Observing Log for Mike Durkin
4/30/2011 about 8:00PM-2:00AM
Locust Valley, NY
Transparency: 8/10, Seeing ?/5
Temperature: ?
Equipment: Celestron Ultima 8 with PEC, Hutech modified Canon Rebel XT
Time of a prime focus image of a galaxy. Tonight my target was M106, a spiral
galaxy in Canes Venatici. The pictires I've seen of it look nice and there's
also a smaller companion galaxy nearby.
For this session, I also managed to use an electical extention cord with my
setup. Turns out that it was a good idea. It took me quite a while to get
all set up with my polar alignment, focusing, and then finally to center
my target. If I had to depend only on the batter I had on my, I probably
would have run out of juice much sooner.
So here's the final processed image:
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Here's a picture I took of M106, a galaxy near the Big Dipper in Canes Venatici. It also has galaxy NGC 4248 on the top right of the image, and there's a few tiny smudges that are also galaxies much further away. I was hoping to bring out the outer arms better, but 2 hours on an 8 inch isn't quite good enough for that.
Telescope: Celestron Ultima 8 |
I did notice that when I stacked my images, if I used "average", the background noise had some kind of pattern that created streaks in the final image. Plus some hot pixels didn't really get processed out. If I used "median", the background was much cleaner and the hot pixels were no longer an issue. This makes me wonder if my dark frames are not being used properly.
4/9/2011 about 12:30PM-1:30PM
Locust Valley, NY
Transparency: 8/10, Seeing 2/5
Temperature: about 60 degrees
Equipment: Coronado Hydrogen-α telescope and Imaging Source DMK31AU03 camera.
First use of the replacement camera from Imaging Source. As expected, I need to use a 2x barlow
to get the image to focus. I'm also very relieved that I do not see the same fringes that
I saw with the earlier color camera.
I took a series of about 9 videos for processing. I had some problems using the processing
software, Registax. I had to use 2 different versions for the alignment step. Version 6
was good on the videos where I was trying to get the prominences and it would use miultiple
algnment points. Version 5 was better when trying to align features on the solar disk.
Here are the best results:
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I used a Coronado Hydrogen Alpha PST telescope and a 2x barlow lens with the camera. There was no tracking, so my movie files were limited to a few seconds. I stacked 150-300 images using Registax and did my final editing in Photoshop. |
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