Ad Astra Observatory

Saturday was cloudy, but Sunday night was clear, so I set up the scopes for another night of photography.

I decided to shoot Sh2-101, The Tulip Nebula. I am still working on figuring out what Veronica’s FOV is compared to Pumpkin’s. This nebula turns out to be nicely-framed in Veronica’s FOV, big enough to show detail without cropping, small enough that it’s not difficult to cram in. As usual, Veronica is the workhorse telescope she’s been for me for 5 years now.

I am having some kind of strange error on the mount — it works fine for about 2 hours, then goes nutty and all the images have trailed stars after that. On Friday night, where it was pretty cloudy, I was willing to blame the clouds for this. But I didn’t see any clouds on Sunday (which is not to say they didn’t appear after I fell asleep). I worry that I’m having a cable-pulling problem or some kind of imbalance thing going on. This will take further investigation, but I’m quite frustrated that essentially I am wasting 2/3 of my shots (and all of the ones after I turn in). Again, this image is 6×20m, a full 2 hours, but I threw away another 9 or 10 images that were on target but with trailed stars. I’ll play with the balance and see if that does anything.

Anyway, such as it is, here is last night’s image:

Compare to my previous shot. It’s a different kind of “feel” between the two images — Veronica highlights the brightest part of the nebula, and produces lots more detail because of the extra magnification. Pumpkin gives much more context to the area, and I certainly never would have known about all that wispy dust lane detail if I’d only seen the Veronica image.

It seems that the two scopes match each other in resolution pretty well. I’m looking forward to more Cygnus hunting with Veronica this month!