Ad Astra Observatory

Another long clear night.

Since the webcam was already installed and focused, I started the evening working WCS to refine my polar alignment. Azimuth was essentially perfect. Elevation started around 200 and is now around 40. I’m done with polar alignment. The final elevation run went for a full 20 minutes, with up to 3″ of drift.

Then I had to reinstall the motor focuser and the main camera. That went fairly quickly. But I needed to do a FocusMax run, too, which is always a bit hit-or-miss. I found a spot close to focus by watching the numbers in FM. FocusMax was headed off to infinity, but it stumbled across a nice 4.78 HFD position, and I went with that.

I spent a little time trying to figure out what to shoot for the evening, and against my better judgement, I landed on UGC10822, The Draco Dwarf Galaxy. I shot 2 hours of it, 20m subframes. In order to get 20m frames, I have to shoot through the Ha filter, so this target is even less visible than it normally would be.

I have never seen the point in shooting open clusters; the photo usually looks a whole lot like empty space. But I have now found the idiot cousin of open clusters — dwarf galaxies. I swore I’d missed the object, until I looked up a photo of it online, and I then noticed the little teeny dim stars that make up the galaxy. So I “captured” it, but I am going with my better judgement and not posting the image.

By the time I’d finished on UGC10822, Cygnus had risen high enough for me to start shooting some nebulae. So I set up on NGC6820, which I’d only shot once before, and went to bed.

I woke up in the morning to a strange phenomenon; I had several subframes with trailed stars in them! Oh, the horror! I actually stacked the trailed ones into the first cut; median filtering did an OK job cleaning up the worst of it. But for the cut you see here, I only took the untrailed images, and ended up with 2 hours of data.

This is NGC6820 in Cygnus, 6x20m subframes, in Ha

Click here for a full frame version of this image.

I talked it over with Art, and he assures me that the seeing goes crazy every morning about 2 hours before sunrise, so I am not freaking out about the trailed subframes at this point. We’ll just see if this continues…