After M51 I decided to move on to a new target and have a crack at M101, the Pinwheel Galaxy. There’s been a lot of fuss about Elon Musk’s starlink constellation and the effects they’re having, and here’s the first image off the camera…
You just can’t get away from them 🙁 Just as well we have sigma stacking…
A week or so on from my last photos and the onions are really starting to grow now (as are some of the weeds)
and a few of the peas are starting to see daylight as well. These are “Sugar Ann” sugar snap peas:
In the greenhouse, the french beans (“Cobra”) are really going for it.
(That’s a bucket containing chile plants in the top left corner).
Vegetable seeds started arriving in the first week of April and I considered myself lucky to get so much of what I wanted given that just about everyone else in the country seemed to be trying to do the same thing.
Radish were the first think to be planted (French Breakfast 3). We rarely have radish in salads unless we grow them ourselves, yet it’s one of my favourite things to buy when we go to the supermarket in France when we’re on holiday. A week later they’re already poking their seed leaves out of the ground.
Onion sets were also starting to show some signs of life only having been in the ground for a week.
Birds did pull a few up early on, but not that many and I replaced them all shortly afterwards.
With the impending arrival of lockdown in the UK we decided that it might be useful to grow some more of our own food and it therefore became necessary to increase the space we use for growing vegetables which has shrunk a fair bit since we had children. In mid March I marked out a new area of about fourteen metres by twelve alongside our existing plot.
Digging was tough going even with a one metre wide rotorvator on the back of the tractor and it took quite some time to get the ground into a usable state, but a couple of weeks later I was done and it looked rather more like somewhere it would be possible to plant vegetables.
Stakes needed to go back in to mark the paths and suchlike (there’s woodchip to go on the paths, but little time to get it done for the time being), but most importantly I needed seeds to start arriving.
Through March and into April I attempted to image Messier 51 with my Skywatcher ED80 and Atik 314L+ (mono).
I ended up with twenty-six five-minute luminance exposures and nineteen three-minute exposures for each of red, green and blue for a total of a fraction over five hours of imaging time.
This is the processed luminance data, scaled down to half size:
I was pretty pleased with that, but my final colour LRGB image I think needs more work. Partly I suspect it’s because I captured the colour data at 2×2 binning so it needed to be scaled up to match the luminance. Partly it’s my lack of skill at processing. I shall definitely return to this another time…
I suspect long exposure images that catch genuine meteorites burning up are not that common and I try quite hard to explain any unexpected trails on my images as satellites or aircraft, but this one doesn’t seem to fit and I can’t decide if it is or it isn’t.
It’s interesting that the brightness of the trail fades a little in the middle and seems a little uneven. I don’t think that would happen with a man-made object, but I just can’t make up my mind.
I recently purchased a used Celestron 80mm guidescope with a focal length of 600mm. Normally I’d probably have gone for another ST80, but in fact I wanted this one to use with a slightly longer focal length OTA anyhow, so the extra focal length of the guidescope suited me.
I really couldn’t get it to work though. The guiding was utterly unreliable. It was only when I looked at the images from the guidescope in detail that I think I might have uncovered why:
That really doesn’t look good to me. I’m going to put it to one side for the time being and see what I can do to sort it out later.
In relatively poor seeing recently, the drift plot for guiding in Ekos showed up like this:
An interesting pattern, I thought, like three circles on a line through the centre of the plot. I can’t explain either the circles or the fact that they appear to be centred on a line at an angle through the plot. More investigation required I think.
The other night I was framing an image using my 80ED and Atik 314L when I noticed that some stars in one corner of the image had odd diffraction spikes:
I couldn’t see what the problem was at all at the time, and ended up having to take the entire telescope/filter wheel/camera assembly apart to find out. It seems a small sliver of some material (plastic, possibly?) had dropped onto the edge of the objective lens, presumably in a position where not all incoming light from the field of view could make it onto the sensor, thus it only affected stars near the it’s position.
A quick clean off and the artefact completely disappeared the next night. Not something I’ve ever seen happen before.
The other night when I slewed to a bright star to check the focus on my Skywatcher 127 Mak I got this image from the ASI174MM camera:
I’m thinking the off-centre ring must be a reflection of the bright star, but the question is what is causing it? My best guess at the moment is that perhaps it is a reflection off the sensor cover that is again reflected by the back of the filter being used at the time, but I guess it could also be a reflection off the front of the filter and/or a reflection back from the secondary. I hope the ring isn’t central because the star isn’t central and that it doesn’t also mean something isn’t square to the optical axis.
