Ad Astra Observatory

Yesterday afternoon, I industriously cleaned all my camera optics (CCD,

MPCC both sides, IDAS-LPS both sides), and was convinced that this would be
good for my flat field. More on this later.

Once it got dark and I decided to follow the FocusMax tutorial I found, I
got 2 successful v-curves off before I decided to do something stupid; I
noted that the scope was way out of collimation, so I decided to
recollimate via star test. Yikes. I ended up with a laser and a cheshire in
the cold and dark, getting the collimation right again.

The good news is, now the collimation looks pretty good.

The bad news is, once I did that, it changed the basic focus position of
the focuser, and I had a hell of a time trying to get FocusMax to re-group
and find the new focus position. It took the better part of an hour again,
with FM not being able to find stars, etc. I don’t know what exactly I did,
but I eventually got it to run again. In all the thrashing, I tossed the
old config files, so I’m down to 1 vcurve again. My Vcurve error is ~15 as
I recall.

Anyway, once I was back in focus and now with spiffy collimation, I decided
I wanted to shoot a nice, easy target. So I dialed up another old favorite,
M51. I tried to do a run of 20 five-min subframes, but ran out of disk
space at 15. Don’t get me started. I did a little cleanup and shot darks
and biases and went to bed.

Being able to VNC out to the shed is nice. I was able to park the scope
while messing around with other stuff, and only went out to cap the scope

for darks and close the roof (it was *real* dark in there (: ).

Having clean darks and biases helps. I haven’t really gotten Max to do the
right thing with “master” dark frames taken on nights other than the
shooting night. I’m sure that it’s a temperature thing. shrug.

So I processed the images both as “average” and as “median”. Median came

out ever-so-slightly better (I’ll upload the .PNGs), so I ended up using
that as a final.

The image is a lot cleaner and handles processing a lot better when it’s
had darks and biases subtracted. But as you’ll see from the PNGs, I need to
build a flat box immediately. I’m off to the hardware store for some
foamcore and diffuser stuff. And I need to check my electronics box for

white LEDs. I might be able to rip some out of some LED flashlights…

I don’t think that I can really do sky flats — since I’m shooting in
color, every time I do that I end up with blue flats, which totally screws
things up. I guess I could monochrome them, but I’m not sure that will do
the job… sigh.

As I was processing M51, I counted at least 4 other teeny galaxies hiding
in the data. Two are on either side of the dust bunny you can see in the
JPG. Of the other 2, one I know is there because I saw it in someone else’s
image (it’s real faint in the JPG) and the other is a really cool looking
S-shaped galaxy that’s out of the JPG frame but easily seen in the PNG. The
JPG is north up (I think), so the S galaxy is to the northwest (up and right).

You can kind of see some tendrils coming off of the littler of the M51

galaxies if you squint.

I was up until at least 3.