Here’s the Crab Nebula. Not a breathtaking pic of what’s normally a pretty dramatic supernova remnant, but it’s a single 60 second exposure. The other nine exposures I took and hoped to combine had too much movement. I think I have a periodic glitch in my drive of about a minute. I have to throw out about half my 30s exposures, and almost all of my 1 minute exposures. So I gMuess I’ll be taking my drive apart again on the next full moon, and sticking to 30s exposures in the meantime.
The good news is the star haziness was mostly gone last night, so it was the sky, not the optics, that had the problem a few nights ago. Also, my lighted reticle eyepiece worked like a charm for drift aligning. Finally, the altitude adjuster that I jury-rigged worked well. I’ll post a picture of that soon. Crab Nebula in Taurus, 60 sec, ISO 1600, 1000mm f/10, cropped.
Last night was my first out with the reassembled scope. I’m a little concerned with some haziness around bright stars, like I didn’t do a good job cleaning the optics, or the grease I added to the focus mechanism is off-gassing and creating a film on them. There was similar haziness with binocs, so maybe it was just moisture in the air.
I wanted to shoot the Crab nebula, but it took me a while to find (I’d never seen it before). Figuring it would take a while to image it, I decided on a simpler task. The Orion Nebula is an easy target, and I didn’t take a lot of care with it, but it’s still beautiful.
I purchased some light-absorbing flocking board to line the tube with (dark tubes=better contrast). That gave me an excuse to break the scope down, clean the optics, and do some maintenance. I took a picture before putting it back together.
Beautiful night last night. New moon, and the Diablo winds had swept away most of the haze and smoke from recent fires. I played with piggybacking for the first time, with my camera strapped to the top of the tracking telescope with a velcro contraption. This is the California Nebula in Perseus, NGC 1499. Ten 1 minute frames, stacked. 200mm, ISO 800, f5.6, from Albany, CA.
Here’s a part of the Veil Nebula near 52 Cygni I captured a couple of nights ago. I’ve always liked this nebula but never been able to see or image it myself. Unlike the Ring and Dumbbell, it’s a supernova remnant. Ten stacked 30 second frames taken from my back yard under pretty good conditions (good for my back yard, that is; I could barely see 52 Cyg, which clocks in at M4.3). The fog is back today, but the next clear night I’ll see if I can image the Saturn Nebula in Aquarius.
Modification successful; Camera disassembled and IR-Cut filter (LPF2) removed. Here are comparison shots (w/o post processing). Left is the modified Canon 1000D, Right is the stock 1100.
My first deep sky object. M57, the Ring Nebula, ISO 6400 35 seconds, 8″ SCT with unmodified DSLR @ prime focus. Just got the Celestron 8″ SCT from Salvation Army and fixed the drive. It tracks pretty well off a 9v. Working on modifying another DSLR to remove the filter that blocks the red colors.
Scott's Sky Shots 