Observing Log for Mike Durkin
10/21/2006 about 10:00PM-1:00AM
Oyster Bay, NY
Transparency: 7/10, Seeing: ??/5
Celestron Ultima 8 PEC
Another chance to try to use my digital camera. This time when I was focusing, I used a dimmer star. This seemed to produce a "sharper" peak in MaxDSLR for focusing, however usually the star was oblong.
So once I did get focusing to a point I found acceptable, I decided to try to take an image of M15, a globular cluster in Pegasus. The following is a result of 2x30 second images stacked and processed in Photoshop.
I also initially tried using the focal reducer with this, however I ran out of focus. I am not sure what combination will work when using a focal reducer and the DSLR.
10/15/2006 about 8:00-9:30 PM
Oyster Bay, NY
Transparency: 7/10, Seeing: 4/5
Celestron Ultima 8 PEC
Well I have had my new Canon DSLR for about a month and the laptop to go with it as well, so today I took the chance to go out to Oyster Bay and try to get the hang of the camera and MaxDSLR.
So I hooked everything up, and one of the first things I tried to do was to get a good focus. Altair was up and due south so I decided to try with that. Since Altiar is very bright (0.77 magnitude), I had to make the DSLR exposure time very short. I also didn't like the shape of the brightness curve in MaxDSLR, it wasn't quite as round and consistent as I would have liked.
After I got the focus as sharp as I could get based on the software, I decided to take a few images of the area around Altair. I took 3 shots, 10 seconds each, I finally took a dark frame since MaxDSLR includes a checkbox for it. Here is a processed image:
The image is about 30' across and by the streaks in the stars, you can see my polar alignment was off. I only
did very rough alignment since I was only doing a test run of the software and camera. It took me a while to
match up the stars with the stars in some software programs. I think that when they created the catalog of
the stars, the glare of Altair was so bright, that some of the stars close to Altiar were missed. I had to
use stars further away from Altair to match up with software programs. I was amazed to find out that some of
the dim stars in the image are 14th magnitude, which I consider very impressive for a 10 second single
exposure.
An example a better image of the area around Altair can be found here
10/14/2006 about 8:00-10:30 PM
Caumsett State Historic Park
Transparency: varied from 5/10 to 9/10, seeing: 6/10, about 50 degrees F
127mm Mak
Linda from AOS was having a public session for kids and asked for people to come out for help. I was able to go and brought my 127mm Mak. I think my scope may have been the smallest there, the largest one as I remember was a 15 inch Dobsonian.
For showing off to the kids, I decided to point my scope at Alberio with the 17mm(90x) eyepice. I did get more than a few people saying "wow" when they saw the two different colors of the stars, which was nice.
When I didn't have people looking I pointed my scope at the double cluster in Perseus. I also looked at the same cluster in the 15 inch Dobsonian, which was right next to me. Even though both scopes had roughly had the same field of view, the difference was amazing. I could see many more stars in the Dob.
As I was packing up, I also looked throught some of the other scopes that were there. I saw M31, M110, the Blue Snowball nebula (which looked very blue), the ET cluster (NGC 457).
<-- 2005 Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec 2007 -->