I shot this on the second night of GSSP 2010.

This is 2h total exposure, six 20m subframes, shot with Pumpkin/350D.

I shot this on the second night of GSSP 2010.

This is 1h total exposure, three 20m subframes, shot with Pumpkin/350D.

I shot this on the second night of GSSP 2010.

This is 1h total exposure, three 20m subframes, shot with Pumpkin/350D.

I shot this on the second night of GSSP 2010.

This is 1h total exposure, three 20m subframes, shot with Pumpkin/350D.

With no polar alignment or setup required this evening, this was my first “full” night with Pumpkin.

I started around dusk with some exposure bracketing on Rho Ophiucus, a nebular area of sky that I’ve never been able to come close to trying from the “light bowl” of my back yard.
Once the sky was dark enough, I ran off an hour of images on this area.

Then I decided to get some full-color imagery on a famous object that I’ve only been able to shoot well in Ha, The Veil Nebula.

By this point, the autumn constellations were well-up, so I put in an hour on M33, The Triangulum Galaxy. This turns out to be an object that’s a little small for Pumpkin, but I haven’t really played with it often, so it’s good to get some photons.

I finished off the night on IC1848, The Soul Nebula, as a counterpoint to the Heart Nebula image I’d captured last night. I will see whether they can be put together as a mosaic. I ended up with 2 hours of usable data before sunup. I was in bed around 2:30 again, and saw The Pleiades rise over the eastern horizon before turning in.

Man, I love this sky.

I shot this on the first night of GSSP 2010.

This is 1h 20m total exposure, four 20m subframes, shot with Pumpkin/350D. I lost one frame to sunrise and one to a passing satellite.

This was the first image I shot while at The Golden State Star Party (GSSP) 2010.

This is 40m total exposure, two 20m subframes, shot with Pumpkin and the 350D with no light pollution filters. In short, the sky was dark. Without the IDAS LPS, I’m restricted to around 3m subframes at home. I shot 20m subframes at GSSP because I already had things set up for that, from the Ha work I do at home.

We left the house around 8am, 4 people, with a packed trailer, Skybox, and “way back”. We headed north via Chico and Susanville. Let’s call it “the scenic route”. The drive was long but without major incident. We arrived at the star party site around 6pm. The wind was cranking pretty good. We got the tent and canopy set up by the kids’ bedtime at 8pm, and I started in on getting the Ad Astra Observatory at Frosty Acres set up. I decided to go easy on myself and mounted up Pumpkin, since I knew that I had a lot of work ahead, getting the polar alignment right, etc.

Leveling the tripod was a little tricky. I ended up using a spare counterweight under one leg. It felt pretty stable, but I resolved to be nice to the mount.

The LED for the polar scope is flaky, and was not working right this evening. So I moved straight into WCS. This took a long. time. I ended up adjusting the Elevation by “standard drift alignment”; I let the star drift in software, and as soon as it stabilized, I adjusted the mount in the proper direction (without using the software to help set up the corrections). Even so, it was well after midnight before I had a halfway decent polar alignment.

Once I was more or less aligned, I switched to the main camera, focused, and decided I needed a really easy first target, so I went for the oldest saw in the book, M31. The first subframe of the star party came in at 1:45am. I set up without an Ha filter, since I’d decided to shoot only RGB from the star party (I can shoot Ha at home). I also removed the IDAS LPS light pollution filter for the first time since I got it. It felt … naked. So weird.

Two awesome-looking subframes of M31, and it was starting to get late, so I decided to switch to another target to run the rest of the night, and catch some sleep.

I moved over to IC 1805, The Heart Nebula, and stayed up long enough to see the first subframe come in, so I could tell I was framed properly. I got to bed around 2:30, and set the alarm for 5am to shut down and cover the scope.

When I woke up at 5, the laptop was already dinging because it had lost the guide star. The sun had risen around 4:30. Jupiter was still blazing bright and high in the south at 5am.

Battery charging went without a hitch. The bike trailer was great for that. Internet was essentially unusable from the site; I never got online tonight.

Seriously dark sky, no light domes at all. The brightest area of sky was where I think the sun was so high that it never set completely in the north, so the northern horizon was ever-so-slightly blue. I could see the Big Dipper go all the way horizontal to the northern horizon (“The Bear Never Bathes In Ocean”). There were a few locals who “forgot” to turn off their outside lights. But generally, the sky was just gorgeous. I certainly didn’t need a light pollution filter. Nice.

The Veil Nebula is a stark test of your optical system. There is a huge brightness range among the various pieces. The size of the object is pretty staggering, too. And there’s a ton of wispy detail that is easy to get lost in noise, blown-out highlights, etc.

I have been playing around with the Dust-n-Scratches + gradient removal method of editing for the last couple of images. I’m not sure I have it down yet, but I’m getting there.

There is a very strange and disturbing “tearing” effect that happens with my images. It has something to do with the dark frame application I think. It does not seem to matter whether I use bias frames or not (I do not scale my darks). I end up with a kind of blotchy background which detracts a little from the gorgeous deep sky object.

This is 18x20m subframes, a full 6 hours.
There is no catalog that lists all the pieces of the Veil as a single object, so this image contains NGC6992, 6960, and several others.

For extra wispyness, check out the image inverted!

Sometimes you luck out when you’re “just testing”. I am still shaking out the kinks in my 350D workflow. I put the Ha filter back on the 350D last night. Focusing with my new commercially-produced Bahtinov mask was a snap. Those spikes were seriously sharp.

I thrashed around a little on what to shoot and &c, ended up doing some 20m subframes of IC1396. When I woke up in the morning, the sun was up and I lost 3 frames. But I ended up with 17 lights that are usable. Because it’s a new camera, I didn’t have any 20m darks yet, so I set it to shooting a bunch of 20m and 10m darks, which took all day.

I still need to shoot some flats, but I’ll get around to that.

One thing I have found is that I seriously need to clean the CCD. There is a dust bunny on there that is like 150 pixels across. You can clearly see it on the first-light NGC7000 photo, and I haven’t cleaned my optics yet.

The dew heater ran all night on a separate power supply form the rest of the rig. The scope was without dew this morning, but the finders (which had no dew prevention) were also not dewed up, so I don’t know that this is the best indicator of anything in particular.

One thing that I’ve definitely noticed is that I am having the same irritating thing happen with my FOV now that I had when I switched from film to CCD.

Right about the time I switched from film to CCD, I owned a ED80 refractor (600mm f.l.), then I bought a Meade SN6 (750mm f.l.). The SN was f/5 to the refractor’s f/7.5, but the additional f.l. meant that the FOV was ever-so-slightly smaller. Then I switched to CCD. 35mm film is 36x24mm. DSLRs use an “APS” size sensor, 23x15mm. So again, my FOV got compressed. And all of a sudden, instead of being able to just barely squeeze NGC7000 into the FOV of the film camera/ED80, there was absolutely no chance with the DSLR.

So I bided my time, waited for a nice 400mm ED refractor to come out, and finally picked up Pumpkin a couple years later. A few nights out with Pumpkin revealed that the field was badly curved, so I picked up the only field flattener available at the time, the William Optics 0.8x FR/FF, which turned the scope from a 400mm f/6 into a 320mm f/4.8. The difference in exposure length isn’t really noticeable. But the FOV was gigantic. It’s like twice the size of the FOV I got with the ED80. So I was happily ripping down these huge swathes of sky.

Then I made two critical decisions.

First, I decided that I wanted the field flat but not focal-reduced, so I picked up an Astro-Tech FF.

Second, I got an offer I couldn’t refuse on a 8mpx DSLR, so in comes the 350D.

So, now Pumpkin gets a ever-so-slightly smaller FOV with the new flattener, and the 350D (being more pixels on the same size sensor) gets an ever-so-slightly smaller FOV still. The difference seems small when considering the whole FOV: 4°x2° -> 3.2°x2.2°. But when you consider that a 1000px x 1000px crop out of the 300D/0.8x FR combo covers an area 78′ square, but the same crop out of the 350D/FF combo covers an area 55′ square, it’s big. The 350D’s square covers half the amount of sky (in area) the 300D’s square does. Whoa.

And it shows. Big objects that used to flop around in the middle of the frame with plenty of space around the edges now barely fit. And the stuff that used to barely fit, no longer fits at all. It’s a brave new world.

So this is how much of IC1396 I captured. It was spilling off the sides of the frame when I shot it last year.
I need to go grab some Veil, too, and see what’s what.

…and I may go back and buy a WO 0.8x again, as much as it pains me. sigh.

I’m still tweaking and tuning.

Here’s the image, 17x20m subframes, 5h 40m, in Ha from the observatory.