Celestron Edge HD 8" OTA First Light

When I woke up Christmas morning and found the Celestron Edge HD 8" OTA under the tree, it was like being Ralphie in "A Christmas Story" opening his brand new "Red Ryder carbine-action, two hundred shot Range Model air rifle with a compass in the stock and this thing which tells time." 

Immediately, I was ready to set it up to capture galaxies and other deep space flora and fauna that I crave to image. However, I'm still waiting for that opportunity.  First came our annual holiday trip to Florida to see my wife's family.  Then came a week of our both having a terrible head cold. 

By Friday I was feeling better and set up "the Edge" on the deck to try to capture Jupiter & the Moon.  

Although it was clear outside, the "seeing" was not so good, and looking visually at the moon, I could see the mirage like waves caused by a turbulent atmosphere.

Undeterred, I decided to try a different capture technique than straight single shot captures with my Canon 60D.  This outing, I used a Televue 2x Powermate for an effective focal length of 4064mm.  For the first time, I used the Canon in "movie" mode, trying to capture a short clip for processing in Registax, a program I've never used before. 

As is usual for me, things didn't work out exactly as planned but I still enjoyed the experience.  First, having never used the camera to capture a movie, it took me a long time to figure out how to capture anything.  Eventually I was able to capture 110 frames of the moon with a shutter speed of 1/250 sec and an ISO of 400.  Try as I might, I could not capture more than 110 frames before the camera would quit.  Not sure what this problem is, since the SD card's speed is supposed to be fast enough to copy the data coming from the camera. 

I took the short movie I'd captured and opened up Registax only to find that Registax 5.6 (the version I have) will not process .mov files.  Sweet! 

So I downloaded a trial version of some software to convert the .mov file to a .avi file that Registax could chew on.  The conversion went smoothly, but left a watermark in the center of the movie.  I didn't care about the watermark, since this was all new experimentation for me and I could put some "makeup" over it in the final image.

I fiddled with Registax and finally got it to crank out the image below.  I think this image is only about 50 frames or so, since I was trying to filter out the worst frames.  Did my best to hide the watermark. 

So, although it's fuzzy compared to images by folks who know what they're doing, I'm happy with the image, considering it was all a new experiment. 

I can't thank Santa enough for this new toy....um... I mean tool! 

Clear Skies to all and to all a good night,

M6A ;-)

The Dragon

As I drove West for three and a half hours on Thanksgiving day, I was hoping I might be able to take a decent astro picture or two after all the turkey and stuffing had been consumed. 

This Thanksgiving, Jenny and I drove to our friends house, West Virginia.  There we had a great Thanksgiving.  I was so stuffed I could barely move as I set up my gear. 

I had high hopes because the sky in View from my friend's Deck in WVAWest Virgina is a lot better than where I live in Fredericksburg.  First, their house is at an elevation of 1600 feet.  Having a little less air to shoot through helps a little bit when taking astro pics and I'll take every foot of altitude I can get.  The light pollution sky quality where I shoot in West Virginia measures high in the class 4 (green), bordering on class 3 (blue) range on the Bortle Dark-Sky Scale.  That compares to a low class 5 (amber) bordering on class 6 (red) where I live just outside Fredericksburg, so I was hoping it might improve my chances of capturing something memorable.

Long story short - things turned out very well (see below).

I like showing my work to my mom.   When I showed her this pic of the Horsehead and Flame Nebulae, she thought it looked like a dragon with its head turned back looking at its own tail.  I see what she means.  :-)

Learn more about the Horsehead and Flame Nebulae here.

BTW, the little symbol in the upper right corner of the page on my website is the symbol for the planet Mercury, named for the messenger God of Roman mythology.  The little "thingy" on top of the symbol represents the wings on Mercury's helmet.  All the symbols for the primary solar system objects can be seen here.

Happy Thanksgiving All!!!

~M6A~

Heart Nebula and Tweety Bird

Friday night I took this picture of the Heart Nebula.  It was taken in Hamshire County, West Virginia at my Mom's and Glen's house the day after Thanksgiving.  As dusk approached, it looked like I was going to have another crystal clear night for taking pictures.  Unfortunately, clouds came in early and the total exposure time is only 36 minutes.  Even so, I'm happy with it.  Today, when I showed this pic  to my mom partially developed, she pointed out that the small bright nebula at the bottom right (IC 896 if you're interested) looks like Tweety Bird when the picture is rotated clockwise 1/4 turn.  I think she's right! Learn more about the Heart Nebula here.  ~M6A~

Practice

Last night there was a break in the clouds, so I set up my gear on the deck to get a little practice in.  On the one hand, remoting all the controls into the house makes for a relaxing evening of astroimaging.  On the other, shooting from Northern Virginia suburbia means a ton of light pollution.  Below are the results.  The picture of the Triangulum Galaxy is 28 minutes total; the picture of the Pleiades is 32 minutes total.  Both could use a few more hours exposure and better post processing, but I'm happy with the results. 

Got my fingers crossed that the sky will clear up right after Thanksgiving! ~M6A~

Under Construction

Hey!  This site will hopefully be a place to share some of the pics from my astrophotography hobby.  I started building it after recently returning from another trip to New Mexico where the night sky rules! Hopefully I can improve it as time goes by.

On this trip, I used a lens adapter with my Canon 60D.  It allowed me to use my old Olympus lenses from my 35mm camera that hadn't been used since the 80s!  I was really happy with the shots taken with the Olympus 50mm fixed focal length lens.  Stars are more forgiving towards fixed focal length lenses and look less bloated.  The stars in the photos from New Mexico are pretty crisp, even though the shots were two minutes with the camera on an unguided mount.  Below is a pic of Orion taken with this setup.   Enjoy! ~M6A~