Updating equipment

I planned to update my mount (EQ-6 SynTrek) to better one  for this season. I have been quite satisfied with it but I wanted more accurate one.

I had saved enough to buy one I had in mind. But the same day I was placing an order for that I found another manufacturer's mount with good accuracy and payload and the most important thing, about half the price! So suddenly I had few "extra" Euros to spend...

So today UPS brought me big and heavy Pelican case from U.K (thanks Brian). Inside was HUGE filter wheel (FW8-STL) with eight 50mm filters (Baader's LRGB+HaOiiiSiiHb) and remote quide head.

Behind the wheel is SBIG's STL-11000XM with class0 chip. Camera has large (36mm*24,7mm) chip with 11Mpix (4008*2672).

And now I have to wait about a month for a dark night... First one with astronomical darkness will be 24th of August.

Observatory v2.0

Here's really short update of what have happened since last summer: I decided to make dome as a  "real" dome, not a roll of roof...

So I started to make a Geodesic dome. I made two models, pentagon and hexagon. (here's good calculator: DesertDomes)

These were used as a mold for fiberglass parts. Here's an assembly diagram where you can find these pentagon and hexagon figures:

After making 5 pentagons and 12 hexagons I started to attach them.

And finally a complete dome

And next the shutter system:

And finally:

Here's domes rotation and shutter control box: (lesvedome)

As you can see, I'm not an electrician.... But it's working!!

Elephant's Trunk - Reprocessed

Here's reprocessed version of the Trunk.

I tried to make image brighter and enhance contrast.

NGC4244 and NGC4214

Here's only Luminance channel for now. I took all color channels also, but somehow image center moved so the NGC4214 is too close to the edge of the frame. So I have to take them again...

NGC 4244, also Caldwell 26, is an edge-on loose in the constellation Canes Venatici. It is part of the M94 group (the Canes Venatici I Group), a galaxy group relatively close to the Local group containing the Milky way. It shines at magnitude +10.2/+10.6. Its celestial cooridinates are RA 12^h 17.5^m, dec +37° 49′.

NGC4214 is a barred irregular galaxy about 13 million light-years away.
 

Total exposure of this Luminance image is 6hrs (15min subs binned1*1).

IC1396 - The Elephant's Trunk Nebula in HaRGB

I got 1 hour of each color last night, so here's the HaRGB image of IC1396.

Total exposure is 9hrs (360:60:60:60). All binned 1*1, Ha 30min subs and RGB 10min subs..

IC1396 - The Elephant's Trunk Nebula in Hydrogen-alpha

I had one galaxy project going on, but about 70% of moon made me take some Hydrogen-alpha images.

I aimed my set-up towards Elephant's Trunk Nebula which is a concentration of interstellar gas and dust in the star cluster IC 1396 and ionized gas region located in the constellation Cepheus about 2,400 light years away from Earth (wikipedia).

I took 10*1800 sec exposures, 5hr total. Here's quickly processed version.

DWB111; The Propeller Nebula

Another one taken with APM 80/500 triplet. This was also imaged in early March, but it took almost two weeks to process it. This can be found in constellation Cygnus.

Exposure of this HaRGB image is 9*1800 sec of Ha (bin1*1) and 6*450 sec of RGB (bin2*2). Total 6h45min.