9/16/03 - Second Night

The moon was just on the horizon tonight, and the sky was not so hazy. Tonight I worked on the polar alignment and took a few images.
The first image I took was of the Dumbell Nebula, just 3 seconds to see if it was centered (and it was):



Another cluster, M71, 12 seconds at -17c:



I then decided to take a color series (one each of L,R,G,B and combine) back at the Dumbell:



Still not doing any noise reduction, I decided to take several minutes worth of shots and combine:




What's really interesting is if you look at the nebula in the component wavelengths that make up the exposure. You can see different structures for the individual elements involved:




9/9/03 - First Light

Tonight was the first time that the CCD camera saw the sky.   The first image, pre focusing is below- you can see the large invar spider (secondary mirror holder) and the central obstruction from the secondary.



I then spent about 30 minutes doing a rough focus- it's really hard to focus at f/3.8, depth of field is very very narrow. Same spot in sky (this is in Ursa Major - the big dipper, second star on the handle, it's a double star, which you can see if you have decent eyesight):



The crappy images were due to a number of factors:

• No noise reduction applied at all (no dark frame, no bias frames and no flat field)
• Full moon
• Fog
• High clouds
  
• I've actually never seen the atmosphere look so crappy here and not be clouded over- just my luck.
• No skill
  

Since I invested the time in mounting the camera, focusing and the dome was open, I decided to shoot a couple of more interesting targets.  I sync'ed on the bright star then slewed to M101, the Pinwheel Galaxy.  I know it's not going to be good, but you can see it if you look carefully.  No color was attempted tonight either.  A slightly better version is here (grin)- I believe this is from Keck.  I would expect to get about 80-90% of the quality of that image when everything is working well.

 This was a 1.5 minute exposure at -5 degrees C:



Since that was hard to see, I resync'ed and then slewed to something brighter, about 20 sec exposure, a cluster- M13 as I recall:



Hopefully it will get clear soon!  I've still got a lot of work to do, but at least I'm converting photons to electrons now.