[tmatlack]

Goat,

[SlowWalker]

MtnGoat, have you been taking any pictures of Jupiter this week?

[MtnGoat]

[MtnGoat]

First clear non windy night in three weeks, moon is about ready to wipe things out for a couple weeks but I managed to snag these Monday night… A new start on the Horsehead for this season..I'm going to keep overlaying data from subsequent nights onto this one..

Horsehead Nebula in Orion, 15 minutes with 8" F4.

And a fairly sweet 90 minute shot of the dust nebula around the star Merope in the Seven Sisters..the Pleiades, also known as Subaru if you are Japanese. I intended a shorter run time, but I went inside to warm up after starting the imaging run and fell asleep in front of the wood stove. When I came to 90 minutes later, I went out and Merope was still in the right spot in the images and it had been ticking over just fine without me. That works!

90 minutes of the star Merope and it?s dust nebula, located in one corner of the Pleiadies.

[MtnGoat]

Very good deal on CL today on a scope very similar to what some of you peeked through at the Teeth campout.. http://seattle.craigslist.org/see/for/1472519976.html and another good deal on a more advanced setup very close to what I use to take the photos shown on this thread..this is an 8" Schmidt Newt on a full computer mount one generation older than mine. Even if you don't want to take photos, this is a lot of scope for $400 http://seattle.craigslist.org/est/for/1472670161.html

[MtnGoat]

Finally cleared up for an evening, in spite of the bright moon I did pretty well with a 30 minute shot of the Orion Nebula..

Great Nebula in Orion

[touron]

Nice shot MtnGoat! You'll be happy to know that there is a budding junior astronomer out there. This tutorial drawn on Thanksgiving. I think the II refers to Chaper II (of something)

Chapter II, The Planets

[MtnGoat]

reprocessed the orion shot in order to bring out the color I know is in there. Not sure if it's too much, and lost some feathery details in the outer fan, but the dust on the right is turbulent looking now and the green core you see visually is now evident.

A dusty hydrogen storm in the adjacent Orion arm of our galaxy

[MtnGoat]

[MtnGoat]

$50 six inch reflector. probably already gone

[MtnGoat]

Was very cold tonight. 8 degrees when I went in. For extra fun, nothing went well.. except dead on GOTOs which is nice. I had to take new reference frames for the imager due to the temp. 20 minutes. Focus was never quite right and I would up screwing with that for a long time. Removed extender, centering ring, and imager and reseated them, then it was better but somehow still wound up with tiny egg shaped stars. This was not helped by the mount, which apparently is a bit sticky at these temps. Then realized when I made the dark frames I did them as JPGs, but I run FITS3P format. So all the corrections being made to each image had been yielding the odd blocky coloring I had been trying to figure out. Fine. Another run of darks (double checked to make sure I had FITS3P chosen as output), another 20 minutes. Finally went to the Crab Nebula, took 87 frames at 60 sec each. This photo run is a great opportunity to see how much astrophotography has changed as a hobby. Imagine spending 90 minutes in single digit temps bent over squinting into an eyepiece you dare not touch (Vibration problems), with a manual drive corrector in hand trying to keep a star on the crosshairs the entire time. One bump, one inattention to the star drifting out of the crosshairs, it's all over. Advance film and try again! Now you've got your shot in the can and you get to pay good money and wait a week to ten days, for this.....what it would have looked like back in the day with a film camera..one run, no drift correction by the SW, shown in first frame.

Up until the early 90's, this is what you'd get if you messed up or your mount wasn't dead on...usually both.

In stark contrast, take a look at what is possible with easily available tools today, using the same raw data. I tossed the worst 1 minute frames, culling down to 68 frames. I processed them with the SW tracking a couple stars I chose for use in aligning each successive frame. Then I used some image processing magic to bring out the faint details without burning out the center, cut out a lot of noise, sharped the details in the cloud, and ramped the saturation to get to the red areas. Pretty cool. M1, the Crab Nebula...remains of a supernova seen in 1064 AD. This object contains a visible light pulsar which flashes on and off 30 times per second...the pulsar is all that remains of the original star.

The magic of modern tech pulls this image out of the same data .

Not a bad shot, focus not good, tracking not good. But OK.

[MtnGoat]

insane price on a fully functional schmidt newt 8 with computer mount...I think it's the same one I listed earlier. $300 for a wide field 8" scope of high quality. http://seattle.craigslist.org/est/for/1504266480.html

[MtnGoat]

This scope is larger than many serious research instruments. Orion has just won scope industry bragging rights, for a long long time. This instrument is so large that it's owners will actually be able to make a sort of history as the first human eyes to actually see many objects reachable by this scope, which were formerly seen, even by researchers, only in photographs. Most big reasearch scopes are never used visually, and there are a lot of objects at this scopes limits visually...an exponential increase probably a couple times over what could be seen with the larger scopes used by amateurs today. I don't know what object catalogs you'd need for this thing, with a limiting visual magnitude reach of 17.5, using it for any average galaxy observing would often reveal all kinds of distant galaxies littering the field of view. All formerly placed in obscure listings because only some computer ever counted them from a photo. This thing would make the storied NGC list of 7000+ objects a beginners guide. Wow. Big Ones at Orion. Fifty, yes fifty inches of aperture... Dobsonian Reflector

[touron]

I almost clicked "Add to Cart", but then I saw the price! Plus you'd have to cut a large hole in the ceiling.

[MtnGoat]

Had a good Saturday night with the moon. I'm seriously impressed with the capability of the tiny Meade DS90 Maksutov Cassegrain. With 1250mm of focal length, it packs a good punch. Weight, 3lbs, size, about 4" by 14". These shots are each stacks of up to 240ish separate images taken at 1/100th sec. Averaging out the air motions is cheating, but as cheating goes it works really well. Total cost of system about 225$.

large circular range of mountains outlines enormous old crater

Sweet!

this lil 90mm scope actually kicks some butt

more moon

moon