I'm happy to report that I was able to get out for my first astro-imaging session of 2011 on July 5th. Not only that, it was in the ideal place (Indian Trail Springs in the Ochocco Mountains) and extremely good conditions (except for a lot of extremely annoying bugs). My 12V battery was too run-down after that night to chance another (the result of a long time on the shelf?), so one night was all I had.
It started out poorly, as my lack of practice set the stage for a voluminous brain fart (I didn't use my compass correctly to find Polaris). The result was that I had to tear down the equipment, move the tripod, re-level and set up again. Fortunately, that didn't take long past the time when the moon slipped over the horizon to bring on the darkest sky. After that, things went well. The three-star alignment was successful on the first try. Though I had wanted to try to improve my alignment by trying the drift-alignment technique, I couldn't bring myself to take the time with such great skies above me. It turned out that was a good decision because by the end of the night I had gotten some very nice exposures as long as ten minutes.
I imaged a total of eight objects in the span of about four and a half hours. That's too many, because the really great images require on the order of hours of exposure. I'll wait to do that when I know how to align the scope better. In the meantime, I had fun imaging a bunch of objects with the new Startlight Xpress camera (SXVR-M25C). The objects imaged were M16 (Eagle Nebula), M20 (Triffid Nebula), M22 (globuar cluster), M31 (Andromeda galaxy), M33 (spiral galaxy), M101 (spiral galaxy), NGC 7000 (North American Nebula), and the Pacman Nebula. I had imaged them all before except for NGC 7000, which is too big for my old camera to image well. With the new camera the field of view is very large and I can capture nearly the whole nebula in a frame. However, when I took the image I didn't see any nebulosity; as a result, I took only one exposure that had a satellite track through it. It wasn't until I got home and did the full processing of the image that I found I was able to bring out the nebulosity; it ended up being a pretty good (see below) given how little data there was.
M31 (below) turned out better than it ever has before, but it still pales in comparison to the images of many amateurs. Progress makes me happy though!
My favorite image of the night was the Eagle Nebula (below).
M22 (below) came out much better than the last globular cluster I imaged with this camera (October 2010 in Arizona).
The other images were pretty good, but all were a bit noisy because of the small amount of data. For the first time I used the data-logging on PHD guiding but I've yet to sort through it.
One of the really nice things about the new camera is that there is very little dark noise, such that dark frames are not even required. I did take both flats and bias frames this time and that was the extent of my image calibration.
The next step is to use some of the moon-lit clear nights between now and the end of July to go through the drift-alignment method and become well-practiced at it. I'll be going back to ITS during the period of the next new moon. I also need to work on a better, quicker way to balance my scope and I need to get some bug netting to cover my head. The bugs at ITS this last week were terrible! They were constantly flying into my face and buzzing my ears, such that I spent about as much time slapping at my head as I did paying attention to my imaging setup.
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