Alright, where were all the astronomers? Finally a beautiful night at Binbrook, and only Glenn, Gail, and myself showed up. Oh well, despite a few clouds at the beginning, it cleared up nice and with only a sliver of a moon it was a good sky.

With the Binbrook Conservation being relatively light pollution free I was able to do longer exposures at higher ISO – and also didn’t require so much filtering – which seriously damages those nice faint fuzzies. Only about half the shots turned out useful – the rest were plagued with double images caused by the occasional gust of wind we were getting. I have shots of (of course) Orion, Pleiades, and M65/M66 galaxies. So far I have processed the Orion shots – I tried something different – I took sets of images at 4 different exposure : 32s @ ISO 1600, 32s @ ISO 800, 10s @ ISO 800, and 2.5s @ ISO 800. I aligned and stacked the 32s exposures together, 10s exposures, and 2.5s exposures – then merge the images together in Corel Photopaint 10 – thus allowing to reveal the faint outer wisps while not over exposing the central nebule with the Trapezium stars. I learned something new last night – make sure the T adaptor is on tight as the slightest play will cause the images to rotate everytime the camera is tinkered with – I spent a good 2 hours rotating each set to match as they were all off by a couple of degrees.

All images were taken using a Canon Digital Rebel XT mounted parfocal on a Meade 10″ SN LXD75.
Images were process in Corel Photopaint 10, Canon Digital Photo Professional, and Registax.

by Tim Harpur

More Binbrook images – Pleiades (showing some decent nebulosity) and galaxies M65 and M66 (with galaxy NGC3628 unfortunately trimmed off the top – I’ll work on that next time) are now uploaded into my gallery.

Check out this Blue moon image added by Hal Mueller.

M37 M38 and Saturn. Click link above to go directly to the images.

The weather was beautiful last night – I hope you didn’t miss out. By 9:00pm the wind had cut down and the sky was almost cloudless – I was still viewing from a light polluted area though. The temperature seemed rather warm – more so than expected, and I was out until 11:30pm imaging. After setting up my 10″ Meade Schmidt Newtonian OTA on an LXD75 GoTo mount and letting it cool down I checked the collimation with my new laser collimator and found it to be accurate and unaffected by the car ride over (I had used the laser collimator to collimate the scope before heading out). A quick polar alignment and I was good to go. I planned on spending most of my time imaging so after a quick view of Orion through the eyepiece I removed the 1.25″ focuser tube and replaced with my new T ring adapter for my camera – what a difference a collimated scope and imaging parfocal makes! I took some new shots of Orion that far exceeded anything I had taken previously – I don’t mean to be over exposing the Orion Nebula (just kidding) but I’m using it as my baseline for learning astro-photography – and you should still check out these new images as they are that much superior to previous attempts. Then I turned my attention on a few star clusters – the Pleiades, M37, and M38. Saturn was sharp but small in the fast wide field optics of the SN – looks like a good 2″ barlow is required for decent planetary pictures. I will be adding the images mentioned as I get them processed.

The first of many images to come are the Orion set:

Orion Nebula Feb. 25, 2006
Meade 10″ Schmidt Newtonian
with Canon Digital Rebel XT mounted parfocal.

19 images x 15s @ ISO 1600, 4 images x 15s @ ISO 800

processed with Registax and Corel Photopaint 10

By Tim Harpur

See these new astro-images of Orion and Saturn by Tim Harpur.