Tŷ Du Observatory - Wales, UK

I’ve had a chance to run the Orion Nebula shots through some panorama software to automate the stitching and blending and I have to say I’m very happy with the results. I was not able to add a further set of images taken the following night, but here’s the result anyway:

Click on the image to see a larger version The Great Orion Nebula M42 & M43

I’ve had to wait until nearly 1am for the M81 & M82 Galaxies to cross the meridian, but it was well worth the wait.

M81 Bode’s Galaxy in Ursa Major 30x60seconds

M82 The Cigar Galaxy in Ursa Major 28x60s + 7x120s

And here are a few more images from the same session:

NGC2403 Galaxy in Camellopardalis 18×60 seconds

NGC7023 The Iris Nebula in Cepheus 31×60 seconds

NGC7635 The Bubble Nebula 34×60 seconds

I keep returning to the Bubble but can’t seem to get a more defined shape to it.

All images are unguided, Scope=254mm Newtonian, 1200mm F/L, Atik 16ic Camera, EQ6-Pro, EQMOD

Another clear night, I can’t believe it! I wanted to revisit Orion but have to wait for it to come around to the South West before I can get there without a meridian flip. While waiting for the heavens to turn overhead I took some images of the usual suspects, M29 (which is near to Daneb where I do my first alignment) followed by NGC6946, The Bubble Nebula, M76 for the first time and NGC891. After this I moved around to the Horsehead nebula, M42, M43 and also had a go at M78.

I spent some time on Orion, after capturing a half decent M43 I thought I’d move a frame southwards and see if I could stich the 2 images together. That led me to a frame to the east, then another and you guessed before you know it I’d taken 11 seperate images to form a partial mosaic of the area. I will revisit to finish this and will only show a rough stitching here for now:

The Great Orion Nebula

The Bubble Nebula

NGC6946 Galaxy

It was forecast to be a clear night but there was too much moisture in the air and by 11:30 I couldn’t even pick out the brightest of objects and packed everything away.

The best seeing was earlier in the evening and I managed to get a few frames of NGC6946, I had my first view of the Iris Nebula and finished with M43 in Orion which is always overshadowed by it’s close neighbour M42 the Great Orion Nebula. My field of view doesn’t allow me to capture both M42 and M43 in the same frame so I was lucky to get these first images before the clouds rolled in. I had decided to try a mosiac of the area but this will have to wait for clearer skies (maybe tonight!).

On the 7th Feb I had a brief dry spell during which I re-collimated the scope using the Barlowed-Laser method and adjusted both the secondary and primary mirrors. Hopefully this will result in finer detail in both Nebulae in Galaxies.

The other thing that should make a difference is I cleared the huge donut off the CCD window! I’d noticed it from time to time and as it appears to be an image of the mirror I thought it was related to the collimation, but turning the camera 90° had no effect on the position so I knew it must be a speck of dust on the cover. I used a dry tissue to sweep it away.

Here are my latest attempts to capture the wonder of the heavens:

NGC6946 Spiral Galaxy in Cepheus

NGC7023 The Iris Nebula in Cepheus

M43 De Mairan’s Nebula in Orion

*Messier page updated

It’s all coming together tonight. A Friday, so I don’t have to worry about getting up for work, a clear sky and low temperatures and the mount is tracking nicely as well. I’ve taken advantage of the situation and gone looking for some faint objects to see just what I can see.

I’m currently on the 15th object and taking 3 minute unguided frames, but they look a little stretched. I think having the scope looking North is helping as the mount doesn’t have to work so hard to track across the sky.

Here’s a few images that I’ve done a quick process on, they’re all aligned and stacked in K3CCDTools and tidied up in Photoshop.

There are a lot of firsts here for me, such as fist Horsehead, Flame and Running Man, and knowing that I can get faint fuzzies opens up many thousands of new targets for me.

NGC891 Spiral Galaxy in Andromeda 21 from 48 x 15 second frames

Horsehead Nebula in Orion 20 from 54 x 30 second frames

M1 The Crab Nebula (Supernova Remnant) 20 from 55 x 25 second frames

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Scope: 254mm Newtonian – 1200mm F/L on EQ6-Pro Mount using EQMODCamera: Atik 16ic monochrome

The majority of images are made from frames of no more than 30 seconds, I’ll work through the images and post numbers of frames etc as time permits – next time it rains

I learned that pointing the scope northwards allows me to take longer exposures and to have less movement in the shot. This is an indication that my polar alignment is out so I need to realign my polar scope or use the new polar align feature in EQMOD. I also noticed the option to add “sync’d” stars to the N-Star list, that offers me a lot of flexibility. If you have an EQ6 mount and haven’t yet looked at EQMOD I would suggest you read up on all the features. It’s incredible!

I finally gave in to sleep at around 3:30am but if I didn’t have a busy day ahead I could easily have stayed up all night.