Color!

Being quite happy with my SBIG ST-402 camera in monochrome... and not liking several aspects of using the Nikon D40... I decided to order a color wheel for the ST-402 so that it can take RGB color images. Last night I tried it out at Larch Mountain and captured the image you see above of M27, the "Dumbell Nebula" (planetary nebula). Right now my image processing skills and software are not up-to-snuff, but I did what I could (what was obvious) with what I have and this was the result. There are couple of stars that saturated and flared and there is slight off-set in the red image (corrected as best I could in CCDOPS). The focus is not too bad, but should get better in the future, as I've ordered a Bahtinov focus mask, which is known to be quick and effective in establishing sharp focus. The image posted is only a combination of three images red, green and blue each 30 seconds in exposure. I a couple of other done the same way that I'll be processing and potentially stacking with each other. I did use guiding but used shorter duration exposures due to the wind being a bit of an issue (some fairly strong gusts).

Since the moon was coming up around 10pm, I didn't have much time. My priority was M27 and I'm pretty happy with my first color image on the ST-402. I did use some extra time to shoot the Veil Nebula (East) and the one brighter comet that is up now (2006-Christie/Aql). The Veil was a learning experience because it takes a longer exposure that most just to see that it is there, which makes framing the image more difficult. If I had had time I would have rotated the camera for the first time to improve framing since the Veil is long and skinny and needed to be horizontal (but was vertical in my view). Being faint, I needed more exposures that what I had time for. So... I'll come back to the Veil in the future.

The comet did not have a significant tail, so wasn't real exciting. I'll post it here once I finish the processing on it. Just out of curiosity, I did one set of RGB exposures, but don't expect to see anything much. I took seven monochrome exposures of 30" each. It was on this comet that my guiding started failing on me. I suspect it was due to either 1) shabby polar alignment (since it happened right away when I went to this new object, which was farther south), 2) poorer signal-to-noise ratio on the guide star due to the increasing moonlight... though perhaps both were at play.

The night was pretty peaceful with only a few other people up there. Two cars and a motorcycle were there when I first came and the two cars left, but a few more cars came after dark, making me wonder what the heck they would be doing up there. Two drove into the parking lot (fortunately not while I was taking light-exposures), one driving all the way down to the end and back and the other kindly turning around as soon as he saw me (an astronomer perhaps?). The only other annoyance were the planes routinely coming over, though I don't think they ended up having any effect on my images.

I wonder how many days we'll have left in September to do some decent astronomy. The prime time is Sept. 16th to 25th with no moon, but the near term shows some clouds moving in. If they go away sometime later next week I may just head out again for another imaging session, so stay tuned.