Black Redstart

Images from Sierra Cabrera

Above and below - a Black Redstart (Redstart means Red Tail)

  

Galaxy Selection

I have started a new library of reference images based on their recession velocity and thus distance. Galaxies that are too far away will have supernovae that are too faint to image in 30 second exposures. Using a maximum recession velocity of  13000km/s and a Major Axis of at least 2 minutes of arc I have compiled an initial list of galaxies( that I call group A ) which works out at 1666 galaxies. I have ordered the list by increasing Right Ascension and have manually produced a text file (after much fiddling with Excel) and imported this into Orchestrate. This means that I can start an imaging session at any RA value depending on the Local Sidereal Time and the RA range visible. I am in the process of generating other lists based on the same and smaller Major Axis Values(MA). One advantage of Orchestrate is that it is possible to cut out chunks corresponding - for example - to a particular hour of RA for MA > 2 minutes - and combine this with - for example- the same hour of RA and a smaller MA - or other combination if required. The source catalogue for the data is the 3rd Reference Catalogue of Bright Galaxies by De Vaucouleurs otherwise known as RC3 so I started with a list of 23000 galaxies from which I am generating my imaging session scripts. I had initially hoped to do this using the Sky6 Data Wizard but that could only be used with databases already in the Sky6 catalogues. Self generated Sky Databases could be produced but they did not work with Data Wizard so I could not filter galaxies by recession velocity. SkyX evidently will do this and I note that an earlier (RC2) catalogue is included (less galaxies). I recently purchased SkyX but am struggling to work out how to use the renamed Data Wizard for my purpose. Thus the manual production and filtering of RC3 for Orchestrate.

Galaxy Imaging

Now that I have resolved the issues with the Paramount and the C14 I can run automated galaxy imaging sessions and last night managed to image 227 galaxies as part of the supernova search programme. The Moon started to seriously get in the way about 1 am local time so I gave up. To build up my new galaxy library I am tempted to let the telescope run all night and go to bed one moonless night but it is always a risky strategy! It is certainly quite a bonus not to have a dome to rotate!

This is one of the galaxies imaged  - PGC 9795

Over the past 2 weeks I have imaged almost 1000 galaxies and will start another cycle of the same galaxies to see if any supernovae have occurred as well as starting a new cycle to increase the size of the galaxy library.

Galaxy PGC 10052 was also imaged.

 This Barred Galay is PGC 2901