Yearly Archives: 2017

New Focus Control System (Finally) Available

 in Blog  tagged focus control system / focus controller / focus motor / perfectstar / PerfectStar B

I told you about PerfectStar B some time ago – it’s my new focus control system using bipolar motors instead of the traditional unipolar motors.  And I had intended to put it on my website and start accepting orders back in September, but ran into some software issues that delayed the release just enough to push it into the busiest time of year, so I didn’t get around to updating the website until now, even though I have already shipped a couple of these to existing customers. The “B” in the name refers to its use of/support for bipolar stepper […]

2018 Calendar Now Available

 in Blog  tagged 2018 calendar / Extended Corona

The 2018 Calendar of Astro-Photography is now available!  For this edition the title is modified from the usual “Night Visions” to “Sky Visions: Night & Day” because a good portion of the photos included are of the Sun, including several from the Aug. 21, 2017 Total Solar Eclipse. As you can see from the cover, three other photographers have contributed to the calendar this year.  Bob Yoesle is a very skilled solar observer and photographer, and has provided images of the Sun captured with different filters.  Kay Wyatt and Michael McKeag are friends who both got better pictures of the […]

Early Christmas

 in Blog  tagged bahtinov / Bubble Nebula / FLT-132 / NGC7635 / William Optics

For many years the AT111EDT has been my “workhorse” telescope, and it has been great, for the most part.  No longer in production, it is a widely regarded triplet refractor with an excellent optical design for its price point.  However, for the last few years I have been wanting to upgrade.  Specifically, I wanted the ‘scope pictured above (stock photo), the William Optics FLT-132.  Aside from having a significantly larger aperture, the FLT-132 uses a better grade of glass for the ED element, resulting in less chromatic aberration.  This has been a problem for me when capturing LRGB images with […]

LIGO Announces First GW Detection of Colliding Neutron Stars

 in Blog  tagged gravitational wave / GW170817 / LIGO / neutron star collision

You probably heard about this announcement from LIGO yesterday, but I thought I should add some details, and shift the emphasis of the story to where it really belongs: The previous detections of gravitational waves (GW) all originated from the merging of large black holes.  Such mergers can produce relatively strong, but very brief GWs – just a small fraction of a second.  And they produce nothing else – no light or other electromagnetic radiation.  Therefore, these observations could not be confirmed by optical telescopes or other detectors. In contrast, this event, dubbed “GW170817” because it was detected on Aug. […]

A Baby Elephant

 in Blog  tagged Elephant's Trunk Nebula / ic1396 / narrowband

There are, of course, a finite number of objects that an astrophotographer can shoot.  It’s a large number, but definitely finite, and when you add restrictions (and, trust me, there are a LOT of restrictions) it can seem like a pretty small number.  So it’s encouraging to see that the same object can be photographed and processed in many different ways.  As an example, I have now photographed the Elephant’s Trunk Nebula at 3 different focal lengths; 640, 350, and now 200mm.  A much longer focal length is often used on this target to capture just the “trunk” itself (the […]

Wider…Wider…

 in Blog  tagged Butterfly Nebula / crescent nebula / cygnus / Deneb / North America Nebula / Pelican Nebula / Propeller Nebula / sadr

In my earlier attempt to capture the Spaghetti Nebula I found that the 200mm camera lens wasn’t quite wide enough.  And that a faster (lower focal ratio) lens would also be beneficial.  So I put an 85mm f/1.8 Nikkor lens (stopped down to f/2.8) on the QSI camera and tried again last night.  It didn’t work.  The moon was full last night, and even with a 3nm H-alpha filter, there was enough sky illumination to almost completely overpower the Spaghetti.  I’ll try it again when the Moon goes away, but I have to comment again on what this says about […]

Spaghetti (with Tomato Sauce)

 in Blog  tagged narrowband / Sh2-240 / Simeis 147 / Spaghetti Nebula

This is a bi-color version of the Spaghetti Nebula.  I wasn’t able to put together a suitable rig for the wider angle lens, so just captured O-3 (oxygen) with the same 200mm setup.  Hydrogen is assigned to red and oxygen to blue and green.  In other photos of this nebula I found online very few bothered with the S-2 channel, as there is so little there.  Well, as I said before, even the hydrogen is very dim.  Oxygen is even dimmer:  You can see just a hint of it in blue/green near the top. I suspect that this is pushing […]

Mama Mia!

 in Blog  tagged h-alpha / Sh2-240 / Simeis 147 / Spaghetti Nebula

There are lots of things to be surprised about these days, starting with how long it has been since I posted anything here!  It has been very busy for several weeks here at Wa-chur-ed Observatory, including product development, order fulfillment, and my daughter’s wedding!  But it has not included any astro-photography – until last night. The Spaghetti Nebula, also known as Simeis 147 and Sh2-240, is a supernova remnant in Taurus.  It doesn’t have any spicy meatballs in it, but it is surprisingly dim – probably the dimmest target I have ever attempted.  It’s also very large at over 3 […]

Playing With Pacman

 in Blog  tagged narrowband / NGC281 / PacMan

The sky has been mostly clear of clouds lately, but often full of smoke from forest fires.  At times it has been bad enough that we’ve had to close the windows to avoid the smell of smoke.  But I found a couple of reasonably clear nights and decided to re-shoot the Pacman Nebula (NGC281), which I haven’t done in about 5 years.  I don’t know when the “Pacman” name was first used to describe this emission nebula in Cassiopeia, but the video game character was created in 1980, so it is quite new in astronomical terms.  The nebula was first […]

Eclipse Report, Part 2

 in Blog  tagged eclipse / Hercules Cluster / M13 / M33 / OSP / Total Solar Eclipse / Triangulum

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3a0nZAFfcEI&feature=youtu.be The above video is one of three that I captured during the eclipse.  This one uses a “white light” solar filter and is fairly wide angle, as it was intended to show the extended corona (and some nearby stars) during totality (more on that later).  The second was shot with my H-alpha solar telescope and is much more “close up”.  That one needs a lot of processing, since each frame of the movie requires processing hundreds of frames to produce a good image.  The third one is essentially useless.  In the not to distant future I hope to add […]