9-25-2007 Clear Skies Beckon Once Again

Well, I was still quite excited about my last time out since I was able to actually image the moon and Jupiter, but things clouded over for a few days. Luckily, all the raw images I had gave me things to do (although I made almost no improvement on the processing...) I can see why people claim that they work on images all winter when it is too cold. You can spend 10's of hours trying to tweak things.

New purchases while waiting for the skies to clear are:

1. Equatorial Wedge-came with instructions and parts that honestly don't match up! I can't put it together, and at this point don't care enough to call Meade. It will be a necessity with long exposures on DSO's.




2. 10mm Antares Ill Reticule EP--with the DSI, unless you have something perfectly centered you will never find it...save yourself the frustration.




3. 5.5mm 5000 series Plossl...Jupiter deserves a close look and so does Mars! Barlows just don't cut it for me on a visual level ( I have a cheapo)

Out we go tonight back to the Buffalo Gap Nat'l Grasslands. My goal is to do a better Jupiter, another moon, and some DSO's.

Started at dusk with the full moon. Didn't get anything to remarkable, but was fun to try again. Setting the camera up and focusing is going much faster now that I have my 26mm EP parfocal. I still get annoyed that it is so different however.

Now came Jupiter again. 3 bands are visible easily, so I make sure to try and not overexpose this time. I decided to use the 2x barlow with the DSI too to capture more detail. This really helped, and 30 stacked and wavelet adjusted images later in Registax here is what I got!

This wasn't visible in the stacked photos...only 1 band was dimly visible. This shows how even with no idea what to do, after aligning, messing around with the wavelet (gaussian and linear were used) brought out this. I am now a believer in processing planets at least.

The DSO's were much more difficult. I decided to do a 15s exposure to eliminate too much drift, but they are so faint that real care is needed when aligning in the EP. I was glad to have my 10mm Illuminated EP to help with that. I cannot however get that EP to be parfocal...it would have to be out of the diagonal a bit. The one thing I notice on the screen is that they are quite visible, but when opened in Registax, unless you really stretch them(Histogram) you can't see anything! Is this because of the darks? Why can't I open my darks in Registax? My folder has them, but when I go to load them in Registax they won't show up as options even though they are saved as fits....arrg. I can't get any of the below to turn out well as you can see, but I think it is processing error on my part. Remember, I am only doing monochrome luminance at this point. The thought of stacking colors etc is overwhelming. I probably should have got a one shot color to learn on in addition to my DSI pro...especially with the DSI color going for only $99.

The top left: Andromeda Galaxy-85x15s

Top Right: Dumbbell Nebula-31x15s

Left: M27 Ring-45x15s

As can be seen, there are lots of artifacts, hot pixels, streaks, star elongations, gradients, and weird spiral patterns. DSO's are NOT easy so far, but I'm happy to at least see something. Glad I got the focal reducer though, but I need to figure out how to include my dark frames I take to maybe help with some of these.

I think next time I am going to try the DSLR prime focus with the scope and see if I can get some color astrographs of these same DSO's...I do have a SCT Meade balance kit I got to counteract the weight of it, but have yet to put it on.

What I would still like to have: Planetary/Moon cam-30fps would be nice, and 5x telextender

For DSO's, I'll most likely just need a couple of years processing the dumb things as well as get my equatorial wedge put together and figure out polar alignment. That is going to wait until I have the processing down though.