Deep Sky / Gear / Long Exposure Photography

M27, The Dumbbell Nebula in Vulpecula

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I’m having trouble getting the G11/SCT combo to work shooting to the East, for some reason. So, I decided to “make lemonade” and shoot to the West instead. This neatly avoids the […]

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Deep Sky / Gear / Long Exposure Photography

M27, The Dumbbell Nebula in Vulpecula

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I tried a longer integration time on M27 (2 hours’ worth of 3-minute images vs. an hour of 2 min)… I think that I’ve reached the limit of what I can achieve […]

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Astro knowledge / Deep Sky / Gear / Long Exposure Photography

M27, The Dumbbell Nebula in Vulpecula

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Another attempt. I’m getting the idea that longer integration times lead to better detail and noise reduction…

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Deep Sky / Gear / Long Exposure Photography

M27, The Dumbbell Nebula in Vulpecula

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This is some more testing with the newly-modded D70. 30 seconds has a lot of detail, but 2 minutes grabs even more.

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Deep Sky / Gear / Long Exposure Photography

M27, The Dumbbell Nebula in Vulpecula, composite

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This is a stack of the previous 2 images of M27. The 5 minute image had nice blue nebulosity, and the 30sec images had some highly textured red, so I decided to […]

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Deep Sky / Gear / Long Exposure Photography

M27, The Dumbbell Nebula in Vulpecula

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This is the first shot after I performed the UV/IR filter removal on the D70. Note that these images are 30 seconds long, 10 times shorter exposure than the image taken two […]

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Astro knowledge / Deep Sky / Gear / Long Exposure Photography / Optics

M27, The Dumbbell Nebula in Vulpecula

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It was this image that convinced me that I needed to do the filterectomy on the Nikon D70. According to S&T, The Dumbbell, The Coathanger, and Albireo form an equilateral triangle.

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Camera / Deep Sky / Long Exposure Photography / Techniques

So many wheels…

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It’s been a few nights of unguided astronomy, as I get my feet under me with new gear. The ASI294 continues to make life easy, as it just plugged in where the […]

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ATM / Gear / Maintenance / Telescope

Soon, Trixie. Soon.

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Because I’ve made so much progress on the observatory of late, I was looking over my Bookmarks, to see if anything needed updating. Trixie (look in the tag cloud) is on-hold right […]

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Camera / Gear

A change at QB for Hilltop Observatory

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Well, it happened again. The dawn of a new era in Hilltop Observatory. Today, the new imaging camera showed up in the mail. I bought it from Renaud Venne Landry, one of […]

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Techniques

Polar Alignment Calculations

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Here’s a page that derives Polar Alignment Calculations. (update 5/2020: the original site is gone, so I found the text on Wayback and am inserting it below. This is by the original […]

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Gear / Observatory / Telescope

Special Guest Star takes the mount at Hilltop O

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The Astro Jedi needed somewhere to store his light sab—- I mean, bucket, and I was only too happy to accommodate him. I have decided that I need to come to a […]

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General / Maintenance / Observatory

Dome shutter is motorized again!

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I finally decided to bite the bullet and fix the shutter motor. Things went sideways last winter, and I’ve been opening the shutter manually (and tying it shut with rope, so we […]

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ATM

Trixie 2017 – tube mods

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I finally got around to cutting the MTA-UTA tubes to length; the only eyepiece that would come to focus with the focuser spacer in place is the Televue 55mm Plossl. If I […]

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