First (…and last?) big fruits of this season

Posted by: leffuren | on March 30, 2015

2015-03-13, 2015-03-14

At last a weekend with acceptable weather and a lot of spare time 🙂 This was the first serious session of this season. All other weekends there has been either lack of time for stargazing, or bad weather which almost have driven me nuts. But this time all seemed to be right and we planned for two nights in a row to get as much as possible out of the situation. The only sad thing is that from now on it is starting to get to bright at nights (when we get closer to the summer) to shoot dim objects, so this was probably not just the FIRST good nights this season but also the LAST.

Anyway…the first night it was clear and good skies and I decided to make a more serious try of M81 than done before. The object is quite small so the big 12″ SCT with its long focal length seemed to be perfect for this purpose. I also tried out with a new object, the NGC6543 nebula. With this object however I discovered that the nebulosity around the center is very dim so the next time I am going to use a much longer exposure. The other night was a little bit blurry, and the smoggy atmosphere was lit up by the city lights. This is far from ideal conditions for shooting galaxies but I made a try of NGC891 anyway and I am quite pleased with the result I must say. The M105 object however is not a pretty site. But it was a first try in poor conditions so I am not very surprised.

I had a serious problem stacking the pictures as Deep Sky Stacker couldn´t detect any stars. Friendly souls on Cloudynights forum tried to help me with various tips but in the end I realised that it was the program that was corrupt. After I reinstall it all worked out just fine 🙂

The last 5 pictures was taken with a different optical line mounted on Jakob´s EQ6-mount. We used two different APO-refractors with two different field flatteners. Sadly we had some problems with the William-Optics telescope getting a clear picture resulting in a couple of mediocre pictures. But overall I think the pictures was a success, especially the Jellyfish 🙂