ε Lyrae
Using the N 150/750 on the HEQ5 and the Scopium webcam, I obtained the following frames. Do note that planetary imaging means a technic – many frames, a 1-2 minutes long video of short frames, stacked -, essentilly lucky imaging, so planetary does not mean a target type. Just sayin’ :P
The clouds obscured the occultation of Porrima, so next time.
Last night I tested an old CCD Labs Q-Guide camera as an autoguider solution. I got the camera from AȚ (thank you :) ) but it came with an unexpacted “semaphore error” message, which rendered it useless. It turned out the firmware was damaged and needed to be reflashed. I found some ideas here, but not the solution itself, which started to come from here was still miles ahead. Worth mentioning the answers given by QiuHY are rather cryptic (tending towards useless), more like from an oracle than a tech guy – and I’m not a believer. A good indicator of just how cryptic: only a month has passed and I already cannot find the best answer, only that it included CySuiteUSB program and a guide in which order to flash what.
So I took some test photos with the Canon 1100Da, N 150/750 on the HEQ5 setup, 4 minutes subs. Ten for the M13 globular cluster, and six for the M57 Ring Nebula. Each at ISO 100 – not that far from the city center (Bortle scale 6-7 if not 8 – better to the north).
M13 test
M57 test
M57, second processing
M57, 3rd processing
Sunspot 2661
A few clear hours, in conjunction with my free time, allowed me to take some photos: the Sun, the Moon, Jupiter and Saturn. I still could not find Enceladus. The setup: N150/750 and MC 102/1300 on the HEQ5, Scopium and CCD Labs Q-Guide webcam.
I resurrected an old project of mine, a Raspberry Pi with a camera put on a time lapse duty. Right now it is pointed towards East, and takes a picture every minute. I captured several Venus rises (the planet is the morning star right now), Sunrises of course, and some atmospheric optics too.
On 2017-04-01 I acquired some light from M104 Sombrero Galaxy (Virgo, 7.9m [wiki]), but the raws turned out to be of worse than expected quality so I didn’t invest the usual amount of time into developing the final picture. Equipment: modded HEQ5, N 150/750, Baader MPCC Mark III, Canon 1100D mod. 14 x ISO 3200, 1 min. As smudges, there are also some faint galaxies in the frame:
M 104 – Sombrero Galaxy
Messier 48
There is nothing interesting about the M48 open cluster, I imaged it as a test of the optics at minimum f – which it kinda failed projecting some ugly halos around almost all the stars. It is a 5.8m DSO in Hydra [wiki]. As a curiosity, this is one of the somewhat debated Messier objects, as there is no notable object at the position marked by Messier. This cluster, in present day also known as NGC 2545, is 5 degrees away from M48’s “original” position. In my picture, the bright star opposite to the cluster is C Hya, accompanied by 1 and 2 Hya and the orange HIP 41316.
Markarian’s Chain
After imaging the galaxy chain with the 200 telelens, at f/2.8, I turned the f/5 telescope to it. Not surprisingly, I registered way less light – also given the lack of guiding at the longer focal limiting the length of the exposures. I remember a discussion on the field with fellow amateur astronomers, about how objects are named, seemingly arbitrarily – however, many of the members of this chain are physically linked, not just a chance alignment, mostly, and it was an astronomer named Markarian who measured their motion. Member galaxies include the two bright ellipticals, M84, M86 and some other NGC members: NGC 4477, NGC 4473, NGC 4461, NGC 4458, NGC 4438 and NGC 4435.
M81 and M82
It’s been a while since I imaged M81 and M82, the famous pair almost made to be photographed.
Messier 81 is the largest galaxy in the M81 Group, M82 the second largest in the group of 34 galaxies located in the constellation Ursa Major, at about 12 Mly. M81 is a spiral, M82 is a starburst galaxy, distorted by the interactions with M81. The intense star formation makes M82, though less massive, more luminous than the Milky Way. The very faint satellite of spiral, in this picture the patch at one o’clock from M81’s core, is the Holmberg IX dwarf, one of the youngest of its kind. (tovább…)
M 101 with NGC 5474
The Pinwheel Galaxy (Szélkerék in Hungarian) is one of the last entries in the Messier catalog, discovered by Pierre Méchain in 1781. It has a grand-design pattern, meaning nothing more than that the spiral arms are prominent and well-defined. Also known as NGC 5457, the galaxy lies at 21 Mly. According to this paper, it has a mass of 9.8×1010 solar masses, way less than the Milky Way’s ~1012 solar masses, see this paper.
As a sidenote, our home is actually one of the most massive galaxies in the wider neighborhood, the exact value depending on the study, placing us somewhere a bit below down to at about half of M31 Andromeda’s mass, which is just heavy compared to the other spirals on the sky. As another sidenote, it is hard to find the masses of galaxies on the internet. As one more sidenote, it is tricky to find out distances of galaxies in scientific catalogs not meant for the general public, thus not containing a trivia section.
