Andromeda Observatory

Archive for June, 2010

I was looking through some old pictures that I took with the meade LPI.  With the imaging scope (AT80) I was not able to get the entire moon in the FOV.  The ccd chip was just not big enough.  No problem here though, for I was able to mosaic a couple different spots to complete a full moon picture.  Here is my results, completely done in photoshop CS4 for mac.  Only little problem is on the eastern edge, the data was slightly cut off.  The end result is still eye pleasing though.  Enjoy!

Last night’s weather was “iffy.”  The humidity was high, seeing was little below average, but it was a comfortable 68 degrees.  I tried using Maxim DL for the first time.  I was able to get the DSLR and the guide cam to work, but guiding using this program was still confusing to me.  I decided to figure out and learn the program another night.  Back to running PHD.  This was the second night out using the guiding program.  The process was a lot easier to use the second time.  I did run into some computer errors, mostly due to forgetting to shut down the power shut down mode on my laptop.  I finally was able to get some longer exposures.  Started with 5min exposures, and the longest for tonight was 8min.  I am sure that I could have gotten more than 10min, which I am really impressed about.  Here is the shot of M27 that I did.  I used 4 shots at 5min each, 1 at 8min, and 1 at 2min.  I did 3 sets of 5min, 1 8min, and 1 2min darks.  No bias shots, because I forgot about them.  I stacked the imaged in DSS and did the post processing in Photoshop CS4 using Carboni’s Astronomy Tools Actions Set.

Well my guidescope project is done! I recently installed windows xp sp2 on my new macbook pro. Only reason for doing this is the desire to run certain astronomy applications that do not run under Mac OS (I hope these companies realize the superiority of mac’s and develop mac os versions). I am running PHD with the meade DSI pro as a camera on the lxd75 mount. Setting everything up was simple. First I polar aligned, then did a 2 star alignment for the autostar computer, slewed to Vega to focus the canon xs, and the DSI.

I had no idea what to expect using the PHD program.  I didn’t look at any instructions, I just hit buttons with what made logical sense.  The title of the program “Push Here Dummy” is pretty self explanatory.  On the provided graph, I noticed that the DEC was going way south.  I changed the exposure time from 1sec to 0.5sec on the camera, thinking that would solve the problem; it did not.  I pressed the little brain button and changed the Max Dec Duration from 150ms to 210ms.  This fixed my problem and the DEC/RA was running pretty stable.  Before packing it in I did a 6min exposure of NGC 6997, a mag 10 open cluster in the middle of the North American Nebula (NGC 7000).

I was looking at The Sky software and found that there are mag 14 stars in this image of NGC6997.  I am very happy considering I took these from my home, 25 miles outside NYC.

I got a DSI pro to auto-guide my LXD75 with my DSLR.  I didn’t want to spend the money right now for a guidescope so I converted my old 9x50mm meade finderscope from the 5″ lxd refractor.  I unscrewed the eyepiece and objective lens.  Drilled some 6-32 holes into the tube and tapped them with thumbscrews.  I found a pvc coupling at home depot that fit right into the finderscope tube.  For the camera, I ordered the DSI low profile plate which surprisingly fit right up to the tube allowing me to focus by screwing the finders objective.  I am hoping to have first light with this camera next clear night.  My idea for this project was adapted from this website here:  http://msfastro.net/articles/finder_guidescope/

Meade DSI low profile plate installation: