Finally a Great Night!

Finally Great Night!

It has been a while since I wrote something here. Mainly because of lack of time but also the weather here was absolutely horrible. The forecast was never right and I've set up my gear at least three time just so I could disassemble it later that night due to the cloud cover. Finally when I downloaded three different forecast apps I saw an opportunity one Saturday night where all three apps agreed that the night could be clear. 

I knew that I really need some good data so I've decided to leave Brno and go to my cottage. In the light pollution map bellow is clearly visible the difference between big city and little village. When I arrived it was cloudy so all I had was hope for the forecast to be true. It said that it should clear out around 8pm and it actually did already at 7.

The red dots are showing where I live and where is my cottage

I knew that opportunity like this won't come any time soon so I spent a big amount of time with balancing my telescope and doing as good polar alignment as I could. I've also decided to rely just on my mount without guiding since I still haven't figured it out and I didn't want to risk that I'll spent the whole night trying to get it to work.

My "light" setup

I started shooting the Orion nebula. I was originally planing on shooting just H-Alpha but I lost two hours of data when I was reinstalling my pc and forgot to backup one folder. So I did 50 minutes of H-Alpha and then just quick 30 minutes of RGB. The resulting image is much better than I was expecting, unfortunately the total exposure is not long enough so it's still a bit noisy. This was my last attempt this year since I can't see Orion from my balcony and I won't go to my cottage any time soon.

M42 The Orion nebula

Another target was the Horsehead nebula. The story with this image is the same as with the Orion. I just wanted to add the H-Alpha data but I lost the RGB data too. I took same exposures and same time of both parts as with the Orion. When I finished with H-Alpha for this one I got scared that my telescope was pointing in the wrong spot because there was nothing visible in the subs. The truth is that I just could't see the nebulosity because the display on the dslr was set to the dimmest and it froze over. When I stacked it and imported it in Photoshop, it became nicely visible. 

The Horsehead nebula with the Flame nebula

With this image I finished with the winter season (I may do M78 in Orion but we'll see). Now was the time to dive into the spring sky full of galaxies and no better start than with M101 known as the Pinwheel Galaxy. This one is really big and is located in the tail of the Ursa Major (Big Dipper). I tried to shoot it from the city but the single exposure times I used were too short to gather enough light to get it visible. Now outside the city, free from the light pollution it was nicely visible even on single picture. The result is still a bit noisy and would require more time but I wanted to move to the final target since it was already 1 am.

M101 The Pinwheel Galaxy

The last target was just for the test so I could see hot it will look through my telescope. The Leo Triplet is group of galaxies located in you guessed it Leo. I'm planning on taking these again but with guiding. This is just 20 minutes of total integration so the result is really noisy. As a test image I would call it a success.

I wish to get out of the city more because the difference it makes is huge and you can't use narrowband filters for the galaxies which is a shame. I hope you enjoyed reading this and wish you nice weekend with clear skies.

Jan