M76 Final, first light of my 14" Astrograph

I got few hours more of Hydrogen alpha so I think this is now final version of this. Even though there's only 5.5 hours of exposure here (3*1800 + 10*900 sec of Ha and 6*900sec OIII).

This is now a formal first light of my new imaging scope, 14" Newtonian Astrograph. I'll post more of this soon!

Here's "natural" color version (HaOIIIOIII):

A 100% crop of bicolor (HaOIII):

And a 200% crop of HAOIIIOIII:

M76, Little Dumbbell Nebula

Finally few nights with no clouds!!! But a full moon and a heavy surface fog... But now I don't complain!!

I got few descent images of the Little Dumbbell, M76, a planetary nebula in constallation Perseus. It's distance is estimated at 2500 light years, and its size is only 2,7*1,8 arcmin with a magnitude of 10,1. Some consider this object to be one of the faintest and hardest to see objects in Messier's list.

Here's only 4hrs of exposure with Ha (10*900sec) and OIII (6*900sec) and a synthetic green channel. So hopefully there's some more to come..

Here's HST (Hubble Space Telescope) color:

And natural color:

And finally a 100% crop of the nebula:

Some photometry

After a very long period of cloudiness there was a clear night, but with a heavy surface fog. Visibility in the ground level was 250m in the near by airfield.

I took 30 * 2 min exposures with Johnson V -filter of the comet C/2012 V2 (LINEAR) and put them to MaximDL's photometry tool.

Here's the graph.

Adjusting and some test photos

About a week ago was a clear night but both the seeing and transparency weren't that good, about 4 and 3. There were again some haze and ice crystals and the average FWHD was about 3.5.

Everything is working again and I spend about an hour to finalize my collimation. I got it pretty good, but I think I'll try to get it a little better... Less than 2" would be perfect. (Don't mind about huge gradients in the backgroud...)

And here's crop of two hours (12*600sec) exposure of NGC2805.

Due the bad conditions there's not so much of details. But I'm surprised how deep the image is!!
Here's some galaxies pointed out with Aladin sky atlas and NED (NASA/IPAC extragalactic database).

Waiting for weather now

My Argonavis controller came back few weeks ago after its month long trip to Australia.

There has been few clear hours since but with a lot of haze and ice crystals in the air. But I was able to test everything and took few test exposures.

Weather here has been even worse than last year! I didn't miss any clear night when the controller was away. I calculated that there has been about 8hrs of good weather in past 7 weeks...

Maintenance break

So, after few emails to Australia and some testing the Argonavis controller have to be sent back to factory for repair. And this means several weeks delay for this season.

I have to say that I'm quite pissed but no can do! This happens with electronics every now and then.

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.