Ad Astra Observatory

Another night hunting galaxies in Virgo. This time I went after M100, which I was pretty certain to be a spiral.

I had some initial difficulty getting Elbrus working. It took about an hour to get the plate solving working. I have to manually calibrate 3 stars everytime, and even so, it had trouble locking on. I started to streamline this process by writing down the positions of favored alignment stars, but there must be something that I am missing.

Once Elbrus was locked on, everything went smoothly. I set up on M100, was able to poke the scope a little to get a couple more galaxies in-frame, and we were off to the races.

I picked up 45 frames (5m each), a total of 3h 45m, before the mount hit its safety limit.

Here it is, in all its gradient glory:

And the annotated version; there are a lot of itty bitty galaxies in Virgo!

And here is a close-up of M100 itself; what a gorgeous face-on spiral. I look forward to trying out Cassie on this target.

I think I might try a little longer exposure next. That will amortize the 90s per frame download time, and I will also end up with a smaller load of images to stack. I might even get extra photons on some of the fainter of these fuzzies. So far I have not run into a tracking problem; it’s about skyglow.

I got the Hubble Guide Star Catalog installed into Cartes du Ciel so I now in theory have stars down to 15th mag. I’m not certain that I have it set up correctly, bit there are a few more stars in-engine now.

I need to work on my plate solving workflow. Elbrus fails a lot at the beginning of the evening where I need it the most. Maybe there is something that I can configure to make this work better; longer exposures, different parameters, … More research needed.

Another gorgeous field in Virgo. Bring ’em on.