Hi, this is my latest attempt at imaging galaxies, M101 in this case. I had previously taken luminance and h-alpha images of this galaxy, so I decided to add some blue and green to the picture and came up with this. Usual gear (TV102, Baader filters, Lodestar guider on CGEM mount and Opticstar 145M-ice camera).

This is M97 taken in narrowband Baader filters: 30 mins OIII (green), 15 mins H-beta (blue), 15 mins H-alpha (red) and added to 30 mins Luminance (clear). Using a TV102, Opticstar145M-ice camera and guided by a Starlight Express Lodestar guider on a Celestron CGEM mount. The green shows the emissions of doubly ionised oxygen caused by the UV light from the central star.

Makarian's Chain

Makarian's Chain is a stretch of galaxies that forms part of the Virgo Cluster. It is called a chain because, when viewed from Earth, the galaxies lie along a smoothly curved line. Member galaxies include M84 and M86, plus many others.

A 2-panel mosaic.
Each panel 12x5min Subs, Darks, Flats and Bias.

M3 - Globular Cluster - 01 May 2013

Here is an image of M3, a Globular Cluster in Canes Venatici (not far from Arcturus!), discovered by Charles Messier in 1764. It contains an estimated half million stars and is around 33,900 light years away.

The image, taken last night, is a stack of 50 1-minute exposures at ISO800, with darks, flats and bias frames on a Canon EOS550d, stuck on my Skywatcher 8" newtonian with a coma corrector. The whole lot was guided using PHD and a Philips webcam.  In the space of an hour I had to scrap 5 images with Satellite trails through them, which is surprisingly high given the small amount of sky I was looking at!

Stacked using DeepSkyStacker and processed with CS5 following Bill's excellent Open-Cluster tutorial guide. I can probably do a better job of this image and will try again when I have more time to fully understand Bill's methods, but I'm pleased with it for now!

The dim Galaxy in the upper right of the image is NGC5263, a Mag 13.4 spiral.

M101 - Pinwheel Galaxy

The Pinwheel Galaxy (also known as NGC 5457) is a face-on spiral galaxy around 21 million light-years away in the constellation Ursa Major. M101 is a relatively large galaxy. With a diameter of 170,000 light-years, it is seventy percent larger than the Milky Way, has a disk mass on the order of 100 billion solar masses and a small bulge of about 3 billion solar masses.

27/04/2013
40x300secs Subs, Darks, Flats and Bias

M97, the Owl Nebula in the Plough is a planetary nebula. The central star is ~1,630 light years distant and the blue colour probably results from H-beta emission lines. This image consists of 3x5-minute images taken in L, R, G, B Baader filters (1-hour total exposure) using an Opticstar-145M-ice camera (1.4 million pixels chip) on a Televue 102 refractor via MaximDL. Guided with a Starlight Express Lodestar guider camera. Final processing in MaximDL and Photoshop CS3.

PanStarrs TimeLapse 27th-28th April 2013

Panstarrs on video !  On April 27th-28th, 146 RAW DSLR images were captured using an 8" SCT on the pier at the WYAS Observatory. Collated in to a 15 second time lapse video, it shows the Panstarrs Comet moving across the sky. The comet was roughly 57° north-northwest of the Sun. in Cepheus, less than 1° east of the large emission nebula NGC 7822, also known as Cederblad 214. Because of its position, high in the northern sky, the comet will remain above the horizon all night for observers north of latitude 23° north.
(Video may not show / play on an iPad / MAC this is being resolved sorry for the inconvienence)

 

Comet Panstarrs - 27th April 2013

We finally managed to find Comet Panstarrs from the observatory pad last night, but it was very low down in the glow from Pontefract, so not easy to image!
This is a stack of 15 2-minute guided exposures using my EOS 550d DSLR on the back of a William Optics Zenithstar 80. It was visibly moving between images, so I've stacked the frames based on the comet, hence the star trails. The long 'pause' in the trails was due to a bank of cloud that graced us with its presence, but it did provide a good opportunity to get a brew on and take some darks. 
I stacked it with DeepSkyStacker and very crudely processed it with CS5.  I'll see if Bill can tweak some more detail out of the raw stack file on Tuesday!

Moon 28th April 2013 02:23am ( 3 days Past Full Moon)

This is an image of the Moon taken in the early hours of Sunday 28th April at 02:23am at the WYAS observatory.

As per the image take on the 19th April, it was taken with a Celestron 8" SCT on the Large Pier with a Canon 40D DSLR. without a f6.3 reducer installed (see note below). 50 images were taken at 1/640th sec at ISO 1250 for approx. 1/2 the moon was imaged in each 50 image set (upper and lower). This is due to using the 8" SCT without the f6.3 reducer which does not give a full image of the moon within the DSLR image frame.  Each half moon image set was first stacked in RegiStax 5 using the RAW image frames. Then the stacked images was saved as 16Bit TIFF and imported in to Photoshop 6 using the MERGE option to combine the half moon images to a Full Moon image. Then it was lightly processed in Photoshop for the image as shown.

What is an f6.3 (f3.3) Focal Reducer:-

A focal reducer mounts directly to rear of a telescope and alters the field of view / focal length of the telescope for astrophotography. When an f6.3 reducer is fitted to an SCT which is normally f10 it reduces the f10 to f6.3 reducing the exposure time required to image a deep sky object. A typical 5 minutes exposure at f10 would be reduced to 3 minutes.  However, the focal length of the telescope is also reduced so the image object is reduced in size. A typical 8" SCT focal length 2000mm is reduced to 1260mm. This effectively provides a larger field of with within the DSLR image frame.  (The f3.3 does exactly the same changing an f10 to f3.3 but reducing a 2000mm focal length telescope to 660mm).

Having suffered a calamity with my polar alignment during a night time accident I spent quite a while correcting it. This is my first attempt at M13 in Hercules following the re-alignment. At 2am in the morning of 28th April 2013 I decided to grab 40 minutes worth of images to compensate for the hard work. 10 minutes each of LRGB using an Opticstar 145m-ice camera, Baader filters, Televue 102 and a Lodestar guide camera. processed in MaximDL and Photoshop CS3. Probably due to lack of sleep I could not correct the colours properly, so I converted it to black and white.

Moon Image (Just past 1st Qtr)

This is an image of the Moon taken on Friday 19th April 22:20 at the WYAS Observatory.

Taken using a Celestron 8" SCT on the Large Pier with a Canon 40D DSLR, PC connected and operated via Canon EOS for remote DSLR control. The image was also taken using a f6.3 reducer, (see note below). 50 images taken at 1/640th sec at ISO 1250. These were then stacked in RAW image format using the older RegiStax 5. The image saved as a 16bit TIFF and was then opened in PhotoShop and lightened a little to give the final image. 

What is an f6.3 (f3.3) Focal Reducer:-

A focal reducer mounts directly to rear of a telescope and alters the field of view / focal length of the telescope for astrophotography. When an f6.3 reducer is fitted to an SCT which is normally f10 it reduces the f10 to f6.3 reducing the exposure time required to image a deep sky object. A typical 5 minutes exposure at f10 would be reduced to 3 minutes.  However, the focal length of the telescope is also reduced so the image object is reduced in size. A typical 8" SCT focal length 2000mm is reduced to 1260mm. This effectively provides a larger field of with within the DSLR image frame.  (The f3.3 does exactly the same changing an f10 to f3.3 but reducing a 2000mm focal length telescope to 660mm).

I added a few nights images of M51 to attempt to show the colour of the two galaxies. The total exposure was 1.5 hrs L, 40 mins R, 45 mins B and 50 mins G. The colour images should have been equal but I lost some to satellites crossing the images. Anyway the colour is beginning to show through.

This is a picture of M51 taken on 30.3.2013 during quite good seeing. Picture taken with Opticstar 145M-ice camera, Baader LRGB and H-alpha 35nm filters via a Televue 102 refractor. Guided by Starlight Express Lodestar guider. 1 hr L, 3x5mins red, 3x5 mins blue, 3x5 mins green, 3x5 mins H-alpha. Processed in MaximDL and Photoshop CS3.

Orion's Sword

Orion’s Sword is an asterism made up of NGC1973 (The Running Man Nebula), M42/M43 (The Orion Nebula) and the bright star Iota Orionis. The centrepiece, The Orion Nebula, is one of the brightest nebulae in the sky and is visible to the naked eye. The Orion Nebula is located at a distance of around 1,344 light years and is the closest region of massive star formation to Earth. It is estimated to be approximately 24 light years across, with  a mass of about 2000 times the mass of the Sun.  It is also sometimes referred to as The Great Nebula in Orion or The Great Orion Nebula.

15/01/2013
8x300secs, 8x120secs, 8x20secs Subs, Darks, Flats and Bias.

Kemble's Cascade

Kemble's Cascade is an asterism (a pattern created by unrelated stars) located in the constellation of Camelopardalis. It is an apparent straight line of more than 20 colourful 5th to 10th magnitude stars over a distance of approximately five moon diameters. It was named in honour of Father Lucian Kemble (1922–1999), a Franciscan friar and amateur astronomer who discovered it while sweeping the sky with a pair of 7x35 binoculars. He described it as "a beautiful cascade of faint stars tumbling from the northwest down to the open cluster NGC 1502".

10/12/12
A 3-panel mosaic.
Each panel 9x5min Subs, Darks, Flats and Bias.

Europa transit of Jupiter 29th November 2012

These images of Jupiter were taken using the 14" Meade SCT at the WYAS observatory. Seven 1500 frame .avi files were taken at 10fps and processed in Registrax 6 to create a .tif image from each .avi file. The .tif images were then finally processed in Photoshop.

The Eurpoa transit started at 19:29 and finished at 20:53 on the 29th November. These images were taken between 20:22 and 20:53.

Jupiter is the fifth planet from the Sun and is the largest planet in the Solar System. It has four Galilean moons or satellites. Transits of Jupiter happen at regular intervals and details can be found by using the  Stellarium planetarium program for your computer,
( It can be downloaded from this url   http://www.stellarium.org/ )

NGC7662 (a.k.a. Caldwell 22 and The Little Blue Snowball. 3,200 light years distant in Andromeda and 32"x 28" arc seconds in size. Images taken during a full and very bright Moon on 28.11.2012 in narrowband filters plus luminance. Equipment: Televue 102, TV 2 x Powermate, Baader 1.25-inch filters in Atik filter wheel. Opticstar 145m-ice camera (1.4 million pixels) guided by Lodestar guide camera on CGEM mount. Images processed in MaximDL and despeckled in Photoshop CS3. L: 9 mins; H-alpha (Red) 20 mins; OIII (Green) 20 mins, H-beta (blue) 15 mins.

M45 - The Pleiades

M45 - The Pleiades or Seven Sisters, is an open cluster containing middle-aged hot stars, located in the constellation of Taurus, and one of the nearest star cluster to Earth. The cluster is dominated by hot, blue and extremely luminous stars that have formed within the last 100 million years.

10/11/12

12x5min Subs, Darks, Flats and Bias

Bonfire Night Double Cluster

The Double Cluster is the common name for open clusters NGC 884 and NGC 869 in Perseus. The clusters are at distances of 7600 and 6800 light-years away, respectively, so they are also fairly close to each other in space. These are relatively young clusters, with NGC 869 being around 5.6 million years old and NGC 884 around 3.2 million years old. Unlike most other object in the Universe, these clusters are blueshifted and are approaching Earth at a speed of around 22 km/s.

5/11/12
16x5min Subs, Darks, Flats and Bias.

The Triangulum Galaxy

The Triangulum Galaxy is a spiral galaxy approximately 3 million light years from Earth in the constellation Triangulum.  It is also known as Messier 33 or NGC 598. The Triangulum Galaxy is the third-largest member of the Local Group of galaxies, which includes the Milky Way Galaxy, the Andromeda Galaxy and about 30 other smaller galaxies. It is one of the most distant permanent objects that can be viewed without the aid of a telescope good viewing conditions with no light pollution.

This image is a combination of images taken on the 10th and 17th November using an 8" Celestron SCT with f6.3 focal reducer, guided with a QHY5 guide camera and a Canon 40D DSLR as the image camera. There are 6 images of 165sec @ ISO 1600 and 19 images 245 sec @ ISO 1250, stacked in Depp Sky Stacker and finished in Photoshop. 

This image of M1 is a blend of Luminance, red and H-alpha images taken in separate image sessions (hence the diagonally offset image. It was an experiment to see if images from different runs could be combined to create a more detailed image. It was made into a black and white image in Photoshop CS3.

The narrowband image of M1, the Crab Nebula, that I took was blended with a luminance filter image taken in the same image run. This gives a more subtle picture and removed all background sky noise needing no further adjustment.

M1 in narrowband filters

This image of M1, the Crab Nebula in Taurus, was taken in 85 minutes of narrowband filters H-alpha 7nm, OIII, SII and H-beta. The pink is hydrogen and some sulphur, the blue is hydrogen, the green is oxygen. Usual set-up Baader 1.25-inch filters on cooled Opticstar 145m-ice camera, Televue 102 refractor on CGEM mount, Lodestar guider and control via MaximDL as well as photo processing. Photoshop CS3 was used for final touch-up.

M1 Crab Nebula
3x5 mins L, 1x5 mins R, 3x5 mins G, 1x5 mins B, 2x5 mins H-alpha - Baader 1.25-inch filters. Using Opticstar 145m-ice, CGEM mount and Lodestar guider. Main scope Televue 102 refractor. Processed in MaximDL and despeckled in Photoshop CS3.

This is the centre of M31, the Andromeda Galaxy. It's about 2.5 million light years away and this image just shows the central region (it's actually 6 times the diameter of the full Moon to see it all). I took 6 x 5 minute exposures in Luminance and a 1 x 1 minute Luminace image, which were all stacked and processed in MaximDL followed by a little tweeking in Photoshop CS3. Image taken on 5th November 2012 in between the fireworks and clouds. The camera was an Opticstar 145M-ice using a Baader 1.25-inch filter. The telescope was a Televue 102 and was guided by a Starlight Express Lodestar camera in a separate (really cheap) refractor in tandem. Celestron CGEM mount on a pier.