5 Years is a longtime

The astro Geek has returned.
Hello and welcome back to everyone out there, I hope you have all been staying safe with your families and keeping well.  How surreal is this situation we are all facing not just as a country but globally. A battle we need to fight together, stay strong and stay safe people. I could rant on about the governments here and around the world in dealing with this unprecedented pandemic but I will leave the politics out for today.

It has been 5 years to the day since my last post. I am not ashamed to say in that time I suffered a mental health breakdown from the job I was doing at that time. I was very ill and went to some very dark places. I required mediation to make me sleep, put on some serious weight, became type 2 diabetic and developed sleep apnoea. I stopped breathing 23 times an hour. I was wearing a Darth Vader mask each night and suffered panic attacks for the fear of stopping breathing again. I had hit rock bottom.  Sad to say during that sad time my passion for astronomy withered, I was angry that I would never again enjoy the feeling and contentment from being under the stars. In that darkness I thought I would never use the observatory again so I sold everything, yes everything.

Fast forward 5 years. 
Without the support of my amazing family I know I could not have done this, their love, support and guidance I am coming through the other side, I am not the same person I was I know that and makes me sad, I have plenty of faults and there is still plenty to fix around self confidence and self worth. But regular exercise and diet has now reversed the type 2, I have lost 3 stone , I can run 10K when the knee is ok and no longer do I need the dark lords mask to breathe at night. I found myself too stopping and reading Facebook posts from my friends at Breckland Astronomical society who are posting amazing images and felt that longing again to be part of what I have loved had since childhood I was soo happy it had not gone forever.

Life has changed a great deal for us all in that time. The last 5 years are a bit of a blur to me, probably a good thing and sad too I feel I have missed out on my girls growing and being a proper dad for them during that time. I am sure you know what I mean by that, just hard to put it into the right words. We lost too Katie's Dad Alwyn a wonderful kind man whom we all miss so much. I also learnt recently the sad loss and poor health of some of the clubs members, I also see some friends too who are fighting the same fight and battle with mental health. My thoughts, best wishes and love I send to you all. Please remember I am here for a chat anytime if you need it.

A new hope. 
Got to love a Star Wars reference. More really a new start or beginning. Wow has astro kit changed over recent years. I have spent months looking, reading reviews, youtubing and putting together a modest set up again. The usual battle between wide field and super long focal length was the choice. I have always been a wide field imager and love that cinematic view of a faint fuzzy won the day.

The New Set up.
The mount is the Sky-Watcher Eq6r pro. I believe the heart of any good rig is the accuracy and precision of the mount. I was tempted by the Ioptron CEM60 but just a tad to far out of reach this time. Quiet stepper motors and a hefty 44lb payload will be more than enough for many years to come.

Main scope Sky-Watcher Esprit ED100 Triplet. An amazing scope with a proven reputation for quality of image reproduction. Incredible flat field with the specifically designed .85 focal reduced / field flattener reducing the focal length to a wide field 468mm @f4.7.

Imaging Camera ZWO ASI294MC Pro. I must admit I am a fan of Trevor Jones from the Astrobackyard a fantastic You Tuber who's adventures I follow regularly. He uses this camera with a similar set up and produces amazing results, so much more sensitive than my Starlight Express MC25 of just a few years ago. Zwo have an amazing line up of cameras and I have been using them for many years as a guider and planetary imager. 

                                                                                              

Image control ZWO ASIair Pro. A truly unique piece of hardware that has revolutionised image capture. ASIAIR PRO is a smart WiFi device that allows you to control all ASI USB 3.0 cameras, ASI Mini series cameras, DSLR cameras and an equatorial mount to do plate solving and imaging with your phone or tablet/iPad when connected to ASIAIR PRO via WiFi.

Dual bandwidth WiFi Control: 5G & 2.4G supported. 

Independent Guiding & Imaging: Standalone guiding & Imaging without the need of PC. Everything is under control with your phone!

Preview in real time: Preview: with the help of WiFi network, ASIAIR PRO can preview images in nearly real-time. Auto & manually histogram stretching is always useful for dark deep sky imaging.

Plate Solving: Offline plate solving can be done in a few seconds.

Supported cameras: ASI USB3.0 camera, ASI cooled camera, ASI mini cameras, DSLR cameras 

USB Hub: ASIAIR comes with 4 USB ports, you can connect up to 4 USB devices and don’t need USB Hub.

Power Supply and Power Hub: ASIAIR PRO needs 12V DC input. It also serves as power hub for up to four other devices - thanks to four 12V DC outputs!

Guide Scope & Camera. Altair Astro's 60mm guide scope and again a ZWO camera this time the 120 MM are the perfect lightweight partners for guiding.

Filters.  ZWO have designed a magnetic drawer that accepts 2" filters that eliminates the necessity for the removal of camera to add or change a filter. At 22mm depth it forms part of the 55mm back focus. So simple..

Optolong L-eNhance dual bandpass filter enables narrowband photography with color cameras and significantly reduces light pollution too.

The spectral lines H-Alpha, H-Beta and O-III are let through almost unhindered.

Periferals. Lynx Astro EQ Mod cable. Provides connection to the EQ mod software and connects directly to the ASI air pro for mount control and guiding. No more ST4 cables ( I savoured every minute of cutting into little pieces).

The next project a new home for them all.

Add caption

Part 1 of the delivery is here.

 Well it is officially my fault that the clouds will be with us for the next few weeks. Part 1 of the new set up has arrived.

ZWO ASI 294 MC Pro

ZWO ASI 1120MM Guide camera

ZWO ASIIR Pro

2" Optolong L-Pro (light pollution filter)

2" Optolong L-Enhance filter ( Dual Band Ha Flter)

M12 More than pleasing to the eye.

The globular clusters in the Milky Way are all estimated to be at least 10 billion years old and therefore contain some of the oldest stars in the galaxy. They contain an abundance of low-mass red stars and intermediate-mass yellow stars, but none greater than 0.8 solar masses. There are about 150 known globular clusters in the Milky Way. It is thought that globular clusters formed very early in the vast halo surrounding the nascent galaxy before it flattened to form the spiral disc. Star formation would have stopped in these clusters maybe 13 billion years ago, so only old stars are expected to be found there.

Described by Charles Messier as a nebula without stars, it's discovery almost 251 years ago this May 30th. M12 is fine example of a globular cluster, appearing to me visually in my 110mm as a compact dense core with a fainter outer shell. I have the luxury of shielding myself from extraneous light inside the observatory but I still like to cover my head with a dark towel and allow just the faint photons of light to touch the retinas. Somewhat smaller than M13 my eyes are drawn to the triangular shaped 3 stars to it's lower left resolving them to starlight points easily. I wanted to highlight that with this image taken Tuesday night with what was one of the best clear nights of the year. Just over 20 degrees above the horizon and tainted with the light from the nearby town of Watton. I limited exposures to 10 minutes and this was just about the limit as a gradient was becoming a problem. 2 Hours in total calibrated and stacked in Maxim and processed in Photoshop using several layers in an attempt to keep the core stellar like. My focus was a fraction off as 12th+ magnitude stars show a little blooming, noticable when stretched so I have sacrificed some of the background stars. Having never image M12 before I am pleased with the result.

3 pixels

I know there is still plenty of time to capture the spring galaxies. Well not for the next week at least with the full / waning moon spoiling the Eastern skies. However I started a Galaxy project The objective was another deep field to image as many of the Coma cluster of galaxies. First estimate was approx 1200 -1500. I will be happy with that.

 I  started with the accumulation of 3 hours in 20 minute subs with flats using the William Optics GT81 and starlight express camera. Resolution was 3.37"/pixel with a field of view at 2.83° x 1.88°. I also captured another 5 hours 40 minutes from the FLT110 TMB with darks and flats. Resolution would provide 2.09"/pixel. in a 1.75° x 1.17° field. Unfortunatly I did not manage to keep the angle of camera rotation the same so the final fov would be somewhat smaller. Calibration worked  reasonably well in Maxim, a few hot pixels remaining not 100% happy with the flats from the 81mm either. The 81mm frames scaled to the 110mm's ok though. Processed with just levels and curves in photoshop. Definately a gradient there. I will have a go at that later.

Platesolved in Maxim DL and compared against Carte du ceil. I have several faint galaxy catalogues added and immediately CDC filled with little round circles. I am certainly not going to label all of these???. With probably only a few dozen of our own galaxies stars in the field, everything else is a galaxy mostly from the Coma cluster. This is where the fun begins. CDC labels the PGC galaxies to magnitude 20 anything deeper just leaves a blank. One particular example was labelled PGC 4628378. Listed as 0.0 x 0.0 ' in size and no magnitude it states it's listed under the HyperLeda Database for physics of galaxies. A complex search of 13,000 databases made the task somewhat tougher than I expected as there have only 6 bibliographic references have been made since 1950 on this object. The Hyperleda database splits into many sub categories and redesignated our fuzzy as GMP3397. This was confirmed by the use of Aladin and images gathered by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey SDSS. (pictured). I also cross referenced the data with the Keck/LRIS spectroscopic confirmation of Coma cluster dwarf galaxy membership assignments 2010.

This was starting to gather pace like finding a great great great uncle on Ancestry.com.

Using the VizieR Online Data Catalog: GMP catalogue: galaxies in the Coma cluster (Godwin+ 1983). Classification confirms it is a galaxy within the cluster one of 6724 with a magnitude >21 in a 26.3 degree square area centered on the Coma cluster.

Size appears to be 6 x 4 arc seconds. So resolving at 2.09"/pixel that would equate to around 3 pixels on the camera sensor at magnitude 21.84. Bottom left is a 800x zoom and inverted image of the location, CDC photographic plate is on the right. Finally on the left show 3 pixels that are a few shades lighter than the background. This confirms the deepest I have ever imaged.

The 2nd line confirms RA and Dec and a magnitude of 21.84

The sky at Night.

I can finally tick off appearing on The sky at night tv programme from my bucket list. I was lucky enough to have my image of the Horsehead nebula appear with myself and Pete Lawrence on the programme. The interview involved 2 pieces to camera with a number of questions asked. Final edit and broadcast was reduced to about 30 seconds. As mentioned before this is the second time the team has visited Breckland AS. An open invite was given to return if we can offer anymore future programmes.

Star trails

Star trails from Saham Hills observatory

 

 

The last time I imaged star trails was with my old Olympus OM1 film camera back in Somerset.

I have seen a few really nice compositions on various Facebook pages using a free programme

http://www.startrails.de/html/software.html .A very simple programme to use. Take the images load into programme and select the trail type and go. In a short while you have a fantastic pic like this.

 

 The sequence is 150 x 40 second images from the Canon 40D and 18-85 IS USM lens @18mm Iso 400.
Capture started at 21.22 hence the deep blue sky. The bright star at bottom right is Vega rising. I am sure I will be posting many more of these before the year is out.



New Life in an old focuser

I tested a replacement focuser for the 110mm unfortunately it doesn't fit due to the 4" fitting on the 110. Having removed the existing I decided to have one more bash at trying to get the darn thing moving. I have the technical diagram for the focuser and decided to adjust the bolts that state should only be adjusted by an engineer. What the heck it's busted so what's the worst I can do. Fix it!!!!!

So 20 minutes later I have a reasonably smooth movement going, readjusted the tension to take the weight of the field flattener and camera. On it went and bingo it worked in both directions. I don't think I want to remove the camera ever again.......

A rebalance of the scopes was required to bring back the Starlight camera back into operation. 
A lovely flat field test has resulted in sharp round stars at the edges of the frame too. I took 40 sky flats and created a decent master. Dark frames also captured for a full calibration. I like to use a median setting in Maxim DL as this gives best removal of hot pixels. 5,10 & 20 minute guided exposures have given me a very smooth finish. Processed in Photoshop. The best image of M13 I have taken has resolved stars to the core. The somewhat forgotten Ngc6207 is showing structure and threre are a few more little galaxies easily visible. A PGC galaxy 3515221 can also just be seen at mag 19.64. This side by side inverted image and CDC chart confirms its location.

An inverted image of the core

Jupiter

Some recent captures under less than average seeing. Using my ZWO ASI120MC camera and the clubs Celestron C9.25 with a 2x Barlow lens. Captured at 11 frames per second approx 90 seconds of recoding to avoid image rotation. The best 50% of frames captured was the result. My best capture of the Great red spot I like the small white disturbance into the south equatorial belt, that defines the red spot nicely. I can also see  some lovely striation detail to the North Belt. I am pleased with it despite the seeing, but not as happy as I would like when seeing some of the other jupiter images posted on Facebook groups. I will of course endeavour to get a little more each capture and produce an image worthy of publicaion.

I am very happy with this image capture of Jupiter and Ganymede. A steadier atmosphere gave a small improvement to the overall image quality. Captured to the right is Ganymede. It looked like a horrible blur at first. An RGB realign later has given a pleasing result to it's disk. I also gave a small increase in colour vibrance and some contrast adjustment. Some distinct patterns in the north & south temperate belts can also be seen. I have a few more Avi's to process and I will add to this post if anything new comes from them..

 

The Sky at Night Update.

Last night was an amazing night for me and the society http://www.brecklandastro.org.uk/. For the second time now we played host to the sky at Night crew to take part in Aprils show that pays homage to the Hubble space telescope and it's 25 years of service. The focus of the show will be the iconic images produced by hubble. The club members had selected thier own favourite & best images for targets that hubble has imaged and the crew selected a few for the show. Richard's, Bob's and my own images were selected. We each done a piece to camera answering questions from Pete Lawrence. Living in hope they don't end up on the cutting room floor. The show will be broadcast on April 12th on BBC4

The Sky At Night

Our society http://www.brecklandastro.org.uk/ will once again play host to the Sky at night team. Hopefully the weather will hold for some observing. I hope to show the team some of my deep images showing the mag 20+ galaxies & quasars I have captured. The topic is Hubble's "Deep field" to coinside with it's 25th anniversary. I hope they will be interested. Watch this space for an update.

Solar eclipse or not........

Diary entry for March 21st 2015 just reads "Bugger"

Alas the weather as usual blotted out ANY view at all of the solar eclipse. Right on cue at 11.30 the skies cleared to reveal what the remainder of a lovely spring day. I am of course disappointed that I didn't get to see anything. However I get get some pics of the Jan 4th 2011.

 

 So at least this post is totally wasted.