The day did not start off too good. I was planning on imaging at night so I decided to check-out my observatory in the daytime. It was a good thing that I did. Nothing worked. Turned out to be a faulty USB Hub. I had another USB hub in my office so I switched them... and back in business.
It was a clear but windy night last night. Since I have not done any imaging for a couple of weeks, I decided to try imaging the spiral galaxy IC 239. I found this object using SkyTools4. This is a fairly small (4 arc-min) galaxy in Andromeda, so it is well placed. I had to install wind shields on the west side of my observatory and remove the dew shields on the scopes. Even with those precautions I realized that I would be discarding several subs, so I decided on using 2 minute subs.
For this object I used 11 inch SCT with ZWO ASI2600 camera. I used SVX130 refractor and ZWO ASI290 for autoguiding. I set the camera to -10c, gain 100, and 1x1 binning. I then took about 224 subs starting at about 6PM and ending at about 2:30AM. I also took 50 flats. During processing I discarded several images due to streaky stars (probably wind gust) and ended up with 198 usable images. Processed in PixInsight and cropped about 20%.
Roger
IC 239 Spiral Galaxy.jpg (3.95 MiB) Viewed 523 times
Roger M.
Celestron CPC1100 EDGE, Stellarvue 130T refractor dual mounted on iOptron CEM120 on permanent pier mounted in Observatory. Imaging camera ZWO ASI2600 OSC, guide camera Lodestar or ZWO ASI290MM.
Cool! I also imaged last night, but overall image quality was pretty poor due to the wind. I probably threw away 20% of my images; luckily, up to a limit poor image quality doesn't cause much of a reduction in quality of brightness measurement (since all the stars are being "damaged" in the same way).
- Mark M
Mark M, AJ1B
Portsmouth, RI
Celestron 14" and Meade 10" SCTs
QHY268M + SBIG ST-9
GM2000 (10Micron)
American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO) observer code: MMU
Beautiful image, Roger. It was windy last night, so kudos just for the effort.
I find those red stars really enhance the hidden beauty of this galaxy.
Another winner!
Tom
Tom H
"Science knows no country, because knowledge belongs to humanity, and is the torch which illuminates the world. Science is the highest personification of the nation because that nation will remain the first which carries the furthest the works of thought and intelligence." - Louis Pasteur
Roger M.
Celestron CPC1100 EDGE, Stellarvue 130T refractor dual mounted on iOptron CEM120 on permanent pier mounted in Observatory. Imaging camera ZWO ASI2600 OSC, guide camera Lodestar or ZWO ASI290MM.
