Messier 52 and the Bubble Nebula

Messier 52 is an open cluster located in Cassiopeia. It was discovered in 1774 by Charles Messier while he was observing a nearby comet. It is located in the lower-left of this image.

The Bubble Nebula (NGC 7635) is located to the upper-right of M52. The bubble is about 10 light-years across, and is being formed by a hot, young star whose stellar winds are pushing away the gas and dust of the nebula.

A little to the right of M52 is a sparse open cluster cataloged as Czernik 42.

A lot of the Bubble Nebula is not visible to my camera--most likely because the camera still has its factory-installed IR cut-off filter. Removing the filter is supposed to increase the camera's sensitivity in the lower-wavelengths of the visible spectrum.

Messier 52, Bubble Nebula, Czernik 42; ST80 on Vixen GP; 21x120

California or Bust, Again

I've been wanting to retry the California Nebula (NGC 1499) since my last attempt. The opportunity presented itself the other night. The sky was beautiful! But, about a half hour into imaging, clouds starting rolling in and spoiled the party. Maybe I can try again another night. In the meantime, here it is:

California Nebula (NGC 1499); ST80 on Vixen SP; 8x180

Double Cluster Redo

I've been going back through my image archives and reprocessing some of the older images to see if I can improve them. Here is a reprocessed version of the image of the Double Cluster that I shot back in September 2009:

Double Cluster (NGC 884 and NGC 869); Epsilon-200; 9x180

Another Coathanger Redo

This is a reprocessed version of the Coathanger Cluster that I posted back in September 2010. I reduced the size a bit to hide some of the image noise.

Coathanger Cluster; Epsilon-200; 13x180

North America Nebula Redo

This isn't exactly a redo of my original North America Nebula. I had been intending to try to remove the effects of chromatic aberration in the stars for some time, but found it a somewhat difficult task. Most of my attempts left unnatural looking holes in the nebula, so I settled on desaturating the purple fringes and colorizing them to more closely match the color of the nebula. This is fine for the stars that are surrounded by the nebula, but those that are surrounded by darker parts of the image now have red halos instead of purple ones. Oh, well. One of these days I might win the lottery and get a nice little apochromatic refractor.

NGC 7000, North America Nebula; ST80 on  Vixen GP; 9x180

Lightning!

Texas has been experiencing its worst drought since the 1950s, so it is understandable that we get excited when a little rain comes our way. I get doubly excited because it gives me an opportunity to photograph lightning. A storm came through this evening, bringing some much needed rain and some Big Scary Lightning. I started off photographing from the back porch, but self-preservation kicked in after a few minutes and I moved inside and set up at a window. Here is the best shot of the evening:

The little smudges that dot the image are water drops falling from the roof. The odd device to the lower-right is a satellite dish.

I can not emphasize this enough: LIGHTNING IS DEADLY. If you can hear thunder then you are well within the danger zone for a lightning strike. I do not recommend that anyone attempt to photograph lightning; but, for those of you who have made up your minds that you are going to do it, here are some guidelines that I follow:

• Set the camera to Manual mode.
• Focus the camera on a distant object. I use autofocus if it is bright enough outside. Once focused, I turn off autofocus.
• Lightning images are best made at night.
• Pick an area of the sky that looks promising for lightning activity. This can be hit-or-miss, depending on the nature of the storm. Move the camera as the storm progresses to increase the chances of capturing lightning.
• Use a steady tripod and place the camera in a location where it will not get wet or blown over.
• Set the ISO to a low setting (I use ISO-100).
• Take 5-second exposures (shorter if the sky is bright) to help bring out the surrounding features. Also, longer exposures mean that the camera will spend less time processing the image and more time imaging the sky. Remember, lightning is fast!
• Use the lock on the remote control cable to take multiple exposures. 99.9% of the images will have nothing of interest in them, so expect to take a lot.
• Work from a safe location! Outdoors and near windows are not safe locations. Set up, lock the remote control, and get to safety!

A Love-Hate Relationship

I have a love-hate relationship with the telescope mount that I use at the observatory. For reasons that I have yet to determine, it works very well sometimes and not so great other times. I will spend several hours trying to tweak the thing and the results will be mediocre, which is a shame considering that this is supposed to be a high-end mount.

Maybe it's me, but on the other hand I can set up my little Vixen SP mount with the ST80 and get very good results with a minimum of fuss. (One major difference, though, is that the ST80 has a much wider field of view, and so is a little more forgiving of tracking errors.)

Anyway, I finally got to spend some time working with the Epsilon-200 after a long hiatus. I battled the mount, which apparently thought it was on another planet, for a couple of hours and managed to squeeze in about two hours of imaging. All of my intended targets had either set or crossed into the light pollution of Huntsville (why didn't I use the light pollution filter???), so I picked the following items to image:

Messier 2, Epsilon-200 on NJP mount, 16x60 + 8x30

Messier 29, Epsilon-200 on NJP mount, 13x90

NGC 6992, the Eastern Veil; Epsilon-200 on NJP mount; 9x180

Addendum:  The right ascension motor had come loose on one side, resulting in the tracking errors that plagued me the night that I took the above images. The problem became obvious while slewing the scope during a star party--the dust cover that protects the gears began scraping one of the gears as the motor slipped further down. After reattaching the motor and balancing and aligning the scope, everything started working fine.