Last night (March 19, 2017) was a remarkably clear night and I took the opportunity to take some images. Unfortunately the grass still had ice on it so I can to put my imaging scope on the deck. The house blocks Polaris (The North Star) so I was unable to get perfect polar alignment and thus suffered from drift in some long exposures. I also did not use an autoguider because I still need to learn how but it would have remedied some of the drift problems.
The basic procedure of what I did is written below.
- Setup tripod and mount and pointed the polar axis to some point behind my house where I thought Polaris was.
- Put the OTA (Optical Tube Assembly) onto the mount. My 2 year old imaging supervisor ensured it was done correctly.
 |
| Supervisor |
- Installed straight through finderscope and red dot finder on top of the OTA.
- Balanced the OTA with a 22lb weight.
- Aligned the system using Rigel and Betelgeuse, calibrated with Sirius.
- Installed DSLR camera using a 2" prime focus adapter in the eyepiece holder.
- Used Sirius to obtain focus through the camera.
- Imaged M46, M47, M93, M41, M35, M36, M37, M38, M42, M43 with exposure times between 5s-35s depending on the object
It was apparent in some of the longer exposures that correct polar aligned and autoguiding would have helped me a lot. Shown below are some of the images taken last night.
 |
| M42 - The Orion Nebula(below) and M43 - De Mairan's Nebula(above) |
 |
| Longer Exposure (M43 is more clear but stars are blurred) |
 |
| M35 in Gemini |
I will update the previous Messier blogs with their corresponding images. A Topic Contents box has been added to the main page of the blog so you can check out the latest in each category. If you are new to the blog feel free to look through some of your favourite constellations or deep sky objects.
 |
| Topic Contents |
The weather is a lot cooler and cloudy today so there may not be any observing or imaging. However, I will try to update the images on the Messier pages. Clear skies!
0 comments:
Post a Comment