The heart of the universe

The heart nebula (IC1805) in the constellation Cassiopeia. Last night, it was a beautiful, clear night here at Harestua Solar Observatory outside of Oslo. Only problem was a storm on the western coast of Norway that had its effect even around these areas. The winds made guiding a challenge. With some peaks of more than a pixel on my guider. But all in all, I managed to collect 4 hours of exposures. This is the best I have ever managed to capture of this beautiful nebula. I will later attempt the twin nebula (Soul nebula).

Tech details : Pentax K5, ISO 400, 48x5min, William Optics FLT98 CF w/WO AFR-IV reducer/flattener (F/5). Stacked in DSS, processed in PS and IrfanView.

A sky full of stars

Last night there was a clear sky, so I wanted to do some astrophoto. At least for the hours the weather forecasters predicted would be clear. So I set up my scope and spent the better part of an hour setting up the polar alignment. I got it pretty good at the end. Then I set up the autoguider, and set the telescope for 3 hours of exposures on M27. When I came this morning to check on progress, I found my laptop had died due to lack of juice (I had actually forgotten to switch on the power from the outlet, so it ran on battery only...). And when I checked the camera, I had not pressed the plug in properly, so the last 10 or so exposures were obviously just due to a wiggly connection, so they varied between 1/33th of a second to 7 seconds. In total, I got 15 exposures of 5 minutes each. They had, on the other hand, very good guiding on them. Round, sharp stars. So, with only 1 hour 15 minutes of exposure. What can I do. Well. Not as much as I had hoped, but I did get something out of it. And I decided to upload almost the whole frame. I love the view of all the stars in the Milkyway. And then, M27 in the middle of the myriad of stars. The universe is truly beautiful!
Tech details : Pentax K5, ISO400, 15x5 minutes, William Optics FLT98 CF w/ WO AFR-IV flattener/reducer (F/5), on Celestron AVX mount. Guided with QHY5II & PHD2. Stacked in DSS, processed in PS and IrfanView.

Western veil

Last night, I finally had a clear night after a few weeks of overcast. Despite the half Moon only 90 degrees away, I wanted to give it a go. So I did 2.5 hours on the western parts of the Veil nebula. (I actually did 4.5 hours, but the temperature dropped so much during the night that the last 2 hours were out of focus...) After stacking the images in DSS, I noticed a strange effect that I was unable to remove. It only happened in green and blue. Red was mostly unaffected. So after a bit of trial and error, I gave up on trying to create a colour image. Although I managed to create one, it looked like something I didn't want to publish here. I will give it some more tries in the future. Using the red channel as luminance worked fairly well, but the colors were weird. So I'll see if I can make them better in the future. So for now, this is the red channel, as a luminance image in greyscale. (Click on image to get bigger version).

Tech details : Pentax K5, William Optics FLT98 CF w/ WO AFR-IV flattener/reducer (f/5), Astronomik CLS filter, Celestron AVX mount, guided using QHY 5II camera and PHD2 guiding sw. Stacked in DSS, processed in PS and Irfanview.

Edit : I made a color version. I checked the image above, and found that it looked like crap on a bigger screen. Sooo. Maybe I should do a better job before publishing my images here. The picture below is a first version in color. Not perfect. But I managed to remove much of the strange colors. Enjoy!

M31, first of the season

Last night, I did a "first light" run with my new telescope. A William Optics FLT98 CF w/ AFR-IV. I did a quick processing run this morning to see the results, and I have to say I am quite pleased with the result. Sharp image, despite the autoguiding was under par. When I left it, it had a rms of about 1.2"... I will tune that better for the coming season, but for now, I'm happy with the results. The scope at least performed brilliantly. So I cannot complain.

Tech det : WO FLT98 w/ AFR-IV flattener/reducer (0.8x). Pentax K5, ISO 400, 30x5min. autoguided using QHY5II and PHD2. Stacked in DSS, processed in PS.

Edit : New version with more colour.

M82 - "The Cigar"

M82 is part of a galaxy pair in Ursa Major. It is about 12 million lightyears away. It doesn't have the usual shape that we are used to see for galaxies. And there seems to be strings of gas flowing out from the galaxy. It is therefore called an "irregular galaxy". On January 24th, a supernova was detected in this galaxy. I took a photo of the galaxy a week before. But due to terrible weather in the weeks to follow, it took a long time before I was able to see it in an image myself. I decided to take a longer exposure of the galaxy using a remote telescope.
Tech details : 20" F/6.8, FLI PL09000, 3x3 binning. Exposure : Luminance 20 min, R, G & B : 5 min 20 sec each. Stacked in DSS, processed in PS.

NGC4565 - The Needle

This is one of my favorite galaxies. An edge-on galaxy in Coma Berenice. I have tried my luck at this several times, but this is the first time with a bigger scope with longer focal length. It is obvious that the oversampling in this picture does it good. Lots more detail than I have previously been able to aquire. And in such a short exposure. But I guess that is from the fact that the camera uses 3x3 binning... Should be a lot faster then.
Tech data : FLI PL09000 camera, 3x3 binning, Luminance : 15x50 sec exposure, RGB : 5x40 sec exposure. Telescope : 20" F/6.8. Stacking in DSS, processing in PS.

NGC2903, another try

After a dismal spring this year, we have finally had quite a few nights of clear skies. And I and a few friends had to exploit his. Especially since the weather forecast is looking bad in the coming days, and the Sun is intruding more more. In a few short weeks, there will not be more astronomical twighlight this winter.
I decided to try an oldie goldie. The NGC2903 in Leo. This was the very first deep sky object I imaged in the late 90's. It was just a smeary blob on the film. This time, I decided to try autoguiding for longer sub-frame exposures. 2 minutes seemed ok, since that would allow me to evict all the frames containing satellites and bad guiding. There were a lot of satellites this night. Three satellites in different orbits raced through the tail of Leo simultaniously at one point. So it was obvious there would be a lot of streaks. Only had to evict 7 frames from the stack, so I guess I was lucky.
Tech : Pentax K5, ISO 800, 59x2 min guided exposures, TPO 6" RC, w/APCCD67 reducer (f/6), Celestron Advanced VX, stacked in DDS, processed in PS.