March 14th session

The night of Saturday March 14th, was again very good for astronomy. After the set up of all the devices, and done a precise alignment to the Polar star, the main goal for this night was the Orion nebula through the refrigerated QHY6 CCD, besides other type of objects as galaxies. The humidity oscillated in the whole night around 50 - 60% and the temperature was about 10 grades which was very bearable.

With the setup completely done, I tried to look for Venus to make a recording test at f/45 (Barlow of 2"ED 2x + Barlow 3x). In total 600mm x 6 = 3600 mm of focal. The goal was not to get an excellent picture, it was to rich the limit off this nice telescope. At the end, some problem in Windows, deleted me all the videos from the hard disk when trying to copy them in another location. I only found a fragment with a few frames with this result. In the future, I will try it again.

The first deep sky picture of the night was the Orion nebula (M42, M43), because it was more close to the twilight. It is a 10x120 seconds, calibrated with dark and bias in Imagesplus 2.8. I used an H-alpha filter (from Baader) due to the very high light pollution in this region of the sky. I am really surprised with the performance of this camera. It has a high sensitivity and low noise. This B&W camera rich very good results in the Downtown with this kind of filters. But I find also some disadvantage, for example the size off the sensor is a little bit more big than a webcam. This way, we can not zoom very much the images took with it, without getting big pixels in the screen. Any way,  is a very good purchase at a very competitive price, and very useful for beginner and small objects (galaxies, planetaries nebula and so for).

The second object of the night was the Bode's Galaxy or M81. In this case I used an UHC Astronomik filter. It is the result of stacking 30x120 second frames. Calibrated with dark and bias in the same way than the previous pictures. Sincerely I think this picture need more light frame to get tiny details in the spiral arms.

The next one was an other galaxy, the Whirlpool or M51, which was at this moment in the zenith and therefore in quite good condition to take some exposures. UHC filter. 38x120 seconds (76 minutes!), my largest time exposure with a deep sky objects until nowadays. Calibrated in the same manner with imagesPlus.

The autoguiding was working really well this night so I thought to take advantage of my good luck and took other shot of a nice galaxy in Draco, NGC 5907. I like very much the view of this object through a giant Dobson (a 25 inches Obsession telescope). It's simply amazing. This galaxy is less bright than M81 or M51 so I must to take more light frames in the future. In particular this is the result of stacking 18x120 second. Calibrated with bias and dark, but with no flat. I need more experience taking flat with the QHY6, It's not easy!

The sunrise was very close, so I tried to take a fast video of the Moon. Processed with Registax 5 beta.

And finally, with the beginning of a new day I grasp the last minutes and took a video of Jupiter at f/22 (Barlow lens 3x, Moonfish). 1399 frames stacked with Registax 5. It isn't a great shot, I admit it, but I like very much the first view for me of this planet in 2009.Moreover, it was very close to the horizon and the seeing was terrible.

And that's all folks…. well…..I want to be grateful with my friend Zerjillo. He help me to write those pages and to enhance all those picture using Inkscape.

And now..... we are thinking in news objects for the future......well.....maybe  for the next  wednesday.