far!

I'm tooling around with things, but most notibly is color matching with PS. I got so tired of, more green, less green, more red.... PS did a good job of a color match to a Hubble shot. I've still got some bad artifacts and am hoping to get one more round of good seeing in the next few weeks before it gets too much smaller.

I've also got a terrible backlog. So I hope I can learn some more and post to my site soon.

Mike

Better one from earlier, processed differently!

Tuesday, January 5, 2010

Another Mars via f/55 in my 8" avg seeing

I took 2min @ RGB every 15 min from 2300 to 0115 to make an animation of the rotation, but I think some of the frames are not very good when the seeing dipped to 4/10. This single capture might be near 6/10 but not by much. Capture details in the image.

Stay warm and don't be afraid of avg seeing in such a cold spell up here in the N. Hemi, Mars isn't going to get too much bigger!!!

Mike

Friday, January 1, 2010

Recent Deep-Sky Astronomy work

4 nights in December, most of which had bad seeing. 2 of them, I started with the CGE aligned and the white, 6" Schmidt-Newt on top and changed it out at midnight or later, in freezing temps (20*F) for the Orange 8" SCT. Phew. It wasn't very fruitful, but felt good to be able to field switch as the single armed fork C8i mount was still in the shop.

Ok, here's the totals:

4 nights
6 hr and 29 minutes of *Stacked* images represented here. Some were thrown away and or not processed yet!
I also got my dad some time on M31 with his Canon 50d at ISO 3200 :) - too bad the tracking wasn't better for ya dad!

M34:

M1:

M45:

Horsehead and Flame Nebulae - at a whopping 3.2 hours of stacked data! I'd like to add more to reduce the noise! Any tricks?! Lots of varied subs, but perhaps too long or too high an ISO?

I like it and it's perhaps my longest yet...