Friday evening saw Me and Chris up on Croft Hill, armed with camera kit, binoculars and other such stuff. The intent was to see/image the fly-by of asteroid 2012 DA14 but the weather decided to confound us. Never mind, we got pics of cloud and light-pollution instead, and we got a couple of hours together without the kids.
The main images have been colour-corrected by Photoshop, run your mouse over them to see the horrendously light-polluted uncorrected versions:
Virgo's chock-full of galaxies, there are plenty to go around. Here's a small selection, help yourself!
M84 (aka NGC4374) and M86 (aka NGC4406) - both are lenticular galaxies - and a few other fuzzy things in the constellation Virgo.
Mouseover the pic for labels.
Subs: 17 light @ 300s, darks and bias frames, ISO800.
1000D on the 6" R-C, guided with PHD.
Cribbed from Wikipedia:
"Messier 98 (also known as M98 or NGC 4192) is an intermediate spiral galaxy about 60 million light-years away in the constellation Coma Berenices. It was discovered by Pierre Méchain on 15 March 1781 along with M99 and M100 and was cataloged as a Messier object on 13 April 1781. Messier 98 has a blue shift and is approaching us at about 140 km per second."
Hmmm... "cataloged"... we Brits use the word "catalogue", so use it as a verb and the past tense is "catalogued". Surely the past tense of the verb "to catalog" should be "catalogged", as in "logged" and "blogged"?
Anyway, less of the Inner Stickler stuff. With the temperature down at -8C it was too damned cold to stand outside looking through the scope so the session was just a photo-shoot controlled from the comfort of the warm-room, replete with Jaffa Cakes and hot tea. M98 is one of the faintest objects in Messier's catalogue... I really wanted to be taking 60-second subs of it but a high background haze spoiled that idea - the best I could get away with was 300 seconds a shot, and I didn't get enough subs for a decent image anyway as a low mist rolled in and spoiled things. I'll try to get more subs when the weather improves, in the meantime here's the best I can do with what I've got so far. It's a tad noisy:
M98 (aka NGC4192), an intermediate spiral galaxy in the constellation Coma Berenices.
Subs: 20 light @ 300s, darks and bias frames, ISO800.
1000D on the 6" R-C, guided with PHD.
This was the first observing session of the year, primarily because it's been the first time we've had clear skies. Prominent in the image is Active Region 1654. This is a huge group of sunspots, currently about 180,000 km from end to end - that's about 14 Earth-diameters, or, in proper units, about 657 x the length of Wales.
Mouseover the image to see how tiny the Earth would look next to these things, and click the image to see it thrice bigger:
Active Region 1654 (13/01/2013)
3000 stacked frames, DMK mono CCD camera at prime focus on the C80ED-R, Baader Planetarium AstroSolar™ Safety Film (ND 3.8) with #58 Green and IR-cut filters
The best period for seeing the Geminids was from dusk on Thursday to dawn on Friday. I was ready early with the D50 set up on the mount, toting the 35mm prime, and intending to track a bit of sky around Taurus. The evening started cloudy but I was convinced that there would be some clear spells before sun-up. Suffice to say that there wasn't a single cloud-gap all night and I gave in to sleep at around 4 a.m. when the mist came down and then froze. It had been a wasted night, and the fact that folk in other places had been seeing the best Geminid display for many a year was really rubbing it in.
The forecast for the next night was slightly better, the cloud was supposed clear sometime around midnight, so I decided to have another go even though the meteor-rate would be much lower. Same kit, this time tracking a vague area between Lynx and Ursa Major. The clouds did part and there was still a fair number of Geminids whizzing about, I took 300 pics and managed to catch just the one meteor trail. It was a promising start.
I re-aimed the camera and rattled off another 35 shots in the direction of Camelopardalis before the constellation became obstructed by the observatory roof. By this time Leo had risen so far that it was fully in the field of view so I aimed at that and ran off another 300 shots before it clouded over fully, ending the session.
After a short sleep and a wonderful afternoon of festive shopping I got around to processing the images, here's the best of the Geminids that I caught on camera:
Geminid meteor in Ursa Major
Main image: 19 x 30s subs @ ISO 400, stacked with DSS
Luminance layer: 1 x 30s sub processed in PS CS3
Final layering in PS CS3
Here's a screenshot from Starry Night Pro Plus 6, showing roughly where the FOV was:
The FOV of the 35mm prime on the D50
The red triangle marks the radiant point of the Geminid meteor shower
Compare the two images and you'll see that those naughty twins appear to have shot the Great Bear up the arse
Here's another one - M44 - Sir Patrick Moore's favourite object on the Moore Winter Marathon list.
The refractor has introduced some odd colours to the mix, I've left them in and enhanced them because they look a bit Christmassy 🙂
M44 (aka NGC 2632, Praesepe, The Beehive Cluster, Cr 189), an open cluster in the constellation Cancer.
Subs: 12 light @ 300s, darks and bias frames, ISO400.
Spikes added using Noel's Actions.
1000D on the C80ED-R refractor, guided with PHD.
