Ad Astra Observatory

After two nights of unmitigated success with Pumpkin, I decided to “zoom in” a little (well, a lot, really), and put up Cassie on the third night of the star party.

Mounting up and focusing was pretty straightforward. The cable harness really makes OTA swaps easy. And the Bahtinov worked flawlessly, as always.

Buoyed by my success, and because I wanted to spend some time in the southern Milky Way, which the Temma was hating because it was right near the meridian, I decided against my better judgment to set up with the scope pointing “west” instead of “east”. This should not make a difference. But I have never been able to shoot west. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s a balance thing, maybe a cable pulling problem, I have no idea. But through several mounts, scopes, and guiders, I just can’t get it done. But I try anyway, every once in awhile. 🙂

This decision neatly bifurcated the night into a “pointed west” portion and a “pointed east” portion. Let’s just say that the same suckage I am used to when shooting while west was happening. And I picked up some awesome photons anyway, but the stars were just not as tight as I’d have liked.

I started on an easy one, M20 The Trifid Nebula. This is one of my favorites. I think I’ve shot this nebula with every single OTA I’ve owned, with the possible exception of Pumpkin. I have attempts on film, with the D70 (pre- and post-mod), and now with the 350D.

The subframes on M20 were coming out looking gorgeous (albeit with non-perfect stars), so I moved on to M16, The Eagle Nebula. This one was made world-famous by the Hubble Space Telescope’s signature photo of “The Pillars of Creation”. Another gorgeous nebula that I haven’t spent enough time on because of the whole southern horizon situation in the observatory.

I admit that I was a little overconfident at this point. I moved from these known and easy targets to a complete unknown that was further west and about to set, B27 The Snake Nebula, a dark nebula in Scorpius. I only took one subframe, because I was having serious trouble with the guider in all the mucky seeing at the horizon, and the stars are badly trailed. sigh.

So I decided to see if I could get a better result, still pointed west, if I attacked something up near zenith, so I went after NGC 6820, a often-overlooked nebula up near Cygnus. Two subframes of that was all I could take; let’s just say that the guiding was junk up there, too.

So I gave up and switched to east-pointing.

But if you’ve been paying attention, all the Milky Way objects were now starting to slide too far west to do any good, and it was starting to get late, so I had to pick something in the autumn sky that was suitable for the tiny FOV of Cassie. And this is where my lack of experience with the OTA and with that part of the sky started to bite me. I ended up landing on NGC7331, a big (although that’s a relative term) galaxy near Pegasus. NGC 7331 is the largest galaxy in the Deer Lick Galaxy Cluster (named after the Deer Lick Gap in SC). It’s very near Stephan’s Quintet, but not close enough to get them both in Cassie’s relatively tiny FOV. Anyway, I had to slew to NGC7331 manually, because the Temma got mad about zenith again. And… I slightly missed. I got the main galaxy, but the little buddy galaxies are off-frame, I think. Anyway, it was late at this point, so I went to bed, and woke up at 5am to shut down and cover the scope. I got 2 hours of usable subframes on NGC 7331.