Geraldton Astronomy Group

Moon-Jupiter Occultation

2013-02-18T22:59:00.002+08:00

18 Feb 2013 Moon-Jupiter occultation. Was very windy which made it difficult to get good shots. Taken with 10" LX90 and Canon 550D. Didn't have any chance for wide shots

Fluro Lemon Fun Time

2013-02-04T02:29:00.000+08:00

Was hoping to capture an hour or two of the comet tonight but only ended up with a couple of minutes, was just one of those nights.

Got to the look out on dusk and waited for full darkness while I setup up the gear. There was some patchy cloud around and the wind was still blowing. When it did eventually calm down the dew very quickly came in and made it's evil presence known. Had some collimation issues with the RC8 that took ages to rectify and as I forgot my head lamp this was all the more frustrating to fix. Took for ever to get the guiding to work too, it just didn't want to co-operate, when it finally did work it wasn't working the best. Just to add to the fun and games this night seemed to be the most popular place for people to drive up to, hang around for a few minutes then drive off again. When I managed to start imaging, the Moon had just popped it's annoying head over the horizon but I thought I would at least get 20 or so minutes in before it got too bright. Just as this thought had finished firing in my brain 3 cars decided to come up to where I was and with no regard to what I was doing they left their lights on while they stuffed around. So that was the end of that!

Not going to be any more chances soon with very strong winds and cloud forecast for the next week or so just as the new moon is coming up too...Sigh :(

Comet C/2012 F6 Lemmon

2013-02-03T02:33:00.001+08:00

Comet C/2012 F6 Lemmon is starting to brighten up nicely and has now developed quite a nice tale.

You can easily spot the comet with a pair or binoculars but you need to photograph the comet to see it's brilliant green colour.

Below is a short and dirty shot I took tonight at Cape Burney and I noted the current location of the Comet. I intend to take a close up shot in the next few days hopefully.

Even with a quick and dirty single 30sec shot the green comet and it's faint tail going off to the top left can easily be seen. Why not have a go and bag your self a comet :)

Hot Days

2013-01-28T22:01:00.002+08:00

Couple shots from tonight's ISS pass, once again the 40c temps make atmosphere horrible, going to be like this for next week at least :/

Space Blob

2013-01-26T20:52:00.006+08:00

Captured the ISS again tonight, was only a early and low pass which combined with the hot heat of the day made for some really terrible seeing conditions. I used the diagonal this time not that I needed to worry about that this time as the pass only reached 30 odd degrees. Think I bumped the focus out too but it hard to tell with the horrible atmosphere. I did actually enter the ISS telemetry details into the scope to try the and use it to track the station but it didn't even recognize there was even a pass tonight so that was useless. Both images are unprocessed frames from the video, I dropped the magnification down and stepped up the frame rate of the capture.

Space vids

2013-01-25T23:10:00.001+08:00

I have uploaded some of my space vids to youtube.

Space vids

ISS pass

2013-01-25T22:45:00.000+08:00

Had a really nice pass of the ISS tonight and my attempted to capture it and failed :/

I thought I'd try using the LX90 with the Baader zoom and a GSO 2" 2X Barlow with the 600D straight through without a diagonal. Bad idea! I couldn't reach zenith which was the brightest part of the pass due to the image train hitting the forks, lesson well and truly learned. Still managed to capture some frames but they all seemed very blurry, obviously trying to manually track the station will produce mostly smudges but the relatively still frames were out of focus, I used the moon to setup the focus as par the last time but it just not right. Using Jupiter to set the exposure worked quite well tho. Oh well, back to the drawing board. My first attempt back in September sure was a case of beginners luck!

Heads up!

2013-01-25T16:40:00.002+08:00

There is a very bright pass of the ISS tonight at 20:41 from the SW reaching -3.3 Mag!!!

I hope to get a good image of it, below is the first image I took of the ISS a few months back.

Back to it!

2013-01-25T16:21:00.002+08:00

After a long hiatus I have returned to making the blog and will endeavor to post regularly.

Thanks to Jason from everythinggeraldton.com for getting me motivated to do more with the blog!

If you don't know about everythinggeraldton.com then you really need to check it out, it's a great one stop shop for everything Geraldton and with a very cool app for both IOS and Android it not only convenient but packed full of features right at your finger tips.

Last of the sky

2012-05-28T00:07:00.000+08:00

Took 90min of M83 and stacked it with the shots from couple weeks back. Got 50min worth of Omega Glob as well. The stupid photon reflector is back so there goes a couple weeks of imaging.

SKA split.

2012-05-25T21:13:00.001+08:00

The battle is over with all winners, Australia/New Zealand will share the SKA with South Africa, win win for all parties.

http://www.icrar.org/news/news_items/australia-to-share-in-worlds-largest-telescope

Snappy snappy

2012-05-25T20:07:00.001+08:00

Wednesday night was another nice clear cool night and now that after the weekend I sorted the OAG issue I pulled the rig out in the backyard and took some snappys. They are only roughly processed so far, the first one which is of the Lagoon Neb is 1hr10min worth of 5min subs and the next two are 45min of 5mins.

Still need to get the coma sorted out as there is some distortion happening but they are getting better. No chance to sort that out this weekend as the skies have clouded over :/

Weekend Antics - Part 2

2012-05-25T19:58:00.001+08:00

Saturday would be the day I would get everything sorted out and get some awesome images after Friday's fail.

I had been thinking about sorting out my power supply issues for some time as well and had been looking at getting a deep cycle marine battery to provide power to all the kit including the Asus EEEPC Netbook that controls everything. The couple of jump starter pack I have been using work fine for the other scopes for a couple nights worth of power but with all the current sucking off them from the imaging rig and the inability to charge the netbook they where not really up to the task or a long nights imaging. After looking at different batteries and chargers I wasn't too happy with what was around locally and I could easily get a better setup online but I wanted to use it for tonight!

I gave up on the battery idea altogether and instead jumped in with both feet and handed over a small fortune for a Honda Generator.. I got the Honda EU 10i which is a nice compact unit that can chuck out a 1,000 watts of juice which is heaps to run everything I need and them some. The unit has the normal AC output and a 12V DC battery charge output as well so you can in practice use it to charge batteries in the day and them use those during the evening with out the generator noise. This would normally be the way to go but this unit can run on a 'eco' mode which slows the motor down enough for the current that is being drawn and it is super quite at around only 80db. A major plus of this unit is the inbuilt computer controlled inverter which gives a real nice clean current and with the 240-12v lab supply I have the power to the gear will be nice and clean. On Eco mode the unit will run for 8hrs on just one tank of a couple liters fuel supposedly, I haven't tested this yet. They filled it up with oil and fuel at the shop and told me to run it off eco mode for the first 10hours of use. I tried charging up the Laptop Saturday night when it got flat but the Generator died after only 2 hours of use! this was not right and I know that with out eco mode on it would be quite a bit shorter run time but not that short, I'm thinking that the fill up at the shop wasn't exactly a full tank of juice and I haven't tested it again to see how it runs with a full tank but I presume it will be better, we shall see.

Headed out to Chapman Valley lookout on dusk so I could try and sort out the OAG in the daylight. I tinkered around with the extensions ect and then setup all the gear. Had the same problems as of Friday night in not being able to get the guider ccd to achieve focus. The wind was a bit strong but I knew that it was going to drop later on so I wasn't too worried about that. After hours of tearing my hair out and not getting a satisfying result the penny dropped, have I been going about the hole focus thing the wrong way around? focus the guider then then the imager? worth a shot, boom! focus. The excitement was short lived tho as the I lappy which had gotten very low was getting charged with the Generator had spluttered to death and the wind was starting to get annoying again. With only a hour or so left on the netbook I tinkered around with the guiding and manged to get a couple of 10min subs! this made it all worth while. After this the laptop was almost dead and the generator empty so I packed up the scope and put the gear away and decided to put a DSLR on the mount and do some wide field shots, bad idea, the wind blew up with vengeance and killed any chance of that happening.

The couple of 10mins subs that I took were not really usable as I had the CCD cooler turned off and the noise and banding was horrid in the shots.

Weekend Antics - Part 1

2012-05-20T23:35:00.000+08:00

Been looking forward to the weekend for a couple of weeks as the nights gave been getting better and better as well as there being no pesky moon around to ruin the view. Was really keen to give the CCD a good run after the preliminarily shots showed a lot of promise.
I ordered a Orion deluxe off-axis guider (OAG) from Bintel which arrived on Friday too so I could go with out using a separate guide scope and hopefully get better accuracy.

Got to the Windfarm look out at dusk and setup the scope in a spot with the least wind. Took a while to get correct collimation and then fired everything up. The problem with using new equipment is not knowing how it works and doesn't work and the Orion OAG was bit of both. The CCD was easy to mount and quickly achieve focus but no matter what I did I could not get the guide camera to get anywhere near focus never mind find a focus star. I was just about give up on the OAG and go with the trusty guide scope when the wind blew up and changed direction thus ruining the sheltered position I had setup. That was too much as I could not be bothered moving and realigning the scope to have the wind turn again so I gave up for the night.

Clive who came along as well had a lot better luck than I with his trusty 8" Dob, he managed to get some real nice shots. Not bad for his first go at astrophography with his new setup and learning the art of processing. Certainly a lot better than my first attempts at imaging that's for sure. Here is Clive's haul from Friday night.

Stunning night!

2012-05-17T00:38:00.002+08:00

One of the best nights in a long time tonight, real shame have to work tomorrow otherwise I'd be up all night at a dark site.

Did a bit more tinkering with the CDD and took a couple of pics.

First one is of M83 The Southern Pinwheel Galaxy. 10x5min subs.
This shot certainly is a little bit better than my first ever astro image which was off M83.

Second is 4x5min of Eta Carinae Nebula.

Dew Vengeance

2012-05-16T08:24:00.001+08:00

With winter come less wind and clear, cool nights. Perfect for us astronomers, the only problem being is the humidity and therefore dew which is astonishingly bad. It is almost like rain which drenches everything, not good for electronic and optical equipment. There is things you can do to reduce the problem which we will cover in a tutorial soon.

Solar Glasses

2012-05-15T13:02:00.003+08:00

Thinking about putting in a order for some eclipse/solar glasses for the Venus transit and November eclipse. They will be around the $5 mark depending on quantity.

Who interested?

Clear Skies!

2012-05-14T20:13:00.000+08:00

Nice clear skies at the moment, just the small problem of having to work to sort out so I can enjoy it :)

Got the go ahead from the RSL tonight at the committee meeting to use the hall or board room for out monthly committee meetings.

Working on doing a bit of tweaking on the blog and will start on some content like tutorials and review soon.

Please subsribe

2012-05-13T12:02:00.001+08:00

Eeek!

2012-05-13T10:33:00.001+08:00

Thought that there might be a bit of misalignment, vignetting and dusties but didn't think it was this bad.

QHY8L finally seen the light!

2012-05-13T03:16:00.002+08:00

After a whole year off not being used, the QHY8L CCD has finally had some real photons chucked at it.

Still learning the hardware and software and these are only short test shots but they sure do show promise.

The first 3 are of the Triffid Nebula, 3 shots totaling 11mins worth and each processed a bit differently.
Last two are of the Lagoon Nebula and are single 5min shots.

All taken with the CCD at -18c/-19c on the 8" Newt, EQ6 Mount and guided. Only Lights taken, no darks, flats or bias frames so there are some hot pixels, vignetting, dust etc.

Binos with no shorts

2012-05-11T23:08:00.001+08:00

Had a good viewing session with the 14" dob in the backyard for a few hours. Tinkered around with adapters, barlows, extenders and such to see if it was possible to use the binoviewers without adjusting the focal length of the dob. Normally I have to move the secondary a few inches down to reach focus and this not a problem with the collapsible dob but I managed to get them to work with no adjustments at all! Such a pleasure viewing things like Saturn with both eyes open.

Weather

2012-05-11T12:53:00.001+08:00

Yup, back to the old weather chestnut. Looking like this weekend is a write off as usual.

Ad is in

2012-05-11T11:24:00.001+08:00

The $89 ad is in todays Guardian

Saturn n Moons

2012-05-10T23:17:00.002+08:00

Here is a couple of the shots from last night. One of Saturn with 6 of her 60 odd Moons and a single frame shot of our one and only lonely photon chucking reflector.

I named the moons so you can know which ones are which when you look with your scope. You can quite easily pick out the moons with a modest scope.

All shot with Canon 600D prime focus on the wedged LX90