Heart Nebula

Having recently returned from an amazing week on Lake Windemere and some lovely clear skies, that is apart from the full moon obliterating any decent view of the Perseid meteors. I had a few great eveinings doing some light painting on the lake. This means the scope has had a week off from action. So the new project is going to be an HOO image of the Heart Nebula IC1805. 5 minute sub exposures starting with the Optolong Ha filter. A total so far of 40 subs with a total of 200 minutes. A lucky capture on my first sub was a meteor breaking the Heart in two.

Over 3 nights I have been able to shoot Oiii data with 73 x 5 minute sub frames totalling 6Hr & 5 minutes. An induvidual sub offers the faintest hint of detail.

The full stack of 73 frames shows a vast amount of detail and a really clean noise free master frame. For some reason my blog will not let me upload the TIFF file so these Oiii frames are JPEGS (aghhhhhh)

I followed the same Pixinsight processing as before for the Crescent nebula. I am still new to this amazing programme and need YouTube tutorials to follow. I feel I have overdone the contrast here of on the final Star reduced image, so I will be looking at a few more Ha hours to boost the outer ring of Hydrogen gas. Watch this space. But for now please enjoy my Heart Nebula. A fitting tribute to Mum too, she sadly passed away some twelve years ago on this day.

One last thing to mention is the guiding, after some welcome rain the skies have been very transparent and the guide numbers have been incredible with RMS totals under 0.25 arc seconds. Images of the guide screen are on the tablet so I will try and upload a screenshot.

NGC6888

It has been a tough couple of weeks wondering what the hell is wrong with my set up, and subsequently been a while since I posted any astro images, A power supply problem caused a few strange issues with the imaging camera, but all resolved now and running on full power again. Eager to capture some photons the dome was rolled back over the weekend and captured 6 hours worth of data on an amazing emission nebula. Ngc6888 is also known as the Crescent Nebula, but for me it resembles a jellyfish adrift on an ocean of stars. The colours you see here are 2 specific wavelength's of light Hydrogen (red) & Oxygen (blue), both are shells of gas produced from violent stellar winds from a star at the heart of this cloud.

Once again I have found a you tuber who has a great and easy to follow workflow. This time it was https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6lo2AJcHkU&t=1s

Transit of Venus remembered

I thought I would get this in a day early. Memories of 8th June 2004. I had a wonderful opportunity to witness a transit of the planet Venus across the face of the sun. A sight not observed by any human currently alive before that day. A transit of Venus occurs twice in eight years then nothing for another 105 years. So the first was visible 8/6/04 and the second was only visible in the UK for the final hour of transit around 5.00am on the 6/6/12. Unfortunately it was cloudy for me here for the second. I was completely disappointed because what I saw 8 years earlier blew my mind. The day started with a beautiful sunrise as I transported my scope to Dad's back garden for a better unobstructed view. During the set up the sky was a little unpredictable with some high cloud that I thought would spoil the view, but eventually cleared to reveal a blue sky. From start to finish over nearly six hours I was truly blessed with clear skies and some wonderful images, videos and I even appeared on a live broadcast on radio Norfolk mid transit. An astro bucket list item well and truly ticked.

3rd June Moon

Feeling a little frustrated with Pixinsight with calibration frames, so I spent an hour or so watching the setting moon on Friday night. Decided to roll back the dome and capture a few frames. A few frames is all the 2600mm pro is capable of per second so I captured an AVI for 3 minutes. Pre processed in PIPP and then rub through Registax. Not the sharpest but I like it.

A bit of a disaster

I like to post the good and the bad so here goes. M92 was the goal here but the data is very poor. I think that I have accumulated frost on the CCD sensor that has corrupted the entire data set. 45 x 60 subs through each RGB filter was just impossible to calibrate. I assumed firstly that it was a setting in Pixinsight that I was unfamiliar with, quite possible considering it is so new to me but after a new set of flats, dark flats and calibrated in both DSS & Pixinsight the results were just the same. I will take the data to Breckland Observatory this week and let a few of our resident Pixinsight experts have a play too. Here is the data anyway. Full size image and crop.#notimpressed. However I was happy with the focus. Win win.

M94

My second capture and full process with Pixinsight is a spectacular galaxy with a double shell. M94 is a bit of a cosmic mystery. Studies suggest very little to no dark matter. Possible suggestions of a galactic collision also seem to be dispelled so overall a bit of a mystery.

M94 has an inner ring with a diameter of 70". Given its distance, about 5,400 light-years (1,700 pc)) and an outer ring with a diameter of 600″ (about 45,000 light-years (14,000 pc)). These rings appear to form at resonance points in the disk of the galaxy. The inner ring is the site of strong star formation activity and is sometimes referred to as a starburst ring. This star formation is fueled by gas driven dynamically into the ring by the inner oval-shaped bar-like structure. Considering my image scale is jus under 2 arc seconds per pixel, the structure in the spiral arms is seriously impressive.

I must admit also I am seriously impressed by the quality of the last 2 posts that have been fully processed in Pixinsight.

M51 The Whirlpool Galaxy

The usual Malcolm luck happened last month, I closed down the observatory for some maintenance and what do we get a week full of clear skies. Still it gave me chance to get some  jobs complete such as wiring the dome to the wireless controller. Disappointing that the weather was clear but since rebuild, a PA and test of tracking and guiding was needed,  Every set up nicely and as expected and  from there I have managed over 4 nights captured five and a half hours of LRGB data on target.

Guiding has been excellent with excellent with numbers as low as .30 arc seconds accuracy. I will be happy if these numbers continue. As you can see target was M51, always a favourite and captured many times previously. 

     I am always astounded and I love the ZWO Asiair pro for its simplicity in doing almost everything now. Some  lovely new additions to the software update now include now sky atlas and the ability to name filters. There are of course many things that it cannot do including composing mosaics but I can live with it for now simply because there are other pieces of software such as Telescopius that communicates perfectly with the ability to download a CSV file with the mosaic parameters. There are several summer projects that will use this feature so look out for my updates on this feature. 

So the target was M51 using the LRGB filters with an aim for a couple of hours on each filter. In case of bad weather I set the imaging run to 30 minutes a filter. At least I would have something to process if the project fell flat. I have also the zwo electronic focusser so the whole process is totally automated when switching from filter to filter to imaging again takes under two minutes.

A Typical stretched 180 second sub frame (right) A small target for 550mm of focal length but I am hopeful for a decent crop out of the final data stack.

So after three good nights I have managed five and half hours of data with 30x 3 minutes sub frames on RGB and 1 hour of Luminance data.

During bad nights I also took the opportunity and captured a complete set of calibration frames too from darks, dark flats, & Flats.

To top it all I have finally taken the plunge into the technical world of Pixinsight. A scary thought but with the help of some serious video instruction from Adam Block I have created my first image.

Prior to starting the image processing I used Image calibration & Image combination to create all my master calibration frames.

Again this is all very new to me and I followed this process to create my first image.

Calibrated and stacked using the new WBPP (weighted batch pre processing) script new and updated script that works every bit as good as six or seven steps of manual image registration. 

Part of this hobby also includes trawling the expanse of YouTube and looking for videos that suit you knowledge set and by chance I found a chap called Richard Bloch. and found Basic image processing in Pixinsight 1.8, the cover image was of M51 and I was processing M51 so thought it worth a look, Turns out his explanations and information were spot on. I will send him a message to say hello and thank you

Dynamic Crop

Autoomatic background extractor

Colour Calibration

Histogram transformation

TGV Noise

Range select

Unsharp mask

curves.

Final result I am more than pleased with.

System set up

 

Well everything is all set up again in the observatory and despite a near full moon when taken everything is working well.

A few small tweaks on the aggression settings and guiding  numbers are down to a really impressive set of low numbers.

Observatory clean up

 A little maintenance is required for the observatory, the roof has been sticking a bit lately and I have also wanted to connect the wifi switch module to control the dome movement from inside the house. After all I have had had it a few months now and just never got around to figuring it out.

Observatory Dome Automation.    

The holy grail for this seasoned and now somewhat lazy astronomer is total automation in the imaging process. Long gone are the days of lugging the heavy mount from the shed, desperately avoiding the cat and power cables as you carry the scope across the lawn. On bended knee with one eye open trying to figure out the hour angle of Polaris, balancing, connecting, aligning everything to no avail as the clouds roll in.

151a is now my forth observatory build and the most challenging.

Atop of my observatory I have a 6ft fiberglass dome manufactured

 by American Company Technical Innovations. It has a motor drive system controlled by 2 motors that are set 180 degrees apart around the domes edge. As this power supply is located inside the dome, control is only possible in the observatory. This created issues on a number of levels from pausing an imaging run, going outside and setting off the neighbour’s security lights, moving the dome and returning inside to set things in motion again. With a shutter opening of 60cm the scope has a limited field of view before movement is required when observing or imaging. Doing this every half hour is a little frustrating but what else could I do..

...........................

I follow quite a few Youtube channels following astronomers as they battle their own journey of learning and improving in their hobby. One in particular is “Astrobloke” an astronomer who’s interest is creating a fully automated imaging set up with his roll on / off roof observatory. Over a few months he eluded to a the possibility of controlling his roof by the means of a app using a simple wireless relay. A simple and cheap little box purchased from Amazon for currently £26.

MHCOZY Ewelink WiFi Relay Switch,Self-Locking/Momentary Timer WiFi Switch Module,Compatible with Alexa Google Assistant (4CH WiFi RF 220V) : Amazon.co.uk: DIY & Tools

It. seemed a little to easy to be true and sure enough he got it to work. So I thought I would have a go too.

A few months passed and convinced myself I could not make this work as the internal wiring of the power supply looked just a mass of wires and struggled with getting my head around what was what at what wire went where. So I stripped it all back and rewired sending a supply to the module and outputs to each motor.  

 

I downloaded an App EweLink and paired via the wifi and pushed the button…It works. After adjusting a few settings the dome moves by itself for 3 seconds whenever it’s needed to move. The next step is to automate this with a programme like Nina or SGP. Astrobloke now says he has developed with another youtuber some open source software that does indeed work via Nina so it is now truly intergrated into his imaging process. This is something I will certainly like to look at but for now I am happy and content with pushing a button every 30 minutes,

The next and final part of the project will be dome shutter control open and close but for now no more getting up, going outside, no more accidental triggering of the neighbours lights, Lazy or what..

 

 

Moon 17th March 2022

 A Worm Moon is 97% illuminated.

Moon 12th March 2022

Not my most favourite object in the night sky, Captured on Saturday night approx 21.03.

AVI capture at just 4 frames per second, hardy a high frame rate but best 90% of 300 frames for each