The Super Moon

I don't know why but for some reason the media really picked up on the full moon this month.  Because the full moon occurs when the moon is at perigee (its closest point to Earth) its called a 'super moon', but really its not that special.  This particular lunar configuration happens quite often and it would be really difficult to spot the 15% increase in size. I was quite interested in setting up my new telescope (an 11" SCT on a EQ6 mount) and testing it out.  Because I was just working the kinks out of the new setup I didn't really want to drag it all the way up the mountain so I chose a community league parking lot close to my house.  My plan was to take some shots of the moon and then try a Light Pollution Reducing filter and see how things in the city worked out.  Unfortunately I made a little mistake; I never labelled which filter was which in my filter wheel and ended up doing all the imaging through a narrowband OIII filter. Sadly, the result was not good.

The moon however turned out quite nicely!

Imaging with my 8" SCT

I felt just like a bear coming out of hibernation yesterday. For the first time in many months a group of friends joined me up on Mount Seymour for a great night of stargazing. I had a hard time deciding whether or not I was going to use my 8" Schmidt-Cassengrain telescope or my 2.5" Refractor.  After much thought I settled on the 8" telescope simply because I haven't had much of a chance to use it for imaging.

Ironically most of the pictures I've taken have been through my much smaller (although much nicer!) TV85. However I wanted to get some practice imaging with a long focal length so  I packed up the 8" and dragged it up to the mountain. The results were encouraging but not stellar (no pun intended) mostly because the freezing temperatures drained my computer battery and stalled my imaging session. I started out trying to image a faint group of galaxies called the Hickson 44 group. 

Given that the galaxies in this image are rather faint (the brightest one is magnitude 11.4) and I took about 1/10 the exposures that I wanted to I'm relatively pleased.  The focus and tracking were both pretty good.  However I did realise two things; first there is something on either my camera or my telescope because I can see some dark spots that are obviously not part of the picture.  Second its obvious that my SCT is not designed for photography; The field is curved and only the center of the field is suitable for photography. That being said I'm still pretty happy since this is my first serious attempt at using my SCT for imaging.

The second image I took was sort of ad hoc. I wasn't planning on shooting anything in Ursa Major but because of the way the light pollution from the city and the ski hill were working it was the only place there was dark sky.  Again, I got about 1/10 the exposures I needed but it just confirmed that my SCT can be used but not particularly well.

Christmas in Alberta

During the holidays I packed up my telescope and drove 1500 km back to my hometown of Edmonton. The weather cooperated quite nicely and even though I was only there for 5 days I managed to cart my telescope out to Elk Island Park.  Yes, it was snowy and yes, it was cold but the sky was clear and the lack of moon made for some terrific seeing. 

I was managed to take about 45 minutes of photos of IC 1805 before I literally got scared off by a pack of wolves.  That in itself is an interesting story; unfortunately because I got about 1/4 the exposure time I wanted the image is quite dim.  But its still noticeable.  I guess the nice thing is all I really need to patience.  The nebula isn't really going anywhere.

Registax

Its almost universally known that the easiest way to take high quality pictures of the moon or planets is using a small webcam.

The webcam is used to take a video which is essentially hundreds or thousands of individual pictures.  Computer programs like Registax look through all the individual pictures and pick out the highest quality images (the ones with the least atmospheric degradation, best focus, least movement) and stack those into one image. 

Although I've managed to get some nice pictures of Jupiter and Saturn this way it would be extremely difficult to get a complete image of the moon, particularly with any detail..  This is mostly due to the very small size of the image generated by the webcam.  The field of view is incredibly small; great for individual craters but impossible for the entire moon.

My previous post showed a high resolution image I am working on using Registax and my DSLR.  Instead of using a webcam I took about 100 shots of the moon on my DSLR and loaded them into Registax. At first this basically overwhelmed Registax and my computer's processing power.  Registax is designed to process pictures that are around 100 kb and I was loading pictures that were 18 Mb.  After a bit of fiddling around I found a way to get Registax to chug through them; there is a stacking option to use the minimum file sizes possible.  This isn't usually an issue when stacking tiny files from webcams but in this case it was an absolute necessity. If your using Registax version 6 its also a good idea to chose a small number of alignment points.  On a lunar shot you can get several thousand points but you really only need less than two dozen for decent alignment.  If you use the default alignment setting it will take forever to finish the alignment and stacking processes.

Even on my Quad-core desktop the processing took a while.  But once it was done I had one piece of my lunar mosaic.  Even with the wide field my DSLR gave me it only covered about 1/4 of the moon.  I repeated the imaging and stacking 4 more times and then had to stitch the final images together.

I accomplished this with the help of a great program called iMerge (although others have told me it can be done in Photoshop).

I'm still working on getting the colour better corrected and then I might restart the entire project with a barlow attached to get a slightly larger image.  It depends how long the post-processing takes.

High Resolution Lunar Picture

After nearly 2 months of almost constant rain it finally cleared up.  And wouldn't you know it, it was about 3 days before a full moon.  So rather than do some maybe marginal deep sky photography I opted instead to try some high resolution shots of the lunar terminator (basically the line that separates the shadow from the illuminated part of the moon). Using my DSLR it took a while before the pictures would stack properly (more to come on that later) but eventually I managed to get three nice shots of difference parts of the moon.  Using a great program called iMerge I was able to combine those shots into one nice panorama shot of the moon.  I'm still working on getting the colours to seamlessly match so you can still tell where the different shots overlap. 

Unlike many of the other lunar pictures I've taken this one is relatively high-resolution.  If you download the picture you can actually zoom in on many different parts of the surface, particularly around the terminator and get some amazing lunar vistas.

Lunar Eclipse

This past weekend we (as in all of us on Earth) were treated to a lunar eclipse.  At least those of you who lived in a non-cloud infested city were.  The eclipse started at about 4:45 am and ended about 6:30 am in Vancouver.  Unfortunately from the vantage point I chose I only got to watch it for about 25 minutes before clouds rolled in a covered the entire sky.  Its actually doubly sad because this is the last lunar eclipse until sometime in 2014.

Despite the poor seeing conditions I did manage to see about 1/4 of the eclipse and I'm thankful for that.  I set up my telescope and camera in Terra Nova park in Richmond. I was planning on taking a nice mosaic of the eclipse at different times but this was thwarted by the clouds.  And my poor choice of cameras.  Out of haste I grabbed my modified T3i which has the IR filter removed.  The result is a noticeable reddening of the moon even though it should be a nice off white until totality (which I missed). Anyway since I missed the majority of the eclipse I've only included one of the unedited pics I took just after the eclipse started.  Enjoy!

Second take at Orion

Orion Nebula, Year 2.

Last year when I seriously started astrophotography the Orion nebula was my first real target.  Its bright.  Its easy to find.  And it looks really cool.  However its also really hard to get a decent image of.  Mostly because the stars that make up the Trapezium (the bright central part) overwhelm the more diffuse, dim outer layers.  This was my second attempt, and due to a malfunctioning autoguider, shifting tripod and really cold temperatures it was limited to about fifteen 30 second unguided exposures.  Still, its worlds better then last years shots. I've put the two shots side by side for easy comparison.