Cygnus – Revisited

Posted on September 15, 2011 by Pete

Last night I managed to test my new CLS-CCD EOS clip filter on my modded 350D.

With a fantastically clear sky although pretty well moon lit I setup my ETX105EC which I piggybacked the 350D to.  The ETX105 does not serve itself well to imaging deep sky objects because of its very slow optics being f/14 however the setup is ideal for guiding and imaging with something else.  This time I did not do any guiding  as I wanted to see what length of exposure I could get without.  Attached to the 350D I had the 50mm f/1.8 prime lens which I stopped down to f/7.1.  I discovered that I could easily capture 3min exposures at ISO 400 with no trailing at all,  the low ISO was chosen as I wanted less sensor noise created from the higher gain of ISO 800 & 1600.

In this image you can clearly see the North America Nebula and also a very small Cresent Nebula.

The Image is a composite of 9 x 3 minute subs with dark, flat and bias frames these were calibrated and stacked in Maxim and after a little stretching in Photoshop this is my very satisfying result.

Cygnus - North America Nebula

Posted in Digital Imaging | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

A quick look at Cygnus

Posted on September 3, 2011 by Pete

Around these parts we have been suffering with a lot of cloud and patch clear skies.  I took the chance to have a brief play pointing my camera at Cygnus using a 28mm M42 lens with a CLS filter attached to the rear. Today because of the unpredictable skies I only used my Static tripod and took 12 30 second subs along with a flat and dark. Stacked using Deep Sky Stacker and a small amount of stretching.  I am not going to do much more to this image as it was only a test I will take alot more time, care and attention with the guided images. 

Posted in Digital Imaging | Tagged | Leave a comment

Tests on new setup

Posted on August 29, 2011 by Pete

Well it has to be said I am quite pleased with how everything went tonight. The equipment behaved well although I do need to make a small modification to the scope to allow the dec to take the weight of the camera and lens.

I am not that pleased with the optical quality of the lens I used tonight but it still allowed me to see the result of how the guiding setup worked. All the equipment however behaved like a dream.

Light pollution is an issue however I should be able to get around this using some better filters.

Now I have the task of cleaning the rather filthy sensor on my camera. I knew this was going to be an issue but I was not using tonight to make amazing images, that is going to have to come with time and quite a bit of practice using this very basic imaging setup.

Posted in Digital Imaging | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Observing in Woolston.

Posted on August 28, 2011 by Pete

Recently I have spent a little time getting a basic imaging setup sorted out so that I am able to use one of my smaller telescopes as a guide scope for when I wish to image using my modified Canon 350D for wide field imaging using only camera lenses.

Tonight is going to be a particularly interesting first attempt as recently alot of the street lighting has been changed to the new apparently low emission lighting around Woolston, also the Itchen Bridge has only just commissioned it’s new lighting which is from what I believe to be a low energy blue led light. Usually when looking toward the direction of the bridge although I can’t actually see the bridge from my back garden you can see the typical sodium glow, last night I looked to see what the difference is and I could see nothing no glow whatsoever.

Tonight is the first clear night in a long time and with no moon as such I thought it definitely worth while giving my new imaging setup a go.

I will be back later with hopefully some promising results I don’t really want to moan at the council and tell them they have made the night sky worse than it was.

Posted in Digital Imaging | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

New Forest Observatory – Mini-Wasp – First Light Party

Posted on August 21, 2011 by Pete

First thing this morning I made a visit to the New Forest Observatory (NFO) which is operated my Prof. Greg Parker.  This was for a Party being held there to celebrate the first light of the new mini-wasp observatory setup.  This is quite an impressive piece of equipment which comprises of a Paramount ME mounted upon a Bespoke Aluminium pier which is bolted rather well to a massive Concrete block sunk into the ground.  All of this is housed within a new Pulsar Observatory which has 2 side pods for additional storage and computer equipment which is required to control everything.  At the business end of the Mount are 2 Takahashi Sky 90′s which are used for the imaging along with a guide scope plus an additional refractor which can be seen that has an eyepiece.

The Dome as it comes has no way of automatically rotating the Dome to the correct position for imaging, this led Tom from Curdridge Observatory design and build an automated dome controller which parts of can be seen in my previous post.

There are still a few odds and ends that need to be done to finish the observatory, some simple and some not so simple however I am sure these will not be a challenge to Greg, Tom and Myself

.

I am sure that in no time at all Greg is going to be producing some amazing images from this fantastic setup.

 

Posted in Digital Imaging, General | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Wiring up a Dome Rotator for The New Forest Observatory

Posted on August 1, 2011 by admin

Today was an interesting day spent at Curdridge Observatory where Tom has been designing and building a Dome Rotator for Greg’s new dome at The New Forest Observatory, the system that is to be computer controlled will allow the dome to automatically rotate to allow the opening in the dome to be in the correct position in relation to the alignment of the mount during times of observation and imaging using the new WASP imaging system which is mounted on a Paramount ME.  The system is based around 2 stepper motors which have neoprene rubber drive wheels which will pinch against a track on the dome, these are controlled by a Microchip PIC microcontroller which is instructed via USB using Tom’s bespoke dome controller software using the ASCOM instruction set. Here are a couple of images of before after and one of the motors.

 

Posted in General | Leave a comment

LX200 gets a dusting off at the Curdridge Observatory

Posted on January 9, 2011 by Pete

Time has passed and it is to say the least early 2011…. Time passes very quickly….. The observatory construction plans have somewhat been delayed due to two main factors 1 being poor weather for building a decent structure and 2 lack of expendable cash for materials. In the next few weeks I hope to resolve the financial side of things. However I have been imaging using the 350D Astro modded camera. I must admit I am very happy with the results and I will be uploading my processed images tomorrow.

I do need to do a couple of things to my basic setup 1 being a crayford style micro-focusser and the second a par focal focus / guide camera for long exposures over 30 seconds.

I will control the 350D using a USB controlled microcontroller so that I can do bulb exposures over 30 seconds.

Right I have images to process so I will get back to this tomorrow.

Posted in Digital Imaging | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Homemade Tracking mount

Posted on December 8, 2010 by Pete

Over the past couple of months I have been designing a tracking mount that will allow me to attach my DSLR to my standard camera tripod allowing my camera to track objects at a precise sidereal rate.

The design of the mount is based on a Barn Door mount using a Stepper Motor driven lead screw, The motor drive system is based around 2 Microcontrollers 1 which is dedicated to controlling the display and control buttons and the other for controlling the motor drive technique.  My Prototype was based on the very popular “Arduino Mega” platform.

Initially my original design was only going to drive the mount at sidereal rate and occupy 1 microcontroller. Unfortunately I soon discovered a couple of problems, one of which when I started to use interrupts to allow me to start and stop the mount at any point during its travel caused the motor to have an annoying tick every rotation which transmitted itself into the mount causing vibration, the other problem was that I was having to program lots of delays into my code to allow the display to reflect accurately what was happening and what the operator could do.   I spend a fair amount of time working on how the Stepper Motor was going to be driven; the motor I am using has a 1.9degree per step resolution giving the motor 200 steps per revolution, although this sounds a lot because the motor rotates relatively slow this can cause vibration between steps, I spent some time figuring out a simple method that would allow me to micro step the motor and ended up writing my own library file.  My Library file allows me to micro step the motor to a resolution of 16 PWM micro steps to 1 motor step, I also added some code to tell the motor to rotate at a specific RPM.

Maths:  Okay so there are 24 hours per day, 1440 minutes per day and 86400 seconds per day.  But these numbers are of no use as that is a Calendar day.  The rotation of the Earth is very slightly quicker. Our sidereal day is actually 23.93446972 hours long; this gives us 1436.068183 minutes per day and 86164.09098 seconds per day.  You may be thinking why does this affect us? Well if you are performing exposures that may run for several hours the last thing that you want to see on an exposure that has been running for a couple of hours is star trails.  When you build your mount you measure everything very precisely and with the numbers above you can work out exactly how far you need your motor to drive the mount per minute or second.

I am adding a Lunar tracking rate to the mount and in time I will also have a Guiding facility.

I will be providing pictures of my Prototype mount and some of the results I have achieved in the next couple of weeks.  Providing I am able to get a nice clear night :-)



Posted in Digital Imaging | Tagged | Leave a comment

Gone mobile

Posted on December 7, 2010 by Pete

Well I appear to be getting lots done this evening and I have even managed to get the iPhone app up and running :-) this will make being able to make blog updates very simple.

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Dead Stop Slow

Posted on December 7, 2010 by Pete

Well I will be honest nothing has gone to plan for me due to a number of things.  Weather, funds and a distinct lack of dry days plus a few other commitments.

I have managed to spend some time designing a mount for DSLR cameras which allows the camera to track the night sky I hope to have the mount construction completed in the next following weeks. Photograps coming soon :-)

Posted in Building the Observatory | Tagged | Leave a comment