Thanks to some encouragement from my Better Half, I finally processed the images I took of the Ring Nebula, or M57. This is an image made of 60 images taken through three different filters and then stacked. Once aligned and cleaned up, I colorized them again in Photoshop.

It's not yellow enough, but that's because my green images were not strong enough. I'll take more of that channel next time around.

Check out this great analogy to perceiving the size of our galaxy:

www.oneminuteastronomer.com/5001/distance-scale-galaxy/

Having continued to battle the integration challenges of bringing all the automation elements together, I was thrilled to capture my first truly automated image. While the image itself is a great example of bloated stars, poor guiding, and other faults, it was taken without any intervention on my part.

The image is of Comet 103P / Hartley 2. It was simple unguided image of 120 seconds with no filters. However, it was the process that was exciting for me.

Since I wanted to image the comet, I had to find the where it was in the sky, as the comet wasn't in my usual list of regular objects. So I opened Starry Night, my planetarium software, and searched for the comet after downloading the latest data. Finding it, I simply right-clicked and said "Add to ACP Plan." This brought up ACP Planner, where I created the plan for a single 120 second image, with no additional focusing, and no filters. The plan was automatically fed to the ACP site running on my internal web server, where it was ready for execution.

Selecting the plan from the menu, I simply told ACP to go execute the plan. ACP aimed the scope in the direction of the comet, took a pointing image to make sure the scope tracking was accurate, and then to my surprise, it solved the plate! It was the first time I was able to do a plate solve, which means ACP knew exactly where the scope was pointing in the sky. It then slewed the scope a little further to get to the place in the sky I told it to go, and began to take the image. I couldn't tell what it was imaging until after the image was downloaded, but when it was done the comet appeared on my screen. I couldn't believe it!

While the image is not very good at all, it's still an image of a comet, and it's the first time I've actually glued the pieces together. Now I can focus on getting the "little" things like focusing and guiding fixed, and making truly beautiful images.

Last night was an awesome night for observing. Bertha jumped to life and was ready for the job. By the time I got behind the console, it was nearing midnight, so I wanted to take advantage of the skies as best I could. Looking up what was at the zenith, I found M13, the  Hercules Cluster, was almost directly overhead. Given that this is the perfect chance to get the best photos, I started with it. Fortunately Bertha pointed to it right away, and I started taking images with the Meade DSI Pro III. Given the quality of the skies, I decided to try my hand at the full LRGB (Luminous, Red, Green and Blue) series, to colorize this image. It was the first time I tried it, but here's how it turned out:

To make this image, I first captured the Luminous, or images filtered only with an infrared filter. I took 60 images at 8 seconds each, and did automatic dark substraction to remove unwanted "hot pixels" from the images. I actually took about 75 or so images until I got 60 that met the quality constraints that I entered into the software. Then I took enough images through the red, green and blue filters to yield 10 usuable images for each filter. This gave a ratio of 50% luminance data to 50% color. These images were also binned 2x2 since I only needed color, not detail.

I stacked them using AutoStar Drizzle, which gave me four files in the FITS format, which a lossless format for astrophotography. Then I imported each of these files into PhotoShop through the ESA/NASA/Hubble FITS Liberator tool. Once in PhotoShop, I stacked the RGB images and manually aligned them , and then layered the Luminous image on top. After blending and applying levels to the colors, this is what I got. Not bad for the first attempt, in my opinion.

After discovering that I was having trouble connecting to my dome and scope from the control PC, I finally tracked down the issue. The USB card had gone bad, so I wasn't able to connect. A short trip through Best Buy and a new board solved the problem. Happy that I had resolved an issue that had been troubling me for some time, I was happy to see the Clear Sky Clock showing that tonight would be a good viewing night. I gave it a shot and was pleased with the results. While it won't land me a job at JPL, I think you can clearly see that this is a galaxy.

This shot was fun for a few reasons. First, it took about 5 minutes to open the dome, get Bertha warmed up, and the image capturing started. Second, the scope was aligned well and slewed to exactly where it was supposed to go. This is shot at first quarter, at 52% of full.

I finally made some progress getting all the pieces to work together this week and was able to do some astroimaging with the DSI. The image below is my first success. It is an image of M65, and was taken with the DSI Pro III using Bertha and a 6.3 focal reducer. I was only able to get about 25 images of 15 seconds each, but those seemed to pull enough photons to make it worth while. I hope you enjoy.

Tax day had an advantage after all - Bertha came home! It's back up in the dome and a brief test in the rain seems like it's working okay. We'll see how things go once it's aligned and a few "go-tos" have been attempted.

I was hoping that this web site would serve as a great tool for posting exciting observations and cool astrophotos that I imaged with my new camera. Bertha returned last year on the dubious day of September 11th, and has really worked well since her return. On Friday night I opened the dome and went about some visual observing of Saturn and other goodies. Shortly after telling Bertha to slew to a new location, the Autostar handset started blinking and beeping and I had to turn off the scope to reset it. This meant that lost my polar alignment and would have to realign the scope before continuing any GOTO activities.

Enjoying the clear sky, I decided to manually flip the scope over, pointing to Polaris, and began the process of alignment. After about 10 minutes or so, I slewed to Leo and wanted to observe the deep sky elements in that constellation. Slewing from one Messier object to the next, I was pleased that the scope brought each object into nearly the center of my 26mm eyepiece. I got lost in the sites of clusters and galaxies, and eventually started feeling the cold. I decided to call it a night and parked the scope. This time, however, instead of the scope slewing to the normal park position, it stopped halfway and was done. I had to turn off the scope, which meant for the second time that night I lost my alignment.

As you can imagine, I was beyond perturbed, and called Meade as soon as I could on Monday. After I explained the hundreds of hours lost in the past six months since her last repair, they agreed to service it again. Fortunately I still had the shipping boxes left from the last delivery, so off she went today. I just hope it doesn't take ANOTHER three months. There goes another Messier marathon down the drain. Better luck next year I guess.

Thanks to my awesome wife, Bertha has a new pair of eyes. Well, one eye, really. She gave me a Meade DSI Pro III CCD camera for Christmas! My first photo with it tonight, stopping only to share my excitement, pour some wine, and eat dinner is to the left.

The camera is awesome and so is the software that came with it. Although the moon is quite bright tonight, I'm going to try my hand at some other objects later.

The Autostar Suite software that came for free with the camera is really terrific to use. It has taken out many of the issues I've had with other attempts, including autoexposure and auto-stacking of multiple images. I slewed the scope to the moon and selected the area I wanted to image, and clicked "Start." After I manually focused, it took 30 images and stacked the best. Here we go!