I thought I’d take a break from the usual Orion object this month and instead present just a single star image.  This month’s object is the star Aldebaran, the eye of the Bull in Taurus.  If you had a much bigger field of view you could capture Aldebaran and the whole of the Hyades star cluster as well – there aren’t too many good images of that lot about.  However, returning to Aldebaran, what makes it nice and interesting of course is that there is some colour associated with this star.  Aldebaran is a red giant lying just 68 light years away.  Aldebaran has a diameter 38 x that of our Sun and it shines with 150 x the Sun’s luminosity.  Being so bright means there is very little effort involved in imaging this one, and it’s more a matter of how your optics reproduce a bright point source.  This image was taken with the (highly) modified original Hyperstar and the little H9C one-shot colour camera.  The four cables coming out the back of the H9C lead to the diffraction spikes from the star (the splitting of the spikes is due to the cables not coming out at precisely 90 degrees to one another) – there has been no addition of software spikes to tidy this image up.  In addition there is an array of fine spikes close in to the star as well as an outer halo probably caused by the outer round aperture I used to use with this kit.  I made up an aperture to go around the edge of the C11 taking the aperture down from 11″ to 10.5″ (with the speed of the Hyperstar this loss of aperture made no real difference to my imaging times) – but what it did do was to considerably sharpen up the stars – I guess there might have been a little bit of “rounding” of the mirror edge?  The edges of the lenses of the Hyperstar were blackened with matt black paint – otherwise there would have been a terrible lens flare to deal with from such a bright source.

We are now well into the winter objects and we have the long dark evenings – even if very few of them are clear and Moonless   But we carry on regardless as it’s what we love to do.  So until the New Year of 2012 is upon us I just wish you a Merry Christmas and hopefully some clear dark skies as a bonus pressie

Here’s Aldebaran in the correct orientation (North is now up) and a touch of extra processing.

Clear night last night and no obtrusive Moon – only one Sky 90 operational at the moment (I’m taking 2 x Sky 90s to Steve Collingwood tomorrow to see if he can collimate them for me).  Anyway – managed to get 21 x 5-minute subs on one of my favourite stars – Aldebaran – the eye of the Bull.  Winter is here, well at least the Winter constellations are now high in the sky.

Image needs to be rotated 180 degrees for North up

This month’s composition is a little different from the form I normally follow.  I wanted to get a nice bright single star image, but I also wanted something else of interest in the field of view apart from other stars.  So I took a good look at the star map to see if there was a main star with something nice and interesting lying close by.  I came up with Phecda in Ursa Major for the bright star, and lying close by are the spiral galaxies M109, NGC3953, and a bunch of other galaxies too.  This image was taken with the Sky 90/M25C combo piggy-backed on the C11 in the south dome.  For this image I used 10-minute subs as I wanted a decent exposure for the little galaxy (and to stand a chance of seeing all the other faint fuzzies in the region).  My notes tell me that I managed to get 27 sub-exposures in all and managed to use the lot giving me a 4 and a half hour total exposure time.  It came out well enough, but of course it would have benefitted from even more time – I usually try for 8 hours if possible using the Sky 90/M25C and 10-minute subs meaning somewhere around 50 subs in total.  This is pretty much the “sweet-spot” for imaging from my moderately light-polluted location with the Sky 90/M25C.  More subs will give a smoother image but beyond 50 and you are definitely entering the realm of diminishing returns where it takes a LOT more extra subs to make any noticeable difference.

The clocks have gone back, and if only the Gods would give us some clear decent skies we could be out imaging by 6:00 p.m.  Weather hasn’t been kind to us for a couple of weeks and as we are now getting into winter constellation time I am wishing for a change for the better in our weather.  The mini-WASP is built and ready to go so it isn’t as if I’ve just bought a load of new kit for the weather to mis-behave in this way.  Here’s hoping we have some improvement during this November so that I have something interesting to report next month.

So until December – clear dark skies, and start grabbing those winter gems

The white Aluminium box with 4 x HDD bays is my new “Icy Dock” attached storage unit for the mini-WASP data.  Each evening’s imaging (if we ever see a clear sky again) will generate a lot of data from the 2 x M26C one-shot colour cameras, and I will store all this data on the Icy Dock.  Behind the 8Tb Icy Dock unit there are 2 x 2-bay Icy Box units holding a total of 4Tb (4 x 1Tb HDDs), and just to the right of the computer is a USB3 caddy with a 500Gb HDD attached.  With 2 x 500Gb in the actual computer itself this means something like 13.5Tb of storage on the Windows 7 64-bit machine – should do me for a while before I need to start burning data to Blu-Ray

The sleep deprivation over this past week’s worth of clear Moonless nights hit harder than I thought.  I have just found this data from 28th September – and I can’t remember taking it   Well if that isn’t a bonus I don’t know what is.  Ruchbah (dead centre) in the constellation Cassiopeia with the little open cluster M103 off to the upper-left.  And the whole thing of course sitting within a glorious Milky Way background.  Single frame with the mini-WASP and 18 x 5-minute subs.

Last night I took a single frame using the M26C camera and the one collimated Sky 90 refractor to capture the very north of the North America nebula – an area I have not imaged properly before.  Managed to get 9 frames at 1,000 seconds per frame before lack of sleep hit me and I had to retire to bed   Bolted the 3rd frame onto the previous two, and with a bit of cropping this is the result.  Must admit to being very pleased with this one indeed.

We’re now well into some decent long dark evenings

This month’s object is rarely imaged it seems – I am going to look at the open cluster Stock 2 in Perseus this month.

This is a beautiful, colourful open star cluster lying just to the north west of the Perseus Double Cluster – and THAT’S the reason that Stock 2 rarely gets any air-time – it has a far more glamorous imaging neighbour just down the road!  But to not have a go at imaging Stock 2 is to miss a wonderful imaging opportunity, an opportunity of putting together a mosaic that includes both the Stock 2 AND the Double Cluster!  I have all the frames for this one taken and I am waiting for Noel Carboni to put the whole thing together for me – I think it will make a wonderful image.

Still – back to Stock 2 – this is quite a large open cluster and for once the large field of view of the Sky 90/M25C is needed – that it 3.33 x 2.22 degrees covers the region nicely.  As this is an open cluster it’s the usual 3-5 minute subs and 80 – 100 of them for a low noise final image.

If you can pull yourself away from the Double Cluster – Stock 2 is certainly worth a look, and it provides much more interesting colour than the Double Cluster as well!

Until November – clear, dark skies to you all

And here’s the “straight out of Photoshop” version with no added contrast enhancement or saturation courtesy of PaintShopPro.

The very quick “process” I did on the NGC7000 image below was no more than a DPP pass and bolt the two frames together – would have taken less than 10-minutes as I just wanted to see what the image looked like.  I know there’s a bad magenta caste and the bottom half of the image looks like it’s been through a ringer – but I didn’t think that spending more time and doing it “properly” in Photoshop would make much difference – WRONG!!!  I spent around half an hour doing it “properly” using gradient exterminator and some curves and levels and it came out markedly different – much to my surprise.