Winter is usually a great time for astronomy with longer nights and the sun setting at a reasonable hour, with the forecast for last Friday as clear until 12am I thought I’d put in a few more hours imaging. I hadn’t realised it was a waxing gibbous moon until after I’d lugging all the gear outside and started setting up.

A nearly full moon, combined with a slightly hazy sky limited the choice of objects severely. The moon was out of the question, as I’ve yet to buy a moon filter, even on the lowest exposure setting of 0.001 seconds the ccd chip was becoming fully saturated. So I turned instead to the Orion Nebula, M42.

At magnitude 4.0 the nebula is visible as a fuzzy gray blob to the naked eye, just below the belt of Orion. I took a total of 90 exposures (81 usable) at 15 seconds each in an attempt to not burn out the central core on the 15 second exposures, whilst bringing out the fainter detail.

• Exposure Time: 15×81s Avg
• Date: 2007-11-23 23:47:55 UTC
• CCD: Starlight XPress MX716
• Scope: LX90 8″
• Dark Frames: 15×15s Median
• Apparent Dimension: 85×60 arc min
• Visual Brightness: 4.0 mag

Since it looked neat, I’ve uploaded a pseudo colour version, this isn’t in anyway the true colour of the Orion Nebula, I don’t have any colour filters yet

I believe this is my best image to date. Although it’s still not quite in focus, the exposure was perhaps too long resulting in a burnt out core. Not to mention the moon/haze made post processing a nightmare with a bright central light gradient to remove.

Collimation of the scope is still slightly out. I spent an hour before taking this image to improve it a little, but it’s going to take stabler skies before I can collimate at a reasonable magnification. I think the sky stability and lack of good collimation is partly to blame for the difficulty in achieving a good focus.

I’m looking forward to re-imaging this object on a moonless night to see how big an improvement I can achieve.

The usual clouds that seem to be permanently situated above the UK parted for a few days, which finally coincided with a few evenings I had spare. The LX90 hasn’t seen the night sky since way back in March, when I last had it pointing skyward for my first real attempts at collimation.

The seeing over the last few nights, has still been poor, with stars twinkling away making achieving critical focus very difficult. The collimation adjustments from March do seem to have improved things, although I still think finer adjustments will be needed on a night with better seeing.

On the first nights outing, Polar alignment was woeful and gotos were constantly 1/4 fov in the finder off. Still, I managed to image a few objects, the two most notable been a double star cluster in Persei and M33 a spiral Galaxy in Triangulum.

h Persei Open Cluster

• Exposure Time: 6×60s Avg
• Date: 2007-09-08 02:44:37 UTC
• CCD: Starlight XPress MX716
• Scope: LX90 8″
• Dark Frames: 7×60s Avg
• Apparent Dimension: 30 arc min
• Visual Brightness: 4.3 mag

The image above is h Persei (NGC 869), which along with Chi Persei (NGC 884) forms a double cluster. The full double cluster was a little too large to fit into the tiny fov of my CCD camera, I’ve not calculated the exact fov yet, but it’s somewhere around 30 to 60 arc minutes.

Open clusters are interesting objects as they contain hundreds, sometimes thousands of stars, all of which were born around the same time and are still gravitationally bound (however loosely) to each other. This is in contrast to Globular Clusters (such as M15 which I imaged on Monday and will upload later) which are strongly bound and often contain millions of stars in a tightly packed ball, making them stunning visual objects.

M33 Spiral Galaxy in Triangulm

• Exposure Time: 15×60s Avg
• Date: 2007-09-08 02:12:17 UTC
• CCD: Starlight XPress MX716
• Scope: LX90 8″
• Dark Frames: 7×60s Avg
• Apparent Dimension: 70×45 arc min
• Visual Brightness: 5.7 mag

I’m quite pleased with the M33 image, the stars are reasonably well focused and the spiral arms are fairly visible. It’s far from a perfect image, with a good proportion of the outer arms not visible, but considering the skies were a little hazy and how blurry my previous images have turned out, I think this is a huge improvement.

Also just about visible on the edges of M33 is NGC 604 a diffuse nebula.

I also imaged M31 the great Andromeda Galaxy, however after underestimating the sheer size of it, the image ended up containing only the bright core and a few dust lanes.

At the start of this week I also managed a third night imaging several objects, M15, M101, NGC7780, NGC 281 (Pacman Nebula as well as a poor image of M42 taking during early dawn. I should have these processed and the best uploaded to this post later this week.

M15 Globular Cluster in Pegasus

• Exposure Time: 15×60s Avg
• Date: 2007-09-10 23:48:16 UTC
• CCD: Starlight XPress MX716
• Scope: LX90 8″
• Dark Frames: 15×60s Avg
• Apparent Dimension: 18 arc min
• Visual Brightness: 6.2 mag

Is the campaign for dark skies finally having an impact?

This morning we had a leaflet from Southern Electric informing us that our street lights and those around Leeds are going to be replaced. This in itself, isn’t all that interesting, it’s the type of light fitting they’ll be using on the new lamp posts that is.

older designs which throw light in all directions, do not meet modern illumination standards.

Hopefully they’ll not be just doing the minimum to meet the current lighting standards, but going all the way with full cut off lighting. Across the entire of Leeds, this could have a pretty dramatic effect on the amount of light pollution and see the return of dark skies. Hopefully neighbouring cities will follow suit.

I’ve a keen interest in Astronomy, so any moves which reduce the amount of light polution, are welcomed. Although sods law will probably result in the location of the new lamp posts directly overlooking where I setup my scope

For a change the skies were relatively clear on Monday night so I took the opportunity to take the scope out and take a few images. Unfortunately I made a few mistakes during setup that resulted in woeful polar alignment giving a 5 second max exposure time before star trailing became apparent, compared to the usual 5+ minutes I’ve acheived with previous drift aligning… With fog rolling in I had little time to correct it and instead made do.

Despite using the fastest exposure time my ccd camera was capable of 0.001s, the moon was still over exposed. Really a filter will be needed to reduce the light gathered by the scope for future attempts. Still with a bit of post processing I’ve managed to isolate the overexposure to a smaller area.

• Exposure Time: 1 x 0.001s
• Date: 2007-03-27 00:42:07 UTC
• CCD: Starlight XPress MX716
• Scope: LX90 8″
• Dark Frames: 2×0.001s averaged

The second image was taken through the first wave of fog and suffered for it, especially with it been a 1/2 moon and limited to 5 second exposure times If I’d noticed the fog coming in, I’d have packed up before the corrector plate became saturated, the dew heater didn’t stand a chance

Still, you can just about make out the spiral arms of M51 and the companion galaxy above as well as the effects of the moon and fog despite post processing attempts to clean it up I plan to reimage this pair of galaxies on a fogless night with more suitable exposure times to really bring out the detail.

• Exposure Time: 20 x 5s aligned and stacked
• Date: 2007-03-27 01:26:36 UTC
• CCD: Starlight XPress MX716
• Scope: LX90 8″
• Dark Frames: 1×5s

Tuesday was again a clear night, but yet again fog rolled in early. Knowing the nights imaging would be short, I decided against setting up for photography and instead spend the time collimating the scope to get the mirrors aligned correctly, which after allowing 90 minutes cooldown didn’t leave all that long.

Seeing was only good enough to collimate with a 12mm eyepiece, still I felt it improved views of Saturn and the moon considerably unless it was a placebo effect, guess I’ll find out next time I the ccd camera is setup. I’m sure given a night with better seeing allowing a 6mm eyepiece to be used, I could improve on the collimating further, which I’m hoping will improve the problems I’ve been having achieving a good focus whilst imaging.

Schwassmann-Wachmann 3 otherwise known as Comet 73P is on perhaps its final voyage around the sun. A recent hubble image shows the disitrigration quite clearly

With a good clear night on Monday, I took the opportunity to take a photograph of the comet. Yes I know, its not quite up to hubble standards

Considering how little experience I have imaging, I’m quite happy with how this image turned out. I’m sure someone with more experience (read - any experience) at image reduction could improve on this.

In hindsight, I should have taken a lot more exposures for stacking and perhaps used a longer exposures time to help cut down on light pollution.

For anyone that cares, here are the image details:

• Exposure Time: 5 x 1.0s stacked
• Date: 2006-05-10 02:19:44 UTC
• CCD: Starlight XPress MX716
• Scope: LX90 8″
• Dark Frames: 5 x 1s median combined

I also managed to get an image of M57. 10×10s exposures stacked with 4 median combined dark frames. Comparing the image to my star charts, I’ve accounted for most of the brighter and dimmer stars but there’s one star that shows quite brightly that isn’t listed on my star chart, if anyone knows what it is please let me know.

The biggest problem I’m currently facing is the lack of accurate focus. I’m probably going to invest in a zero image shift microfocuser to help improve on that. I also think my scopes collimation is off, something to double check next time I get a clear sky. Fingers crossed I don’t spend all night on it only to make it worse

Hopefully with more practice I’ll get a little closer to getting the most out of the scope. In the hands of an experienced user, the LX90 and MX716 are capable of much much better images.

The web is full of blogs which makes finding those few popular and interesting blogs quite a difficult task. Step in the “Top 10 Blogs” sites, amongst which we have a new contender: Blog of the Day ranks WordPress blogs on their popularity on a given day, if enough people visit a blog it will end up in the top 25, it has to be worth a look doesn’t it

The current second place Blog entry is from a site that’s a personal favoriteof mine BadAstronomy run by Philip Plait. A site that covers “myths and misconceptions in astronomy and related topics.”

Many films use a bit of artistic license and break from science in a number of ways claiming that it improves the enjoyment of the film. Others are just ignorant of the mistakes they’re making or do so due to the public expectation of how things work. Phil’s site provides an interesting insight into the ways films fail to make the scientific grade. One of his more recent reviews covers the science in Star Wars Revenge of the Sith (spolier warning for those StarWars fans that havn’t seen the movie yet - What are you waiting for?).

Philip now has a new “mission” for his website, the rebuttal of “Creationist Claims”.

Evolution rankles them because it contradicts the Bible which says God made man in his own image and describes specifically how God did it. But cosmology, the study of the Universe as a whole, is even worse for them, since it clearly contradicts the very first passages of that Bible.

These are the same people that claim Crime Rates have increased since the teaching of Evolution began in schools. Which would normally be laughed at and forgotten, only their claims are disturbingly taking hold in the US. That article was from 2002 and I havn’t heard whether the ban is still in place or whether it was appealed, either way, I wish Philip all the best in his quest to rebute the claims of “Creationists”.

Skimming through the news headlines, as expected its full of news about the Michale Jackson verdict. There is another news item though regarding Microsoft and its blog censorship. Having read the article, it really doesn’t look like Microsoft can be blamed too much over this, they’re only following local laws (much like Yahoo and Google). It does make you wonder about the Chinese Government though. Requiring all Chinese bloggers to register their blogs by the 30th June with the Government and censoring words such as “freedom” and “democracy”.

Just as worrying though is the last paragraph of the news item,

Some net writers in the US have discovered that MSN Spaces in the US also censors blog names, though albeit in a way that is easy to get around.

The Internet is changing and in some cases for the worse. News such as this just shows the importance of anonymous networks such as Tor. At least via Tor people can air their views without censorship, with as much anonymity as they need.

In other news, Astronomers at the University of California have found another ExtraSolar Planet, bringing the total to 155. The planet was found orbitting the 10th magnitude Red-Dwarf Gliese 876 in Aquarius (which plays host to M2 one of the best globular clusters in the nights sky). What makes this planet special compared to the other 154 planets, is its mass. Around 7.5 times that of the earth, makes this the most earth like ExtraSolar planet found to date.

Don’t get your hopes up and expect to find life on this planet though. With an orbital period of roughly 2 days, the planet is so close to its Star that the Star fills 12degrees of the sky. To bring that into context, our moon and Sun fill a mere 1/2 degree, imagine if it filled 24x as much of the sky! The researchers predict the planets temperature as a result to be in the region of 200-400C.