The time has come, FINALLY
After seemingly unending weeks of temperatures over 100F during the day and 85F at night with at least 60% humidity we get some relief. It came in the form of Tropical Storm Lee which pummeled the East Coast with rain for days on end once again flooding large portions of Tennessee but the break in temperatures is very welcome here in North Texas. The moon is about 75% full so deep sky photography will be challenging but I took some pictures of the moon, just in case. At least the night won’t be a total loss now even if everything goes completely pair shaped. Currently the temperatures are in the middle 70′s and the humidity is in the upper teens to lower 20′s with calm winds. Only barely enough gust to keep the air from being completely still. Currently the SN6 is trained on M27 and snapping away happily after a small amount of minor drama. I took my time getting set up but I bumped the tripod lightly with my foot while aligning the mount. Hopefully no ill will come of that. We shall see in the morning.
Maybe tonight?
It’s been oppressively hot here in Tejas recently but I’m starting to get the itch to play under the stars once more. I needed to give my declination axis a tune so I did that last week hoping to use it when it was actually looking like it might get into the 70′s overnight. Granted it wasn’t much into the 70′s with lows forecast at 78F and 79F but it was less than 80F at least. I just got a Clear Sky Alarm Clock notification that the sky is favorable tonight so I may ponder this over dinner.
Into the breach once more . . .
Leo Triplet from Allen, TX 2011-02-12
After several long months of fighting colds/flu and cruddy weather, lack of motivation from having to collimate my scope once more finally got the better of me. A quick and dirty process of some quick and dirty data on a night with a half moon high in the sky. Shot from the Dallas-area suburb of Allen under clear, cold and less than 50% humid skies. Envisage kept crapping out on me so I fired up PHD Guiding which of course worked perfectly. Once more hats off to Craig Stark for volunteering his time and effort to make our lives easier in providing an excellent autoguiding package free of charge. Check his software out and support him if you haven’t already.
Equipment:
- Meade LXD75 – SN6
- Canon 300D (unmodified)
- StarBlast 4.5″ Newt + Meade DSI on guide duty
What a difference a (few) years make
I was digging through some old data and thought I might reprocess my M13 data from three years ago. Man, what a difference! Some of it is software, some of it is technique, some of it is experience.
The old M13 on the left, the reprocessed data on the right:
The Manger
M44, a long time coming but worth the wait.
Messier 44, The Beehive Cluster, Praesepe. This is one really large object. It is 95 arc minutes (a bit more than 1.5 degrees) in angular size. It’s big enough that it won’t fit in a single frame on my Canon 300D with my f/5 Schmidt-Newtonian scope. That officially makes M44′s dimensions Big by Large! Located about 545 light years from home, M44 is a relatively close open cluster of stars and one of the closest stellar objects. It is large enough and bright enough that in a relatively dark sky it is easily discernible with the naked eye and is spectacular through binoculars.
My first image of a DSO from May 2006
Personally I have a warm fuzzy spot for M44. Many years ago when I first started picking up astronomy magazines I looked through the charts, read the articles and saw that Saturn was traversing M44 which made it very easy to find in suburban skies. It was the first deep sky object I looked at through my department store telescope and I was instantly hooked. It was also the first image I took of a DSO with my point-and-shoot digital camera clamped to my eyepiece in the same department store telescope. Now, years later, I finally snapped another image of an old favorite.
