I’ve not even got close to doing this justice, and it didn’t help that I lost my guide star after 30 subs or so thanks to the sky becoming hazy. I am going to have to come back and have another bash at this. Even in my poor image it looks absolutely outstanding.
I’ve had a couple of attempts at processing. I’m not sure which I prefer.
I had to revisit this before it disappeared from view for the winter. Sadly dew had other ideas (time to make some dew heaters…), but not before I’d managed almost two hours worth of subs. Only 90 seconds this time. I should perhaps have gone for longer in an attempt to reduce the noise.
After starting to get to grips with guided imaging I had to give this planetary nebula one more crack before I move on to pastures new. So this is two and a half hours of RGB in two minute subs. My longest piece of imaging yet. I leave M27 happy that I’ve had a fair crack at it, but eager for another go next year when I want more exposure time and longer subs.
And girls, and indeed astroimagers of any other persuasion.
I’ve finally assembled all the bits I need to start guided imaging. Whilst I have an ST80 that I plan to use eventually, for the moment I have a Skywatcher 50mm finder adapted to take a QHY5L-II camera that fits into the finder shoe on my 127 Mak.
I’m using AstroArt5 for imaging at the moment, but I couldn’t get it to play nicely with the QHY camera at the same time so ended up dropping back to that old standard PHD for doing the guiding.
There’s a real mess of cables now. I’m going to have to do something about that.
This isn’t a great image — the Moon was far too bright for it to be that successful, but the subs are 90 seconds long (compared with my previous limit of 45) and I’ve really not put much effort into drift alignment yet.
It’s the first time I’ve seen one of these thought it appears they’re not that rare. A rainbow, photographed from our garden:
But it’s a double — there’s a second rainbow above it, just visible in this photo (most easily at the treeline and the edge of the picture):
And adjoining the first, underneath it, some additional refraction effects as well. I’ve seen quite a few double rainbows, but never noticed this before:
It’s very faint, but it’s definitely there.
Still unguided, this is seventy minutes worth of RGB exposures of 45 seconds each. I’m not displeased with it, but the outer reaches of the nebulae definitely show that much longer exposures are required.
I’ve not noticed anything like this before. To me it looks like lots of little knots bunched up together.
There was more of the same in thicker cloud nearby, but being lit from behind by the Sun makes the details very hard to see.
Neither really does it for me, but this is an amazing object. Another planetary nebula, and one with so much to see. It looks small, but in fact it’s huge, dwarfing our entire solar system to the point where I don’t think you’d be able to see it at all on this scale.
This image really needs a lot more exposure time, but for that I really need guiding.
I didn’t really believe it would be possible to image this with my setup as it is, but I decided I’d give it a go anyhow. Planetary nebulae are such fascinating objects. Perhaps what lies in wait for our own Sun in billions of years time?
I think I’ve about done this to death now. I’ve decided that to get better results than this I firstly need to get very good polar alignment which really means a pier, which probably means an observatory. That should allow me fewer rejected frames and longer exposures. Guiding might be good, too. That’s one to work on soon. I always intended to have a finder-guider rig on the Mak. Because of the alignment issues some of the stars have turned a nasty shade of magenta in the bottom right of this image. I’ve learnt a great deal from imaging the clusters around Hercules and Lyra this year, so whilst this may not be the best image I’m far from unhappy.
