Saturday, 24 August 2019

New target NGC7331

Scope: Sky Watcher ED80 DS Pro
Mount: Celestron Advanced GT mount
Camera: Altair Astro Hypercam 183C
Guide cam: QHY 5L-II-C
Guide software: PHD2

90 x 60s subs
60 x 60s darks
100 flats

The main target of NGC7331 is a little small in this wide angle view, although there is some nice detail. The entire image encompasses 20 individual galaxies.




Same image plate solved to identify the galaxies using 'All Sky Plate Solver'
 http://www.astrogb.com/






Saturday, 17 August 2019

Embarking on a new aspect of astronomy - Spectroscopy

I've recently started imaging star spectra. This requires a diffraction grating to be placed in front of the imaging camera and processing software to calibrate the data.

Basic imaging is best done using a mono camera.

The equipment I use:

Telescope:              Sky Watcher ED80 DS PRO
Camera:                 Altair Astro GP-CAM3 290M
Diffraction grating: Paton Hawksley Star Analyser SA100
https://www.patonhawksley.com/product-page/star-analyser

Processing software: RSpec from Field Tested Systems
https://www.fieldtestedsystems.com my thanks to Tom Field for all his assistance getting me this far.

So here is my first analysis of Vega.

This is what the camera sees, the star Vega to the left, the spectrum to the right.




And after processing in RSpec.

The yellow line is professional calibrated reference data for the Vega class A0V star.
The red line is my data after being calibrated and corrected for the camera sensor response.

The dips in the curves indicate where elements in the atmosphere of the star are absorbing light. There is a large dip in my data around 7650 Angstroms that is not matched in the reference data, I believe that's probably due to the Oxygen in the Earth's atmosphere.






Thursday, 15 August 2019

ISS transiting the Sun

The ISS transited the Sun at 11:57:48 today.

This short video isn't great, the transit is incredibly fast and I should have used higher magnification. The transit is copied 4 times to lengthen the video and the frame rate reduced from 26 to 4 fps.

Maybe next time!