Andrew’s Astronomy Blog

At the beginning of the holiday in Northumberland we had an evening where the cloud passed through just as the moon was setting. Having a restricted southern horizon I looked instead to the East where Cygnus was rising and decided to image the region around the bright star Sadr. Some puzzling over the hit or miss drifting I’d been getting with the AstroTrac lead me to the conclusion that I needed the polar scope on the left side of the mount to get good results. This has subsequently been confirmed by some recent posts on the Yahoo group and the problem is due to the scopes being manufactured with the tubes slightly misaligned. There is a mod available to correct this that involves fitting a collar with three grub screws around the tube. This will be worth a closer look.

Polar alignment was pretty close on this occasion so I took 16x 3 minute exposures with the ZS70 and unmodified Canon 350D and stacked the results.

The bright star to the left of centre is Sadr. There is an open cluster (NGC 6910) to the left of Sadr. The remainder of the image consists of HII emission nebulae that are catalogued in the DWB index. One Barnard catalogue object (B344) is visible just to the right of the bright orange star top centre of the image.

While on holiday in Northumberland we took advantage of an open evening at the Kielder Observatory. The evening started with a talk by the Director, Gary Fildes about the Universe and our place in it. This was followed by a tour of the facility and views of the Moon and Saturn through the 20″ Newtonian and 14″ SCT telescopes as the sky didn’t get dark enough to look at anything fainter.

http://www.kielderobservatory.org/ 

I’ve resisted imaging M51 for a while now with the feeling that the world doesn’t need yet another picture. However, my recent  rough and ready image and Dan’s work convinced me that this really is one of my favourite night sky objects. So, I gathered 60 minutes of exposure time on GRAS-3 in 5 minute sub-frames. The results, while nice to look at lacked some definition in the finer detail and I found myself wondering what rather more exposure time would do for the image. The following night I gathered another 60 minutes and, when added in, the difference was stunning. Detail in the dust lanes that had been rather blurred before leapt out of the screen and this was before any additional processing had been done.

I made several attempts at processing the results before settling on this image. I’ll probably return to this in the future and try and enhance the tidal tail of stars that have been swept out by this galactic close encounter.

For the second part of the Saturday evening I turned my attention to M13 in Hercules. As the tracking appeared to be working OK I switched back to 3 minute exposures at ISO 400 and ended up stacking 16 images. Also in the image is NGC 6207, a faint galaxy just visible at the left hand side of the frame.