Day 20 APT - Astrophotography Tool software setup and images.

Similar to yesterday - breezy and sunny with light cloud. I decided to set up APT  - Astro Photography Tool to use with my Canon 40D instead of the EOS software that began to behave erratically apparently - in reality it was due to the almost full hard disk on my computer. However APT is specifically astronomy oriented so worth making the transition.

A description of the software is here.

 This shows a previously taken image opened in the image browser. There is a live view option that can be selected to check pointing and focus. A key thing to know at this stage is the brightness adjustment that allows adjustments up to 200%. Objects hardly visible at normal brightness become much brighter. A very useful feature.

A particularly good feature is the way in which the software will calculate the Field of View and Image Scale if you tell it the focal length of the lens or telescope. The camera details are added by the software once it knows which camera you are using.

The magnifier allows you to see the images in detail. For example the Flame Nebula can be seen on this short exposure 38mm lens image.

 

 Selecting the Camera Tab allows you to connect the camera and select a Plan from a predetermined list. The plans editor is where you set up the plans for flats, darks ,lights etc.

 NOTE: The brightness adjustment button!! Very useful.

Day 19 Sierra Cabrera Views, Canon 40D images of the California Nebula and the Rosette Nebula.

A warm and sunny day but windy again with passing clouds.

Some Cabrera views on my walk.

More images taken with my Canon 40D and 38-76mm zoom lens.

CALIFORNIA NEBULA

ROSETTE NEBULA

Day 18 Centaurus A video, Webcam set up.

Not a good day today - cloudy and very breezy up here at about 1200 ft. above the sea. Have  looked at New Mexico, Sierra Nevada and Siding Spring Telescopes today - all clouded out! On Day 15 I talked about my remote image of Centaurus A repeated here

Browsing through the huge NASA video database I came across this video about Chandra X-Ray observations of the galaxy released just a few days ago. It shows a spectacular jet from the black hole at the centre.

I set up the webcam today focusing it on the mountains - still have a problem with the USB hub - can't get it to work. It worked every time in the Leyland dome - can't see the problem. I realised I was using the wrong mains socket - some Spanish sockets have an earth and some don't. The telescope and cameras were plugged into one with no earth - I could feel a tingle on the tripod legs that made me realise. Plugged into an earthed socket now - no tingle!

I now have 3 usb cables running outside for the telescope, the Canon 40D and the webcam. They all work - but should do through 1 cable and the hub!

 The evening was cloudy so again no observing.

Day 17 Telescope location video and local bird life.

A really bright and sunny day first thing in the morning.

A brief video showing the location - apologies for the noisy sparrows.

The telescope shadow on the air conditioning unit on the terrace

Notice the TAL 1 has just the Telrad base as the Telrad itself has been transferred to the 4" refractor. A very nifty arrangement!

There was some bird activity

A sparrow thinking of ending it all

Oh no...

It landed safely

and a White Wagtail on a nearby chimney

Still no sign af any Bonelli's Eagles

This is a previous image

 Unfortunately the weather went downhill so no astronomy today.

Day 16 - Windy day - Cloudy New Mexico - Canon 40D attached to ETX90 - Toucam Pro attached to 4" Refractor. -

Not a bad day but sufficiently windy to get me worried about the telescope outside. I have added securing lines fixed at three points that should keep it safe! I started to take an image on Telescope T20 in New Mexico but part way through the roof closed due to bad weather. I decided to transfer the Canon 40D from the Meade 4" to the Meade ETX90 for a trial.

This is how the camera is attached

 I also decided to attach my Toucam Pro 740k to the Meade 4" refractor.

The Toucam Pro is a fairly old Webcam shown in its original planned method of use here:

There is a special adaptor that replaces the Toucam lens with a 1 1/4 inch tube that fits into the eyepiece holder.

Here is a closer look at the threaded end that screws into the Toucam

and the removed Toucam lens

and here it is with the adaptor in place

This is the USB webcam ready to be connected to the telescope.

and plugged in to the eyepiece holder.

ready to go when connected to the computer.

The day remained fairly windy and clouded over but I noticed it was clearing towards midnight but decided to wait for an earlier start - hopefully tomorrow!

Day 15 - Sparrows - Centaurus A - Uphill Climb - Telescope Setup - Images of Jupiter and The Pleiades.

A similar day to yesterday - clear and sunny in the morning with the odd bit of cloud around.

Plenty of sparrows here in Cabrera - this is one of them perched on a chimney this morning. They like to congregate on the Orange and Lemon trees.

I have been looking at a remote image I took of NGC 5128 also known as Caldwell 77.  This has to be one of my favourite Southern Hemisphere objects  - the stunning peculiar galaxy NGC 5128  in the constellation of Centaurus, the Centaur,  which is half man, half horse. Centaurus A is so named because it is a strong radio source detected using radio telescopes. The original method of naming radio sources allocated the letter A to the strongest source in a constellation, B to the next strongest and so on. This is the image.

This was taken using telescope T13 at Siding Spring and is a 10 minute exposure on a single shot colour camera.  It has now been shown that Centaurus A is  the result of a collision between an elliptical galaxy and a spiral galaxy with dust lanes providing the material for the dark bands. Confirmation of this was provided by the Spitzer Space Telescope following its launch in 2003. Spitzer is an infrared telescope and was able to peer into the structure and actually produce an image of the spiral galaxy.

I have been trying to find the distance to this S0  type galaxy and it proves quite difficult. Opinions vary! A paper by Harris et al in 2009 gives a distance of around 3.77 Megaparsecs which is equivalent to approximately 12.3 million light years.

I "solved the plate" i.e.matched the image to a star chart which then provides me with data on that image.

So the position of the centre of the image on the sky is given by the Right Ascension (RA) and Declination (DEC) coordinates and the angular size of the image is calculated as shown. The camera has 1600 X 1200 pixels and each pixel corresponds to 3.65 seconds of arc in the sky - not very big!

I aim to try some throught the telescope DSLR photography with my 4" refractor by taking lots of short exposures and adding them in Deep Sky Stacker. To help with this I have added my ETX 90 OTA as a guide telescope - it was quite good fun removing the OTA from the fork mount....

I have set all of this up now and used the camera mount on the 4" to attach the ETX OTA. It is all set to go now having aligned the Telrad, the 4", the ETX and its finder! Having done that I had my usual constitutional up the "hill" to the phone masts.

Took some photos when I got back - not sure if it is going to be clear tonight,  This is the complete setup now.

and the ETX OTA

and the camera attached to the 4".

I can view the rocks on La Pilica hill quite closely through liveview on my laptop. I need some stars now.

It was a clear evening that I spent re-aligning and focusing the equipment starting with Jupiter which showed up well on the laptop screen in liveview. A 1 second exposure of Jupiter through the 4" refractor is shown below.

 

I then tried a 10 second image of the Pleiades.

 and a 20s exposure

Day 14- Sunny Day - Calar Alto from the Cabrera Arch - Cloudy Evening.

A bright and sunny day today. I will be viewing some potential sites for my more permanent observatory. I was talking just outside my front door when I suddenly realised that I could see the observatory at Calar Alto from my doorstep centred in the Cabrera Arch. I could only see one dome whereas previously I had imaged two from a different vantage point.

 A zoomed in view

and the previous image for comparison

Here is a map showing the "as the crow flies" distance and the distance by road.

 An easier way to see the telescopes at Calar Alto is to link to the video camera set up there! This is a still taken from the webcam video that points to the various telescopes.

Click on it and you will go to the live video feed in a new window. This is live video so you may see a car drive up or down the road!

 Click on the appropriate information below for more on Calar Alto Telescopes

3.5m Photo                                    2.2m Photo                                    1.23m Photo

3.5m Data                                      2.2m Data                                      1.23m Data

3.5m Observatory Cross Section   2.2m Observatory Cross Section1. 

A cloudy evening so no observing!

Day 13 A cloudy day and the Cabrera Uphill Challenge!

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Clear at first today and then rain moved in. I squeezed in my daily challenge of walking up to the telephone antennae.

The target:

A steep climb:

 

Made it - my truck below -----------------its a lot harder to get there than it looks-------------------------phone antennae below

Day 12 The Moon and the Onion, M31 using Deep Sky Stacker and IRIS.

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 A clear start to the day. It then clouded over but cleared in the evening so I was out at the telescope.

The Moon was visible from my front window in the morning. Here it is to the right of the Onion Dome house in the village.

A closer view

I set up in the evening as usual with the target of taking multiple short exposures to combine.

The image was taken with my Canon 40D and 38 to 76 mm zoom lens (shown below) set at 76mm. No telescope involved.

This image of The Andromeda Galaxy M31 is a combination of 19 median combined light frames (30s each) with 20 median combined dark frames.

 

The image was taken using the Canon EOS software and combined in Deep Sky Stacker and processed in IRIS.

Day 11 New Mexico Images, Canon 40D with 76mm lens images of Pleiades, M31, Double Cluster, Mizar and Alcor.

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A good day - completely blue sky. Currently taking an image (luminance only)  of M91 using telescope T21 in New Mexico.

here it is

This is not a particularly bright galaxy and is frequently referred to as Messier's Missing Object as no-one could identify M91 until (in 1969) it was reasoned to be NGC 4548 - the above object observed  by William Herschel in 1784. For the Wikipedia explanation of all this click here. The galaxy is clearly barred and is about 5 minutes across.

Here are the details of the imaging process starting up(focusing and pointing stage) (courtesy of itelescope.com)

Here is the technical data on T21 (courtesy of itelescope.com)

T21 has just become available again and I am currently taking a 5 minute exposure of M92 a globular cluster with a diameter of 14'.

Initial data from T21

and the image

I have cropped the original image.The globular cluster is only two-thirds of the size of its well known neighbour (both in Hercules) M13.

Just for comparison here is one of M13 that I took (remotely) earlier - I used the logarithmic function in IRIS to bring out the individual stars more clearly.

 At 7.25 pm I plugged in the CGEm mount with the 4" refractor and the piggybacked Canon 40D. All I had to do was plug in - switch on the CGEM and the Canon, set the CGEM to the initial registration marks and tell it to use the previous settings, I then used the Sky software to slew the mount to Jupiter, switch on the Telrad and make a slight adjustment to centre Jupiter in the Telrad - then centre it in the 32mm eyepiece on the 4" refractor. I then synched Jupiter into the current TPoint model and Mapped the point in TPoint. Hopefully the mount will be sufficiently aligned to give good pointing accuracy. I aim to use the same lens as Day 9 but with a 76 mm setting on the lens instead of 38mm.

I took a quick snap of the telescope (using flash)  while I am waiting for darkness to fall

I took an image (shown in monochrome) using the 76mm lens of the Pleiades. The image is absolutely crowded with stars in this 60 second image. The next stage for me is to take multiple exposures and stack them to see the result. I do not (yet) have an autoguider on this setup so long exposures are difficult. I will try multiple exposures at the next opportunity.

 

This is the negative of that image with image data

The 60s image below was taken of M31 - definitely worth a multiple exposure.

 The next image I took was of the Double Cluster in Perseus which is shown below with North to the right.

The upper cluster in this image is NGC 884 and the lower image is NGC 869. The image is 60 seconds at ISO 800 with the 76mm lens at f 5.6.

 I slewed the telescope to Mizar in the Great Bear or Plough and took the image below.