Images taken over the past week…. By KerryLH

***Starfest (Friday August 10th)***
Getting set up for a night of observing, astrophotography and meteor scatter

NGC 6992 – Network Nebula ‘part of the Veil’
Canon 300D, C6-SCT, f6.3 focal reducer
9×3-5min + darks
Autoguided with Meade DSI on the Sky-Watcher 80mm Equinox

M16 – Eagle Nebula
Canon 300D, C6-SCT, f6.3 focal reducer
9×3-5min + darks
Autoguided with Meade DSI on the Sky-Watcher 80mm Equinox

***Persied meteor shower night (Sunday August 12th)***
Distant Thunderstorm

***Home in Grimsby (Monday August 13th – last night)***
M31 – Andromeda Galaxy
Canon 300D, Skywatcher 80mm Equinox
15x3min + 4 darks
Autoguided with Meade DSI on the c6-SCT

During this year’s (2007’s) Starfest, we were very fortunate to have gotten clear skies for two nights, and part of a third night, during our stay at The River Place.

The only rain was a few minutes of sprinkles Thursday morning.

IMHO, I’m not a huge fan of tenting, but the spectacular clear skies on the Wednesday and Friday nights, and excellent cameraderie amongst fellow astronomers and fellow club members, not to mention a gazillion Perseid meteors, including a few bright bolides, made the camping part of it well worth it.

Here are more images from Starfest that I took from two of the clear nights. I will post larger versions of these and other images soon:

The Lagoon Nebula (M8) in Sagittarius, from the Wednesday night (August 8, 2007):

The Andromeda Galaxy (M31), as well as its two dwarf-elliptical companions M110 (above) and M32 (below), from the Friday night (August 10, 2007):

When it was all over, on Sunday Morning, it was time to pack it in. Some of us, including a fellow HAA colleague whose tent here says it all, had our work cut out for us, taking everything down and packing it away.

But we all managed to get packed before an approaching cold front from the west brought in rain Sunday afternoon (…what timing!).

Ad Astra!

Bob C.

Starfest gave a number of clear skies – no rain (at least it hadn’t hit yet when I packed up and left at 8:00am Sunday morning). A number of us spent Friday night imaging into the wee hours – and then casual observing on Saturday night – walking around and checking out the other equipment – it was quite a pleasure looking through a 25″ telescope! A few very brilliant meteors were spotted – one that lasted about 3 seconds as it flashed and pieces broke off was a treat.

I’m up in Tobermory for a little more observing – tonight’s forcast for the meteor shower is very promising here.

Tim’s Images from Starfest:

Part of the Milkyway

Veil Nebula (or at least the west part – NGC6960)

M31 (Andromeda), M32, and M110

CLEAR SKIES (and so far NO rain)

Greetings from HAA’s Active (pre-registered) members at Starfest: Today’s beautiful skies will be followed by a grand night of observing (we hope – see the attached CSC). We’ve had one great night already – Wednesday was phenomenal with Kerry and Bob getting some nice images, Glenn and Gail getting the last object needed to complete their Messier list (M74), and Steve Germann discovering faint galaxies like NGC 404.
The most moisture we’ve had was the heavy dew on Wednesday night but we know how to cope and didn’t have to pack it in until 2:30am.
According to Alex Tekatch, Starfest is the most wonderful time of the year.
That’s all for now – stay tuned – your fellow observing members: Alex, Tim H., Ann, Bill, Anthony, Steve, Kerry, Glenn, Gail, Bob, Mike J., Cindy, Stewart, Jackie, Jim, Doug B., Doug W., Marg & Bruce.

PS, did we mention there is no sign of rain…

M16 By KerryLH from Wednesday night @ Starfest

The GWS with fancy new shroud (made by Ann) and improvised counterweight system

Update By Kerry
Currently we are expecting good sky conditions through the weekend!!!!!

Update by Bob Christmas
I arrived at Starfest on Wednesday afternoon (August 8, 2007), about 2-ish. I had my digital imaging setup ready to go at dusk that night, and, here’s one of my results from Wednesday night (2007/08/08). This is the Trifid Nebula (M20), as well as open cluster M21 above it. — Photo by Bob Christmas

*FRIDAY NIGHT*

What a fantastic 2 nights for observing and astrophotography. After the cold front went through Friday evening the skies became crystal clear. I wasn’t able to join the gang in Binbrook so I had to do my observing from the driveway. Since Glenn and Gail live a very short distance away, they opted to keep me company rather than make the long trek out to Binbrook. While my telescope, camera and computer were doing all the work of imaging, I was enjoying the views of many deep sky objects through their 6in dob, and both my 15×70 and their 10×50 binoculars.

Viewed objects: (list provided by Glenn)
-31 Cygni – small blue and gold double stars
-NGC 6940 – open cluster in Cygnus
-M27 – Dumbbell Nebula
-M71 – open cluster in Sagitta
-NGC 6934 – small globular in Delphinus
-NGC 7789 – the Magnificent Cluster – open cluster in Cassiopeia
-M13 & M92 – glob’s in Hercules
-NGC 6210 – planetary in Hercules
-Albireo – blue and gold double stars
-NGC 6543 – “Cat’s Eye” planetary in Draco
-tons of satellites

*SATURDAY NIGHT*

Another great night. I’m surprised that I’m not burned out yet. Anyway while hubby was doing some radio dxing I decided to set up again on the driveway. Another beautiful night!!!! I had problems with my images from Friday night so I decided to try my targets again. M51 and M71. In between exposures I was viewing many targets in my 15×70 Celestron Skymasters.

Viewed Objects in 15x70s:
-m27 dumbell nebula
-m71 glob cluster, in hazy air I was barely able to see this in the my 6in
-m81/82 a very nice pair to look at in binoculars
-m31 Andromeda Galaxy still pretty low in the sky
-m51 surprised I could see this
-m101 – again another surprise to find in binoculars
-various clusters and nebulas above Sagittarius
-various open clusters and doubles in Cygnus, Casseopia, and Lyra

Both nights I was able to make out mag 6 with averted vision at zenith.

M51 By KerryLH
13×3-5min exposures @ iso 800
Canon 300D, 6in SCT on the CG5-GT
autoguided with DSI and PHD Guiding
diffraction spike – copper wire

By 8:30 the last stragglers were still packing up to leave the park.

I selected a location on the hill with a clear view to the south and west, and a good view to the east, and started unpacking. Having a proper wrench, i was able this time to deploy the equatorial platform. Lots of new gadgets to unpack and set up.

The GWS now has a shroud, expertly assembled by Ann. It’s so fine.

The scope was almost perfectly aligned from last time, and took only a minor touch
on the knobs. I aligned it with the shroud on, no problem. The fully assembled scope on the platform is tall enough to require a 3 step ladder for the zenith. There’s 3 little rubber feet under the base of the Lightbridge 16, and they sit on flat parts of the platform without extra work. I did not try the second axis this time. I might have to add another small pad under the base for it.

We had some new members observing, and they brought a fine refractor on a goto mount.
Even a few non-members brought their scopes and set up.

The equatorial platform is great. It makes finding objects so much easier, and they
just sit there. Since it’s for 43 degrees and the latitude of Binbrook is
43.1 degrees, i just basically leveled it on its 4 feet and pointed the finder at Polaris, and it was ready to go. With a little help from my friends, i had the scope up on the platform and ticking away.

I took the time to assemble and adjust the camera holder. My pocket camera
has auto-focus, and getting it to stop trying was not easy.
I snapped this photo of Jupiter and its moons… (upload will have to wait till i resize the photo)

A tour of the skies with the GWS was in order. I found the following: Jupiter, M57, M13, Mizar and Alcor.

Then on to fainter things…
M31, M92, M27, M70, M29, M54.

I tried the ring nebula with a 5mm lens and a Barlow, making it fill over half
the field of view in the eyepiece.
Th platform kept me on target, as i tried to focus it.

At that magnification, there was blurring of the stars to small blobs, and i think it’s because the focal length is short (and the eyepiece has to be very fancy to cope). I will continue to search for eyepieces up to the task. There was no problem with brightness though. The ring was plain as day even at 731 times magnification.

I tried a camera holder Mike lent me, but it causes the scope to tip forward,
even with the clutch tightened down. I finally need a counterweight.
Jackie sold me her 3 inch scope an diagonal to use as a finder-scope.
Attaching the rings is my next project.
I noticed there’s a place on it to put a smaller finder-scope.

The GWS is so big… 🙂

After about an hour, i noticed that objects were drifting out of the field of view. Strange, the platform had been working so well…
It had reached the end of its travel. 2 good things… it did not dump the scope,
and it took a few seconds to reset by simply grabbing the base of the scope,
lifting slightly and repositioning the platform at the other end of its travel
for another run.

The moon was big and red on the horizon. Smoke from Montana fires is adding to the redness. I pointed the scope at it. In spite of there being another scope, and my car,
in the light path, i still got the moon. It was bright enough once it cleared the car, to project an image onto a sheet of paper the size of a dinner plate. Bye bye night vision.

I bought a new stool to use, but spent very little time sitting.

I am now able to navigate the star charts much quicker, and brought in the dumbell nebula for the final item before packing up.

The dumbell nebula. My red dot is right on, and with a low power eyepiece i found it in seconds. I am so happy with my ability to find things in the sky.
The best part was that although everyone’s scope had dewed up, the shroud on the GWS
kept it nice and dry to the end.

So i am happy, anyway.

Although the sky condition Tuesday night was not top notch, we still managed to get a decent amount of observing in. Not only were there the odd patches of high cloud… but much overlooked was a very thin layer of smoke aloft (from the Montana forest fires) which I noticed on the satellite imagery during the day, but was hoping it would not make it out this far. As mentioned in Steve’s post I forgot my camera adapter so astrophotography was going to be out of the question. I ended up setting up my 80mm and 6in anyway but didn’t really make much use of them compared to normal nights. Instead I spent some time testing out my new binoculars and checking out the views from Steve’s 16in. I did make a few comparison views of m27 and m71 in my 6in and his 16in. Obviously it was not a contest 🙂 With the 16in, M71, a faint globular cluster, was easily seen with direct vision in Steve’s scope… and in my 6in, well lets just say it was barely detectable with averted vision. M27 was nice in both scopes. I’m sure in a darker sky with better conditions Steve’s scope will perform even more spectacularly on those Messiers. Mike challenged me to find a faint band of stars that go through m27 in my 6in but I couldn’t see anything until I took my cheap 1.25 diagonal off. It was a nice challenge… that also led me to realize how important a good quality diagonal is. Now turning my attention to the binoculars… They were a pair of Celestron 15×70 Sky Masters. I recently got them for my birthday and they are a replacement to my cheap and now broken 16x50s that I had since I was 11 years old. Anyway Jupiter and its moons were nice a sharp. The Milky Way was spectacular… I have to say this is where binoculars are a real treat to use. The tripod that Steve set up for me made viewing a little easier since they are a bit on the heavy side for the arms. With a little help from Mike I found a few Messiers including m27… which looked really nice, bright and condensed. It is pretty rewarding finding and seeing deep sky objects with out the use of a telescope.

Anyway that’s it for now, I thought this was only going to be quick report.

BTW Keep your eyes on the moon tonight!! If it is clear in the east when it rises, you will notice that it will appear really red and will stay orange for quite some time. This is from all the forest fire smoke that is still high up in the atmosphere. The smoke should clear out in time for tomorrow nights observing which Mike just posted about.

KerryLH

I arrived at Binbrook A to find Kerry, Tim, and Joe, several scopes, binoculars and computers all set up and ready to image. Unfortunately Kerry neglected to bring an important fitting and could not really image properly, so she decided to do some real time observing instead. The sun was just setting and it took a few minutes before Polaris could be seen.

I had my car fully packed with an EQ platform, and the GWS. I built a jig in the back seat so that the entire scope can now ride in the back leaving room for a passenger (or a tent) in the front, except for the EQ platform not quite fitting back there with the rest of it yet. (I plan to make some kind of wooden contraption to make it more compatible with the seat cushions)

Turns out for lack of a crescent wrench (the moon was near full, too) i could not test out my eq platform this time, but i did manage to unwrap it, power it up and align it and it did its job well, making almost no sound and moving ever so gradually. 4 knobs adjust the placement. I think the key is to use 3 of them to level and bring in the fourth for stability after it’s level.

It’s designed for 43 degrees north, which is about right on for Binbrook, so almost no shimming was needed. (I see that starfest is at about 44 degrees north). Alignment of the LB16 took only a few minutes, but i think some big knobs on the secondary adjustment screws would make things easier still. I also think i need to shim my laser aligner to get it perfectly centered. Another cool addition would be a right-angle finderscope. My red dot finder is great if i can see or estimate what i am aiming at, but not so good when there’s light pollution making it hard to spot the fainter stars. Another option is to attach the laser to my binoculars, and use it to point the way for the GWS to follow.

Mike, Tim and Therese arrived presently and mike provided us with some fine advice. He also helped me fish up M71 and M27. Alas the camera holder eludes me once again and i did not get a chance to see my pocket camera sneak photos through the eyepiece yet. With averted vision some of the stars in M71 could be detected. I set up by Bino parallelogram and suffered a hockey-tape malfunction but it still served its purpose for Kerry’s new binoculars. I tried some high power views using a 7.5 mm eyepiece to bring in Alcor and Mizar. They don’t even fit in the same field of view, but the scope split the double nicely. The double-double was not split under 26 mm, and when i tried the higher power, the clouds were rolling in and i could not fish it up.

The clouds rolled in for good by 11:30 and i was packed up and ready to leave by midnight. I think tomorrow i will try the dark skies where i did my messier marathon, near Lynden.

I think I gave manual guiding a fair try. I’ve been doing it for quite a few months and it hasn’t been going too bad. I started out really enjoying it but as time went on I started to become conscious of the observing time that I was missing… not only that but I was eventually getting tired and achy after staring at the illuminated reticle for several minutes at a time. Also, after looking at a ton of astro images on the net I started to notice how crisp the autoguided images were compared to the manual guided ones and figured perhaps I need to try it out someday. I did a bit of research and realized that all I would need is a cheap webcam or imager. I already lug my laptop with me into the field so why not lug around one more item plus a few more cables. So I talked to Mike and he recommended the DSI because of its sensitivity to fainter stars. I bought it off of him for a pretty good price and immediately began to work on re-configuring my astrophotgraphy setup.

I had to first get my CG5-GT (ASGT) mount to communicate with my laptop via the RS232 cable and ASCOM platform (many astro programs require ASCOM in order to communicate with the ASGT mount). I then loaded a free program called PHD Guiding which was able to communicate with the DSI and my mount. A few clicks of the mouse a bit of DSI focussing and a few more clicks and I was on my way. I was surprised at how easy autoguiding was to get running after getting the initial communication bugs worked out.

Last night at Binbrook I lugged my entire setup out and after my alignment, balancing, and focusing I started the autoguiding and the rest was pretty easy. WHile I was collecting the frames I could walk around and enjoy the views through the other scopes and actually have real conversations.

I tried a few frames on M27 and since this is my first real attempt, the tracking is not yet perfect but still better than when I did it manually. There are some settings in PHD guiding that I probably should play with in order to get better results

M27 Dumbell Nebula
By: KerryLH
Canon 300D with C6S-GT and f6.3 focal reducer
3 x 5 minutes autoguided with PHD Guiding and DSI-C on the 80mm APO
2 dark frames
Stacking in Deep Sky Stacker and processed in PS

After some instigation by Don, we all decided that the alternate site had a hope of providing us clear skies. Of course, with the new GWS, the chance for actual clear skies was slim. However, a big enough scope can see through clouds…. and a dob can slew faster than a goto.

I was the first to arrive, at about 9:05 pm, and Kerry pulled in before i had a chance to get out of the car. I selected a firm surface for the GWS and began assembling it. I chose the path just beyond the parking lot.

I put the top half on rotated 120 degrees but had it right 2 minutes later, for a setup time of 9 minutes from car to view. I aligned the finderscope, using the moon, and got it bang-on. I got a nice view of Venus as it was setting. A sharp crescent it was, even though it was directly behind a tree branch. A big enough scope can see through trees… 😉

The finder works great on anything that has bright stars nearby. M57 came in without any fuss whatsoever. It was quite easy to see M57 even with direct vision. I think i might benefit from a right angle finder scope for the GWS,
to help where the sky does not have bright enough stars for me to see them without help. Perhaps an 8 or 12-inch finderscope would do. 😉 (Actually, i think a 3 inch at 6x power would be fine).

I was able to hold my camera at the eyepiece and get a few shots of the moon by hand, and was impressed it could pick things up and the auto focus could focus on the moon. I borrowed Don’s camera holder and put my Dimage Xt onto it. It weighed down the GWS but i eventually remembered there’s an adjustable clutch which was able to counteract the weight. I think a super-magnet would help too.

I was able to get 4 second time exposures of Jupiter and the moon. Then i tried zooming in… I was able to get the camera to focus on Jupiter, but at 3x zoom looking into the eyepiece things move about 1.5 Jupiter diameters in 4 seconds. Once you know which way to go, adjusting a dob to keep things in view is easy. Guiding to keep them stationary is not possible though.

I tried one flash shot, after warning all within earshot to close their eyes. I got a sharp shot of Jupiter, but the moons don’t show in a 1/1000 second exposure. Here it is. You can even see some bands on it. ( i wish i knew how to link jupiter_1ms.jpg here. it’s uploaded already)

We brought in M13 and i switched to a 10 mm eyepiece to get a 180x magnification. Even with that magnification it was about 1/3 of the field of view and pretty bright. That’s when the collimation issue started showing up though. It turned out that the collimation was a bit off, and we all agreed that steps should be taken. I thought the gentle bump it got when I put it down last Thursday might have thrown off the collimation but I now think that a truss Dob can be out in several different ways, and what I need is a rigorous collimation procedure at setup time.

First, the secondary mirror might not be directly on the axis of the primary and the view through the eyepiece might not go to the center of the primary, as viewed in the secondary. These depend more on the length of the struts and the selection of which strut to use in each position than anything else. I plan to mark them. Unfortunately it was pretty dark (even with the Hamilton skyglow bouncing off the clouds) by the time I wanted to collimate, and that made it kind of impractical.

Clouds blew in and blocked our view of the area around Linear, and although i waited about 20 minutes for them to clear, they were followed by high clouds that made spotting comets impractical.

I packed up at about midnight, and zipped home, with enough energy to spare that I can do it again. I plan to try assembling the scope a few times on my porch and checking how the collimation changes. I am keen to see through all manner of eyepieces and at high magnification, once things get straightened out.