Ad Astra Observatory

In a last-ditch effort to make Veronica work with the mount, and since it’s Friday night, I decided to really tweak the scope before starting up, then do a series of “test” shots to decide what actually works.

I had balanced Veronica “forward” in the tube rings to help get a little more time past meridian before the scope hits the pier. I moved the rig back to the center of the rings, and rebalanced “to within an inch of its life”.

Then, I re-adjusted the RA worm to remove as much play as I could. It was a bit of a Q&D job, but I’m getting pretty good at it, so I think I’m OK. There is still the tiniest amount of “wiggle” if I grab the scope and really push it around. I’m not sure how to fix that, though. I tightened up as many of the other mount bolts that I could think of, while I was at it.

Then I decided to shoot one hour each of 5m, 10m, and 20m subframes on a nice, easy subject, M27 The Dumbbell Nebula. As I expected, the 5m frames worked, but both the 10m and 20m frames (all of them) were trash.

Here’s M27, The Dumbbell Nebula in Vulpecula

The Dumbbell is a really easy target. It’s big and bright and looks good at almost every exposure length from 30sec right on up. At 5m in Ha, it’s spectacular. There are little prominences of vapor coming off of the main nebula that I’d never noticed before. Nice. This is just 1 hour, but I’m happy with this result.

Once I figured out that 5m is what I should be shooting (and since it was now 2:30 in the morning and the autumn constellations were in the “sweet spot” for guiding), I decided to do a quick little test, an object that I wasn’t expecting to do well in Ha, but since (at this point) I knew that this was Veronica’s last night as the “main” scope for awhile, I wanted to go out with a nice solid test shot for future study.

I chose M33, The Great Triangulum Galaxy. Galaxies are made of stars, which throw (more or less) full-spectrum light, so for the same reason that I don’t have to worry about the local shopping mall that leaves their parking lot lights on all night, galaxies are not really what one would consider a “narrowband” target. However, at the same time, M33 is both large (3rd largest galaxy in our local neighborhood) and close (next closest after Andromeda), so much so that certain nebulae *in M33* have their own, separate NGC numbers (because at the time, it was not understood that they were really part of the same object). So I wondered ifI could pick some of that detail up.

The results speak for themselves.

This is 100m (3h 20m), 20 5m subframes of M33 in Ha through Veronica.

M33, The Great Triangulum Galaxy

There’s a decent amount of detail there. Even in Ha, it’s obvious that this is a spiral galaxy; you can see the arms in the clouds of hydrogen. And of course, I picked up some of M33’s brightest nebulae.

NGC 604 is the knot of bright nebulosity at upper left. NGC 604 is pretty bright, considering it’s millions of light years from here. That’s because the nebula is 1500 light years across. The distance from Earth to M42, The Great Orion Nebula, is 1500 light years. If we were in M33, the NGC 604 nebula would cover that entire distance. Wow. It’s huge, huge, huge.

In all, a successful image of M33. Makes me want to shoot M31 with Pumpkin in Ha.

At this point, though, I’m pretty frustrated with Veronica as an Ha scope. Flashes of brilliance, but a lot of fighting the mount to make things happen. I’ve decided to swap the camera over to Pumpkin to finish out the moonth. Back to some easy widefields for awhile.

Veronica is now a gigantic guidescope again.