And a major set back, again...

This hobby really isn't the easiest one... Everything was working well and my new scope looked really well so something happened to my mount's Argonavis controller.

Few weeks ago I noticed that the LCD went really dim and almost unreadable during night. I changed the "RTC" battery because it seemed to had run flat, I got it working again and powered everything down for almost two weeks because of my business trip. Yesterday when I powered it up again  there was nothing in the LCD. So there was no chance to align the mount or to do anything else with it. GREAT!!!!!

I contacted the Wildcard Innovations and made some tests they suggested, and there seems to be problem with the RTC battery voltage input. Without the 3V voltage the operating system of the unit does not start at all....

So there could be a long delay coming for BBubble Observatory.

Short test exposure

I took this image while setting the autoguider few days ago.

Here's one shot per channel LRGB (5:3:3:3min) through my new scope.

New season new tricks

Yesterday was a partly clear night after a few weeks of clouds and rain so I made some adjustments of my new imaging scope. More of it later!!

But here's some CCDInspector information of it:

Collimation needs some work but the rest is starting to look quite ok.

I took also few unguided test images of Mizar: This is 5*30sec unbinned and uncalibrated image.

Summer break

No darkness here until late August.

But some unprocessed images waiting for time to handle them...

Bubble area wide with color

I got few frames of OIII two days ago and hopefully some more but the weather forecast doesn't look too good for that. And there's only less than a week to go before the astronomical darkness ends at my latitude.

Here's 5*1200 sec of OIII (binned2*2) added to 4hr30min of Ha. Again a bicolor picture with synthetic green channel.

And here's 100% crop of the NGC7635 Bubble Nebula.

SH2-140, SH2-145 and SH2-150

This was my previous project which was imaged on two nights about a week ago. I have done only one narrow band image earlier (M97) so the processing took a while. I took the images under almost a full moon with narrow band filters (Ha, OIII and SII). But the SII data (about 3hrs) was so week that I decided to forget that one and decided to make a Bicolor image with Ha and OIII with a synthethic green.

These three Sharpless objects are located also in the constellation Cepheus. The hydrogen alpha is showed as red and the OIII as blue. Green channel is combined with these two.

Exposures: Ha = 8*1800sec and OIII 6*1200sec (bin2*2). Total 6hrs.

Bubble area project

My previous test exposures showed so interesting area that I decided to start a new project with it. This is propably going to be the last one for this season...

Last night I took 4h 30min of Ha exposures with 1800 sec subs. Here's what it looks like:

I also made a starless version of it. This may have better view of the nebula itself.