COMET C/2015 ER61(PANSTARRS).

APRIL 16 2017.

Target was comet C/2015 ER61(Panstarrs).

Equipment used.

Skywatcher 102 alt/az goto(synscan).
Canon 1200D.
ISO 800

This was a few frames taken in the early hours of Monday morning 4AM just before dawn.
This was part of a all night session that started at 7PM and involved some video astronomy, some visual and some AP/

This is my first crack at a comet so I am pretty pleased at the result.
This is only a handful of subs so there was plenty of noise and I had to cut back the stretching so as not to further exacerbate the noise during post processing.
I was pushing the stretching to keep the little bit of the tail I managed to capture.

And here it is.

CENTAURUS A (NGC5128).

The weekend of the 21/22 April 2017.

Target: Centaurus A, NGC 5128.

Centaurus A is a galxy located in the constellation of Centaurus and discovered by astronomer James Dunlop.
It is estimated to be between 10 and 15 million light years from Earth.
It is viewed side on and is thought to be a disturbed galaxy and has a very prominent dust lane that bisects it. It is also a radio active galaxy that has been studied extensively.
It is also the only galaxy that pushes through my LP and allows me a visual peek at it on good nights.
See more here: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwio1ObY9rnTAhWlJsAKHULtA6UQFggkMAA&url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FCentaurus_A&usg=AFQjCNEXYWB56Fe-Z7i6LbXJPm4eawE9Lw&sig2=GsYWmQZ2mHt2wUfx-vlyog


Friday night 21st April and I set up my gear with the aim of getting some AP done for a change.
Things were looking good with decently clear skies and mild to cool weather.

So got set up, did an alignment and set about getting focus with a bhatinov mask.
Set APT to do a run of 300X25 second exposures.
I checked back every so often to confirm all is on track and about two hours in I check again and see APT has lost contact with the camera.
Rookie mistake number one! The camera battery was not fully charged and gave up the ghost.

So a quick check on the folder shows a total of 187 light frames captured. Not my target but enough to garner a semi decent image.
So it was almost 1AM and I decide to pack away for the night.
Rookie mistake number two, some idiot forgot the bhatinov mask on the scope and all 187 images are now ruined!

It has been a while since doing any DSO imaging and this was a major disappointment.
Not much to do but berate myself whilst packing up, some choice words were used and are not suitable for re-printing!

The good news is that Saturday night was another clear night but also fraught with pitfalls from the get go.
So once again set up and attached a fully charged camera, did the alignment and removed that darned mask this time.
Got the target well centered as field rotation will be a big issue with this target!
And we are off to the races!

Within half an hour clouds start to interrupt the session and I have to stop the sequence. Wait almost a hour to see more clear patches and resume shooting only to be thwarted by more intense cloud cover.
Grrrrrr, so wait another hour and call it quits as the dew is also starting to become an issue now.

So what do I have to show for all this?
!33 light frames in the bag, after removing all the cloud frames I have 93 that will suffice.
Well so I thought, DSS has other ideas and will only stack 39 of those!
What the...

The resulting stack was put into Star tools and somehow I made lemonade from these lemons.
There are no darks, flats or bias images with this stack, only the light frames.
And still it looks semi respectable.
The full details as follows.

Skywatcher 102 alt/az goto.
Canon 1200D.
39 X 25 second exposures.
ISO 1600.
 Processing done with Star tools and resized in PS.

And here is the image.

So some rookie mistakes were made and this shows what happens when you have too much cloud cover over the course of the summer and your AP skills get rusty.
There was some consolation and I have a image to show for my efforts.

Thanks for reading and comments and criticisms welcomed.

Solar in White light Sunday 02 April 2017.

At long last I have something to post here.

This Summer weather is nowhere near what it used to be. There seems to be more and more cloud cover in recent years.
Climate change is a harsh reality!

Right, back to Sunday's adventures.

The equipment used was a s follows:

Skywatcher 102.
Canon 1200D.
Mallincam Hyper Colour and 7 inch monitor.
DIY solar filter.with baader solar film.

I started out by doing a bit of visual only and was enjoying the nice large sunspots AR 2644 and AR 2642.
Even in white light they are very clear and large!
Then I swapped out the eyepiece for the DSLR.

Took about 60 frames at 1/800 of a second at a ISO of 100. Saved to file and then popped in the Mallincam.

Again a short learning curve to figure out the settings for solar and I had a decent image on screen.
At this point I called my wife Trish out for a look, first in the eyepiece and then back to the cam.
She enjoys the monitor views far more than having to squint through a eyepiece!

So it was a great way to laze away a Sunday afternoon. Just the way I like it!

For the life of me I could not get registax 6 to align and stack the DSLR images. I could not get to the bottom of the problem since my Registax knowledge and skills are pretty poor!
So out of desperation I popped a single image into Star tools and set about processing that.

I was very surprised at the resulting image, probably one of the best I have taken to date.
Not sure what was different, I put it down to a purely lucky shot on a good day. I have not done any solar AP in a while so was happy with the results.

At some point over the next weekend I will revisit Registax and see if I can get those frames stacked etc.

So here is the image.

 

Thanks for reading and feel free to comment etc.