Ad Astra Observatory

I stayed up way too late on First Light night, but the sky was clear again the next night, so out I went.

I did a little testing to start the evening, there’s a drift that I am going to have to chase down. However, PemPro shows polar alignment dead-on (under 1 arcsec in each axis). With a probably flexing scope, or cone error, or whatever it turns out to be, the actual numbers are meaningless — polar alignment changes everytime the things shifts around.

…

Except, I know that I can put the thing at under 1 arcsec, even if it’s the wrong arcsec. 🙂

Anyway, I have been collecting drift data, by shooting and then plate solving each image. Plate solving is using software that analyzes the photo, matches it with known star positions, and is then able to determine (with high accuracy) where the camera (and, thus, the telescope) was pointed at the time the image was taken. Nifty. Watch the data over time, and you can graph where the telescope wandered, relative to where it should have been pointed. Super nifty.

The “pointing error”, as it’s called, is large enough that, instead of slewing directly to some dim object, I first have the scope slew to a nearby bright star, which I center up in the viewfinder, and then send it to the final destination.

So I have quite a few photos of pretty stars. I am not so much into open clusters, but bright stars with diffraction spikes are kind of cool. So here is Albireo, the head of Cygnus the Swan, a gorgeous orange/blue double star. This star is easily split with binoculars.

I then “finished” slewing over to M27, The Dumbbell Nebula in Vulpecula the Fox. This is a favorite target of mine, so I am pleased to add this to the growing collection of M27 data that I’ve captured over the years. The better my gear gets, the better images I get from this beauty.

…and here’s a full-resolution crop of the nebula.

While M27 was capturing, I took a little catnap in the fairly comfy chair in the observatory. It was a little chilly, but I’d brought a few extra sweaters to toss over myself. I shut the scope down when the background in the image was “blue” instead of “black”.

I shut down, and then started the camera capturing “dark” frames, just 2 hours of shots of the inside of the dome — of course, the sun *was* coming up at the time… meh, I will capture more darks (and flats and biases, and…) some other time. For now, I am hoping the photos look a little cleaner, without quite as many hot pixels.