Moderator: kt4hx
John Baars wrote: Fri Jun 07, 2024 12:01 pm Thanks for the fine choice of nice objects!
My contribution is over here: viewtopic.php?t=34867
Graeme1858 wrote: Fri Jun 07, 2024 10:36 pm Been out tonight attempting to catch some photons from NGC6210. After waiting till almost 22:00 I set up, rolled off the roof and pulled the coordinates into a NINA sequence I put together earlier in the day. I slewed towards Vega to run an autofocus routine. But intermittent cloud was messing up the HFR calculations! The Cloud cover increased so I parked the telescope and closed the roof. The forecast is good for tomorrow so the Turtle will have to wait another day.
M5 was an early wow moment for me back from my 10" dob days, along with the other globular clusters in the area. Here's an image I captured a couple of years ago.
22-048_The_Rose_Cluster.jpg
I captured M102 for my resurrected Messier Challenge after putting my observatory back together after the OAS Star Party I went to in May. I always thought I was good at keeping optics clean but it looks like a sherbet dab fell in the filter wheel! Even after stripping everything down for a second time and carefully blowing out every filter there were still donuts on the stretched images. The Moon was close and the wind was knocking out my guiding so I didn't bother processing the stacks, but it was good to get the observatory working again! I had a go at it today and pulled the black levels as far as I could to hide the dust motes and misshapen starts but retain some galaxy image. M102 is an excellent example of a side on view galaxy and I just managed to retain some of the dust lanes in the disc to show it off.
M102_LRGB_02.jpg
kt4hx wrote: Sat Jun 08, 2024 9:55 pm Outstanding Graeme! I appreciate you sharing your images of two of the northern targets and I look forward to NGC 6210. Looking at your image of M5, it is easy for me to see what it is my favorite northern globular. It is a true thing of beauty.
Nice job on M102. I like how you pulled out its dark lane bisecting the central bulge. Well done!
Graeme1858 wrote: Sun Jun 09, 2024 10:48 amkt4hx wrote: Sat Jun 08, 2024 9:55 pm Outstanding Graeme! I appreciate you sharing your images of two of the northern targets and I look forward to NGC 6210. Looking at your image of M5, it is easy for me to see what it is my favorite northern globular. It is a true thing of beauty.
Nice job on M102. I like how you pulled out its dark lane bisecting the central bulge. Well done!
Cheers Mate!
The images are rubbish but the targets are excellent and well chosen. Thanks for the work you put into this challenge Alan, I look forward to it every month.
Last night here was clear sky and reasonable humidity all night, well the four ish hours of nautical all night we get get here in June! So I went for NGC6210 again. Earlier in the day I tried removing my focal reducer to get a narrower field of view for the tiny planetary nebula. I love how you pick a range of targets, NGC6210 is tiny! Just 25 arc seconds across so a challenge at any time! But without my focal reducer it's not possible to fit the OAG and the EFW onto the back of the SCT because the electronic focuser gets in the way! So I had to put it back on again. When darkness fell my first job was to slew to Cebalrai and re-calibrate the PHD2 guiding then I moved north to NGC6210.
After that I just clicked go on my NINA advanced sequence and sat back, my mobile phone pinged a notification of sequence start, I watched a nice even hyperbolic autofocus curve form, the target appeared plate solved at the centre of screen, the guiding picked a star and got going and the first exposure started.
A meridian flip was due at 00:32 and I like to be out there to watch the cables during the flip so shortly after midnight I went out and sat in the garden to let my eyes settle into the darkness. I like to spend time under the stars while an imaging run is underway on my garden lounger either with or without binoculars. Despite the lack of darkness, there was lots to be seen in the cloudless sky. After a while I could see at least five stars, possibly an AV sixth (my eyes are not that good any more!) in Ursa Minor, always a good sign. I looked around the sky at old friends including Alphecca who would soon have a new friend! I heard the flip start in the observatory so went to supervise.
The cloudless skies gave me 97 x 120 second LRGB subframes, so I was quite pleased with that. I'll have a look at them today and hopefully post an image of this lovely diminutive planetary nebula.
Graeme1858 wrote: Thu Jun 13, 2024 4:23 pm It's been a busy week but I finally got NGC6210 processed. (Without flat frames. (But now I wish I had done some!)) The image is tightly cropped to enlarge the nebula which has bloated the stars (and shown up my collimation/back focus/tilt problem (that I need to get to the bottom of!)) but I've left them as they are so as to keep as much detail of the nebula as possible. The adjacent 7th mag star and 9th mag star are both lovely colours, Stellarium reports B-V 0.98 and B-V 1.67 respectively. The nebula itself shows as a really nice cyan colour and some protuberances to differentiate it from the stars, which I was quite pleased about. A perfectly aligned native F10 9.25 SCT would show some more detail but not sure how much more. What does a 25 arc second target look like visually through a 17.5" Newtonian?
Graeme1858 wrote: Fri Jun 14, 2024 5:15 am
Yeah, probably should have attached the image!
NGC6210_LRGB_03.jpg