Haven't been posting many openings at HJRO because of early morning comet distractions.

I've been trying to see Ison before it passed by the sun.

I spent some of my time going out to locations down near the Detroit river.

I wanted to take some wide field photos of the comet and other targets. I thought about setting up my four inch f4 telescope on my nexstar 4se mount, but had some issues with that setup. I found a way to quickly mount the scope on the mount, but Ison wasn't something I could easily find because of problems connecting to the mount.

I then decided to get a different setup. I was thinking about a Hyperstar setup, but a full blown hyperstar setup for wide field photography, if I'm using a canon dslr as the camera would be a huge setup and huge expense. I'd need to get a large telescope because a hyperstar setup requires the camera to be mounted in front of the front corrector plate, where the secondary mirror is. It essentially turns the telescope into a Schmidt camera. A Schmidt camera was a setup where a corrector plate holds a film camera in front and center of the telescope mirror. They were created in the old days for film cameras. Celestron invented the fast star setup which allowed cameras and lenses to be used in the front of sct telescopes turning them into Schmidt cameras. This system is now known as hyperstar setups, because a second company makes what are known as hyperstar corrective lenses that your camera would attach to.

In any event the entire setup, for a canon EOS owner requires a c11 which is rather large, and a hyperstar or fast star setup. A nice c11 hd with a cgem dx mount costs a little over $4100, closer to $4400 when it's not on sale, then the hyperstar lens has to be purchased. It costs about $800. Se we are talking about $5000 to photograph wide field stuff and really faint stuff, very quickly. I think a c11 records images at something like 18x, it's been a while since I did the calculations, but it's in that power range.

The photos can be taken much quicker, which would be good for comets of something where you'd like to take quick wide field photos.

Without $5000 in extra cash laying around, I decided to check the other wide field options. The cheap one using my f4 four inch telescope doesn't work very well because I have a lot of coma, elongated stars at the edge of the image. There is a cheaper option of getting a short tube portable refractor. Something like the Meade APO f6 telescope we have at HJRO. That costs about $1000. Or you can get an Ed glass Williams optics 60 or 70mm telescope that is fairly good for imaging and wide field stuff, the Williams optics telescope will cost about $500. Getting a telescope means I'd have to have a nice telescope mount for tracking as well.

A nice mount like a Losmandy gm8 costs $2000 or so. Maybe $2500 with all the goto options. A lesser mount can cost perhaps $500 to $700, that being a cg5, or Celestron VX mount.

A $500 mount and $500 telescope is still $1000 just to take a nice wide field shot in a portable location. It's kind of pricey. I could get a stripped down c8 nexstar for that price. But the nexstar c8 with mount is a different telescope, it's not wide field but narrow field, and f11 telescope with a long focal length. It won't take wide field shots of the sky and a long comet tale. You can get a hyperstar c8 which is only in the $2000 range, but you'd need to buy a nice small ccd camera that would fit on the smaller setup. A small decent ccd astronomy camera would have a lot of advantages and I could use it at HJRO as well. But those cameras typically cost $2500 to $3500 which brings the price of a c8 with wide field capability up to the $5000 price range.

So to get a wide low field of view of a comet would be cheaper with a small refractor telescope and a smaller mount.

But I did not want to risk and spend $1000 on a hyped up comet photo shoot that might not turn out. I knew I could spend money on an expensive rig and do other things, but I just could not pull the trigger on spending a grand or more on this comet Ison frenzy that I wanted to take photos of.

I already have a basic goto mount in the nexstar 4se. This mount can do basic goto and track in an EQ mode using the built in wedge bar. It's a cheap setup for imaging and lacks many features that an imaging system might have, especially for high powered imaging.

What if I could take wide field shots with a telescope that was just a Canon EOS lens. Some great comet shots have been taken with 300 or 400 mm lenses. There are limits to what a camera lens can do compared to a telescope, but these lenses are not bad and as a positive they are light weight.

I know at times my nexstar 4se will not work or lose tracking if it's not balanced well with a dslr mounted on it.

The DLSR and nexstar 4se weigh in at over 7.5 lbs, maybe a pound more, I'll have to reweigh and confirm the weights. But if I mount a dslr and a telephoto lens on the mount I'll end up with a lot lighter load. Just take off the telescope and mount the camera and telephoto lens on the little 4se mount.

I needed a vixen dovetail, but was in a hurry and didn't want to steal and jury rig the one on the telescope for the camera. So I found a block of wood and a camera clamp and a clap. With these three items I was able to mount the canon EOS on the telescope mount.

I did an impulse buy and went to Walmart and picked up a Canon EOS 55-250mm lens. I mounted these on the telescope and tried to get a nice tracking photo of comet Ison closer to the horizon. I wasn't able to find that comet, but I was able to test that combination on other objects in the sky.

Here's a test photo of the Orion nebula and it's surroundings taken with a 80 second exposure using the lens on my little telescope mount. This shot was taken at 8x. I processed this single shot a bit using nebulosity, photoshop, neat image pro noise reduction and even iPad apps. Here is the result.

(Not bad for a quick test photo.)



- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Comet Ison was brighter than magnitude 5 on November 20 by my estimate, see photo

The comet clearly looks to be as bright or brighter than a nearby star which is magnitude 4.96.

See images for explanation.













As you can see Sky Safari's estimates are way less than the brightness of the comet for November 20, 2013. This means the comet will likely be even brighter than other estimates in the software, if we are able to see it it should be quite a site in the next few days.



Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

My all night photo session on Grosse Ille - comet Ison

I setup my telescope, a nexstar 4se and my old home build f4 four once telescope to try to take an image of comet Ison.

Clouds through the evening looked discouraging with some breaks and clearing at times. I had my car next to my imaging setup and tested the camera and telescope on m42 and the moon while waiting, checking tracking.

With a wide field telescope for a comet tracking might not have mattered as much. The telescope was tracking very well, but my searching for the comet would rely on my iPad sky safari software controlling the telescope, as the comet was not defined inside the telescope controller.

I used skyfi a wireless control box that sets up it's own wifi network to control the nexstar mount with my iPad. Testing it there times before I arrived earlier worked without problems. When out at the river I could nit get my iPad to connect to the wifi network.

I sat much of the time in my car warming up as cold winds off the lake really chilled me. I felt at times I was standing in the cold in swimming trunks instead of with long johns and winter clothing. Clearly I should have worn winter snow pants.

I have a theory that my Prius hybrid motor running caused rf interference or magnetic interference to mess with my iPad and the skyfi remote. Perhaps it was the cold weather on the skyfi box as well. Whatever the case I could not get the remote to work and control and point the telescope. It worked briefly but died just before I was to slew to the comet.

I had my vixen BT 80 binocular telescope out and used that to manually find the comet. I could not locate the comet with the Celestron mount using the hand controller, even with a four degree field of view.

I ended up taking some photos of the comet using a fixed tripod Amd the camera lens on the canon EOS t1i. I took some ling exposures to find the comet, and see if I could see it with images on the laptop. But also some four second exposures at 3200 iso and as wide an aperture as possible to get some kind of wide field shot of the comet.

Ison looked like a huge green fuzzy star through thin clouds and haze and the tail was visible clearly through the bt80 binoculars and my 10 by 50 binoculars. Clouds moved over and obscured the view as I was viewing the comet. I setup backyard EOS to take up to 30 photos in a sequence and took many photos hoping to get a decent one to show others.

Below is one of the photos.

Processed in deep sky stacker to remove a single dark frame from the single four second exposure, photoshop and Neat Image Pro noise reduction.

You can see there are a couple of aircraft leaving jet trails in the photo as well.



- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Comet Ison - some photos from Thursday morning.

Some photos from Thursday Morning.   This photos have been quickly processed and some advanced techniques are missing from these photos. 

It's early in the morning Friday.  If it's clear out I could decide to go out to HJRO and try to get another shot of Ison.  I'm to tired to even think about that right now.  I'm going to post some photos, I threw together from early this morning/last night's session.

I'll keep the comments brief.  I used Photoshop, Neat Image Pro to filter noise, and Preview on the Macintosh.  To stack images I used Deep Sky Stacker on the PC.  I acquired most of the shots from the Canon EOS under control of Backyard EOS on the PC.

I took a few test shots from live looping auto guiding mode from the Orion Star Shoot camera.  I processed and worked on a few of those black and white test images.  This was while it was guiding, a 2, 5 or 10 second exposure.   I was able to even get some half decent (for the cost of that camera) black and white iamges from the auto guider as well.

Enough comments.  Here's some of the photos.

I took some images of Comet Lovejoy.  Most of my Canon EOS images still need to be processed.  I worked on processing this image I actually took with the auto guider as a test image.  This actually shows Lovejoy pretty well, for a short exposure black and white astrophotography camera.

Comet Lovejoy above: (trying to pull to much out of the image results in much of the checkerboard noise we see in the photo above.)

All  black and white images from the Orion Star Shoot auto-guiding camera (comet LoveJoy above and M42 further down) were processed in Nebulosity, Neat Image pro and Preview.    There is a lot of noise in those images, so I used Neat Image pro to reduce some of it.

Above: Aan image of Comet ISON taken at F7 through the C14.  This image was stacked from about 3 images.   I was taking a lot of images at F11 through the C14, but then found F7 worked much better.  The coma is basically the comet's actual color, green.  This image shows more black and white than green, due to poor processing on my part and a desire to show as much of the comet's tail as I could.  The comet appears white because it's overexposed and my processing for this photo didn't keep it's slight green color.  With a more sensitive camera and better processing, we'd likely see more dust details in the comet's tail than shown above.  It's also difficult to tell if much of the dust is lost in haze or cloud's in this photo.

Earlier in the evening, I took a few photos of the Orion nebula.  I was testing the focus of my Canon EOS.  I decided to take a few stills with the Orion Star Shoot Guider to see what it could do while in guiding mode.  A 4 second and 10 second exposure were combined and processed to create the photo above.  There is still some noise, in the photo above depending on how bright you view it.  I probably tried to push this image to much and made it to bright.   I used Nebulosity, Photoshop(?), Preview, Neat image Pro and Photomatix HDR programs to get the results above from the Orion Star shoot.  I believe I actually took two passes with Neat Image Pro in between a couple of the other adjustment steps.  

I also took some photos earlier in the day of The Eskimo Nebula (no photos posted here yet), and  a test photo of the Crab nebula (M1).  I didn't get enough exposure of the Crab Nebula to process it.  I didn't have time to spend on M1.

The above Black and White photo came from a color photo I took of Comet ISON.  This was cropped and zoomed in from the wider shot taken from the Meade Refractor.  I started out adjusting the color to reduce red and blue sky glow and enhance the natural color of the comet (green).  But I decided to also create a black and white version of the image to copy the style of a photo that George Korody sent me.  His photo was taken with a black and white camera and took 30 seconds.  My photo was taken with the Canon EOS T1i and I combined three exposures totaling 105 seconds if I recall correctly.  The three 35 second exposures on the Canon EOS rivaled George's quick Black and White photo.  

I actually generated an intermediate photo that overemphasized green for this shot, but decided to combine that photo with the black and white version of it, to tone down the green tone and colors in the one shown below.  The photo of ISON below has a little bit of color in it, but it's almost completely Black and White.

Per George's comments: To the left of the comet there is a faint galaxy in this photograph.

"I see that you caught elliptical galaxy NGC4697 (Magnitude 9.2) towards the left side of your image.  The bright star below the comet is magnitude 12.85"

Lastly I'll leave you with another image of comet ISON, this was taken with the Orion Star Shoot Auto guider at the end of the session.  This camera took a 10 second exposure through the Meade telescope.  Not bad for a quick image from an auto guiding camera.  The image below was enhanced/adjusted using Nebulosity, Preview, and Neat Image Pro for noise reduction. 

Right now the moon is hanging about 8 degrees above the western horizon

It's nearly 4am and comet Ison is only five degrees below the eastern horizon. The moon sets as the comet rises.

I'm going to be trying to get better ranges of comet Ison this morning. Will be doing mostly photography through the telescope.

I'm taking images of comet Lovejoy as well, right now at HJRO.

It's going to be a long night. So many comets, so little time.




- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

A quick update about Wednesday morning's comet viewing, revised a bit.

(A bit of re-editing happened to this post, I'll add photos in another post later tonight if possible.)

Last night I didn't get to sleep until around 2am.  I thought I set my alarm and perhaps I did for 4am.  If it rang I didn't recall hearing it and turning it off.  There's a chance I didn't even set it as I woke up around 5:15am and couldn't get out of the house until 5:25am

Got up late to view the comet. I woke up around 5:14am and didn't get out of the house until 5:25am.

Took my Canon EOS, a laptop and my eyepieces.  When I arrived at HJRO I left the eyepieces in the car.

It was bitter cold out, around 23 degrees.

The sky looked good, but I didn't have time to take wide field images.  I simply rushed to open up the observatory door, in hopes of setting up and taking as many photos as I could.  I had probably less than 25 minutes to open up, setup and take photos before the clock would strike 6am, the effective witching hour for taking photos before the sky grew to bright.   I decided to only attempt to take photos with the C14, not the Meade.  I didn't have time to setup the Canon EOS on both telescopes, focus and take photos.  I also knew that I had a slim chance of getting the Auto-Guider focused and working in such a short time.

The first minute or two, I visually viewed the comet through the c14 with the same 40mm eyepiece I used 24 hours earlier. Comet ISON looked brighter than it did the day before.  It's starring to look better now.

(Unfortunately the comet is moving so fast, good close up photos from HJRO with the C14 might only be possible for a couple more mornings (weather permitting).  The Meade might reach it better.  If we lived in a perfect world I'd have a large easy to setup telescope for photography and the weather would be much warmer, giving me time to setup in the morning near a nice low horizon.  With the weather being so cold out lately it's unlikely that I'd setup to to photography with a telescope and tracking in this cold.  It might take an hour or two to get a really nice setup.  One could ideally use a low focal length rich field setup for the comet as well as it gets closer to the horizon and the tail becomes longer.  Having something like a "hyperstar setup" at a nice dark sky site, perhaps something like an over the water view would be nice, something like the dark sky site at the tip of the thumb of Michigan would be awesome for the comet if it provided a nice low horizon dark sky location. ) 

Took a few stills, with the canon EOS on the c14 before I had the Toshiba PC laptop hooked up to control the camera via Backyard EOS.  I like and highly recommend using a laptop or some computer for your photography of a comet, the larger immediate display of the images you take helps you locate the comet in the field, and insure you have a better focus. 

Before I setup the Laptop, I tried to focus on the comet using a focusing mask.   My mistake due to the rush and lack of time was trying to use the focusing mask with only the small Canon EOS t1i display, reviewing and using the small display didn't work well for me.  Perhaps due to the small display, perhaps because I forgot to put on reading glasses.  Visually the image at low power of a nearby bright star jumped around with the seeing with the mask on.  Rendering a quick use of the mask, useless.  I was better off aiming and focusing as best I could due to the time limitations.  Using the laptop would be a better way to do this.

Also I want to point out that using my laptop to capture images while focusing is better with one person in HJRO than using the computer in the observatory.  We have a large monitor and the computer display of images and controls are setup for a separate operator.  You often have to move to the telescope from the position you're in in the observatory to focus the telescope when getting the telescope in focus.  A live view perhaps to the other monitor facing the telescope would work, but we often run the configuration with the Windows and Macintosh sides of the Mac Mini going to separate monitors.  We haven't optimized the setup in a quick way yet to do solo astrophotography and it's a challenge.   I'm better off using my Toshiba laptop for solo imaging runs at HJRO.   The USB wire I use for the laptop also works better most of the time, because I can use the large observing chair as a stand and have the laptop up close near the eyepiece and camera.  It allows me to stand and setup the telescope focus while observing the results instantly using the laptop. 

- I should have dressed warmer.
This morning although I dressed up, the added colder air and rush likely made me much colder.  I left the observatory shivering by the end of the session.  I didn't use the IR heater at all during the entire imaging and setup, this made the comfort level almost unbearable.  I should have worn winter snowmobile boots and a snowmobile pant setup as well to have more comfort.  perhaps another layer of clothing and ear muffs as well.

- 5:40am
I took a few photos while trying to get the other stuff setup, the auto guider. Had to setup the auto guider in between exposures taken of the comet.

Had to refocus the Meade for the auto guider and was rushing. Had to go back to a nearby bright star to focus the auto guider.

The auto guider is not recognized by the computer in HJRO, at least it didn't work this morning. Phd guiding software did not see the Orion camera on the Macintosh or PC side.

I quickly tested and discovered PHD guiding software ran on my laptop. But the guiding didn't work very well, for stars inside the field of view near the comet, it could be due to the poor focus I did as I was rushing with phd.  I ran 2 minute intervals on some of the star tests to do autoguiding and that ate up at least ten minutes of my imaging time, which made it impossible to get good auto-guiding adjustments and the long exposures I was hoping to get.  You really should be at the observatory an hour before imaging is going to happen to setup.  Ideally I'd be there at 3:30 and start imaging tests around 4:30 or so for example with the comet if it was first visible around 4:30am.  The comet is not visible in the C14 until 5am however so a 4am arrival would have been better.  I retrospect I probably should have bundled up more and just went to HJRO and tried to image all night.  Perhaps warming up in my car during imaging sessions and test, the results would have been far better.

DIGRESSION EQUIPMENT THOUGHTS: Not that this log is meant to be a gripe fest. but for low targets, we have better viewing using the Meade Piggybacked on the back of HJRO.   A more ideal setup for comets would have two cameras piggybacked on the C14, some other telescope that was wide field on the telescope as well, perhaps removing the Lunt Solar telescope for a wide field telescope for auto-guiding.  Having a large telescope for auto-guiding would also be idea.  Really you'd want a better setup all around, HJRO is far from ideal for imaging comets.  To image comets you need a nice dark site, which we don't have.  You want a really low horizon, which we don't have due to city obstructions, and you'd want a portable rig ideally that has two telescopes a larger rich field perhaps for the auto-guiding.  For high up hard to see deep sky images of comets the observatory would likely do better with our auto-guiding setup.  To get faint stars to work with the auto-guider you need to let PHD do the mount calibration for backlash, which can take ten minutes out of your imaging run.  So overall we are better setup for fainter comets far above the horizon.  What is the big advantage to HJRO vs. a portable rig.  There is practically no setup time, as the telescope and mount are there and setup already.  There is no hour or longer setup of the mount and telescope.  There is less wind because the walls protect the observer.  We have a wooden floor with carpet on it, which is much warmer than a observing position outside.   For outside observing, unless you were using a large rich field telescope, a wide exposure is probably a much better setup.  In this cold weather I don't know if many FAAC astronomers will brave the early morning hours to setup and view the comet visually from any location.  (A part of me wishes I had a Faststar hyperstar setup and a trip to a dark sky site to get photos of this comet.  But most of those kinds of "cheap rigs" cost nearly $5000.  (outside my immediate telescope budget.)  The next best way to get a nice comet photo from a remote location is with a DSLR with a lens on a fixed mount.  It's relatively cheap.  One could use a small tracking mount with the DSLR on it as well, or use piggyback photography with a DSLR on a small telescope which tracked the comet.

THE AUTO GUIDING ATTEMPT
I took one long exposure while phd guided the mount, but phd started throwing errors so I cut it short to 156 seconds, aborting the exposure.

THE SYNC ON THE COMET MISTAKE
Before going to refocus I decided to do a sync on the comet as I liked my framing of it. But the comet is moving and you should not sync to a moving object. By the time I got back from the focus of the Orion guider the comet had moved and my 156 second exposure missed.the comet and showed only half of the comet on the edge of the frame and the tail.

Re-centering the object for a better photographic attempt, I took six 60 second 3200 iso exposures.  With phd guiding not working well, I could not get a long exposure.   I took six dark frames for stacking and image processing at the end of the session.  These were registered as 11 degree C sensor dark frames, and the exposed frames during the run were at 14 degrees C, not perfect, but close enough to perhaps help in the post processing and tweaking of the images.

By the end of the session the chill was starting to really set in.  I left HJRO around 7am to go home.  Outside HJRO the lights of the middle school had been turned on by morning staff.  I don't know if those lights affected the comet photos, it's more likely that the rising sun (sky glow)  affected the images.

SUMMARY
It will be challenging to get good images from the massive amount of sky glow that exists in those photos.  I may only have one or two images that are usable from this mornings session.

It was a real whirlwind of activity today for me at HJRO.   I would not say the trip to HJRO was worth it, to see the comet, Monday morning, but Tuesday morning the trip was worth it because the comet is much brighter. 

If your able to get the right setup a small telescope and binoculars and wake up early in the morning, viewing the comet visually now would be as rewarding as the nice views we had of Panstarrs.  As the comet gets closer there's a chance for unusual outbursts, so that makes viewing this "sun grazing" comet an exciting opportunity.  With the Michigan weather I almost felt I could feel cold CO2 particles and ice flying off the comet on my face, but that was just the Michigan weather.

Near the end of the session, I looked at the comet visually through the C14, 6:12am.  The sky glow  overwhelmed most of the tail by that time, making the comet appear like a fuzzy star, with most of its tail missing.  Observing after 6am would be disappointing, you need to be out there at 5am to observe this during the next few days.

I didn't get to sleep until 8am.   I'll look, process, and hopefully post some of this morning's comet images in the next post, or edit and add images to this long rambling post. 

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Quick review of Comet ISON with photos - attempt 5am to 6:30am Tuesday morning

Arrived at HJRO shortly before 5am.

Before I continue, I want to say there is a chance I'll try to image this comet again before the sun rises.  If I can get equipment issues ironed out and the weather cooperates I may get a better photo this morning.   One of the problems of course is the comet is getting brighter as it gets closer to the sun but the sky will glow from natural sky glow from the sunrise and images after 6am when the comet is higher are practically worthless as they start picking up a lot of blue sky and the contrast with the tail, renders the images pretty useless.  We have to take all our images before 6am between 5 and 6am and the comet is fairly low on the horizon making it difficult to image from the observatory due to the wall obstruction.  We need an object about 18 degrees above the horizon for the C14 to be able to image it.  The Meade can image a little lower because it's mounted higher on top of the C14 and it can peek out of the shutter at a lower angle in the east and west.

A more detailed log about viewing the comet Tuesday follows:

Opened up but experienced a few issues and problems.  ISON was not defined as a comet in the sky catalog and I had to download an updated comet list off the internet.  I had some tracking/balancing issues and the auto-guiding camera would not connect.  Some of these were possibly user error, others were perhaps related to my not being awake enough and having enough time to configure the observatory.

At first I looked at the comet visually through the C14 with a 40mm eyepiece.   Temperatures were very cold out, about 27 degrees and there was a slight wind of about 10mph at the observatory.

The comet looked about as good as Panstarrs looked earlier in the year with a much smaller telescope.  The C14 didn't seem to bring out much of the tail and I decided after looking for a short time to try to take some long exposure photos.   I didn't get ideal images, because of tracking issues and the lack of time.   I was running late, but no visitors showed up, so I was able to get a few photos.

This images are not anywhere as good as images taken by other astronomers of the comet.  With better luck and more setup and planning time, I might be able to do better.  As the comet gets closer to the sun it will be brighter.  There's a chance Wednesday morning will be clear out and I may try to image the comet early this Wednesday and see if I can do better.

While looking at the comet through the C14 I tried to take a half a dozen exposures of the comet through the wide field Meade telescope.  I took these with a Canon EOS T1i DSLR camera.  I took relatively short exposures with the Meade as I was in a hurry to move the camera to the C14.

Here are five photos I took with the Meade 80mm refractor and the Canon DSLR.  These were stacked with Deep Sky stacker and I worked on trying to tease out detail from 5 13 second exposures. We are talking about a total exposure time of only about a minute, so these images don't show the tail and faint parts of the comet as well as I'd like to see them. 

I ended up playing with the image in Preview on the Macintosh and used way to much adjustments actually trashing the image pretty good, to get detail from the tail, but this introduced many noisy and oversaturated artifacts that make the comet look more like a comic book comet than a nice astrophotograph.  I guess I can call it "art" and leave it there.

Below you can see the output from Deep Sky Stacker with some natural adjustments.  

Deep Sky Stacker is a free program on the P.C. and it does a nice job of removing the motion in the five images and correcting the comet image.  But we don't have a lot of detail to play with in the photo above. 


The over saturated "artsy" kind of look.  from a cropped image from the Meade adjusted to give more detail in the coma and tail.  This makes it look a little bit more comic book like, which is not the normal goal of astronomers when taking images of deep sky objects.

- Moving to the C14
I was unable to get long exposures like a 180 second exposure or some exposure that might take five minutes.  Something long which would bring out the tail of the comet would be nice.   I saw some tracking or balancing errors with a 180 second exposure, so I made the decision to try to take a half a dozen 60 second exposures of the comet on the C14 and see if I could stack them to get a good image.  Most of the 60 second exposures were not very good.

I ended up working on a single image from the C14 which was a 60 second exposure.  A little bit of manipulation showed the following from Photoshop.

This image was manipulated further to try to enhance the detail in the tail but these are over-processed and introduces the same kind of artificial noise we see in the "art" like photo results from the Meade above. 

That's about it for now.

I'm hoping to get better photos soon.  Ison will be approaching the sun by the 28th of November and this is the week we'd want to get an image of it before glow from the moon would affect morning imaging.

Will attempt to open up HJRO by 5:45am Tuesday morning to observe and photograph comet Ison.

Comet Ison will be in the morning skies this cold Tuesday morning and in theory will be visible from a good eastern horizon view.

Perhaps with binoculars and a small telescope most anyone will be able to find the comet. It will be about half way between Mars and the horizon at 5:30am.

It will be cold out this morning. I will try to view the comet at HJRO.

It won't be very visible from HJRO until it's risen about 18 degrees or further which would mean the comet wpnt be visible until nearly 6am for The observatory's large c14. We may be able to see it with the Meade refractor as well a little bit before 6am.

The sun rises around 7am so sky glow will start when the comet becomes more visible to the telescopes inside. (The sun starts to brighten the sky for an hour before it rises.)

Here is a chart showing Ison and it's position at 6am on Tuesday morning.











Clear sky chart shows that it should be clear this morning.

Unfortunately it snowed around here and the weather will be cold out.

- In planning for Tuesday morning.
There are a couple of ways I could try to view the comet. I could try to view it from HJRO later in the morning around 6am or find a location near with a better eastern horizon. . . Perhaps somewhere near the river.

I'm leaning toward going to HJRO because I won't have to setup a telescope in a cold environment and can turn on the heater inside HJRO, if it gets to cold after observing. I also have a better chance of getting a photo from the telescope by opening up at HJRO. Around here I'm not sure a good low eastern horizon can be found to allow me to view from both locations.

I like to see it through a big telescope, but if I headed down to Ecorse to setup my large ten inch newtonian("Big Bertha"); I would not have time to take down the telescope and travel to HJRO and view the comet. I think I should shoot for HJRO tomorrow morning and any other viewing from other locations will be optional.



Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Playing with my new 94 inch telescope

There is a story on the Internet about a guy who owns the biggest amateur telescope. He bought a 70 inch surplus mirror that was meant to go into a spy satellite, but became military surplus. He spent some time creating a huge truss telescope structure and apparently coated the mirror with some nonconventional method. I have no idea how good his mirror is and how good that telescope works, but reading about it threw me into a mood to go searching for another telescope.

I spend to much time dreaming about more telescopes, and more telescope mounts. Something I can take out to a dark sky site. My dreams often end up searching for things like mounts and large telescopes. Maybe a Losmandy g11 mount for Big Bertha, my ten inch Newtonian. Maybe some new planetary killer for sale on an astromart or cloudy night website. One moment it's a planetary killer, and another moment it's a rare large sct, perhaps a nine inch takahashi sct which is super rare and expensive, or a c11 with a hyper star lens. Or maybe a rich field telescope that is a little smaller than big Bertha that I could use on a tracking mount to take wide field photos when out at a dark sky site.

Then I get back to reality and think about the telescope I have access to at HJRO. It's difficult to compete with a Celestron c14 with a small personal telescope. Being at the observatory and able to look through the 14 inch telescope spools me. I often conclude, there is no point in spending money on another telescope which will not compete well against the C14, and cost so much time and money to deploy, I'd rarely see it used. I end up realizing I'm very fortunate to be in the FAAC club and able to look through the Lincoln Park Observatory Telescopes which are so close to home and quick to access.

If I had a lot of money, I could buy a huge telescope. I can dream of some monster telescope like a $75,000 50 inch telescope that one can buy from Great Red Spot astronomy. I'd have to wait for a mirror to be built, buy a trailer and then drive hundreds of miles perhaps to get a good view camping and observing. If I was to take photos they still would be limited because the tracking for a large dob of that size would not allow long exposure photographs.

If I had a huge telescope like these I'd have to schedule the time to take a decent photo, then download the photo and play with the photo using photoshop. And I might not select the right photos or it might be cloudy where my telescope was setup. I could rent a telescope from I telescope.com or some other rental site and spend money for imaging time.

But I already have a 95 inch telescope that I own (in part) as a taxpayer, it's sitting in orbit. It takes photographs of many interesting objects in space. It's the Hubble space telescope and NASA puts all the raw image data into files called FIT image files on the web. Anyone can browse and download any of the thousands of images that are posted and learn to process those photos. NASA even has programs on the web to help me convert a fit file into a readable tiff file inside photoshop and there are tutorials on the web that show us the basics of merging the separate filtered images into a color file. (I won't go into details but can post a link later.)

I've thought about this for years and never tried to process a Hubble photo until tonight. I decided to go out to the web and select an image and learn a little bit about how to process that image. My photoshop skills are still fairly basic.

I went out and selected the ring nebula. One of many photos that NASA has out there, a color three channel image fit file was selected and downloaded to my Macintosh laptop. I used fits liberator to convert it to a set of three tiffs representing three color channels.

The program created a three channel image which has three different color channels. I didn't spend time to read up and determine what the three colors were and probably made that mistake, not using or selecting the proper colors. I just guessed that layer 1 was red, layer 2 was green and layer 3 was blue : an rgb image. But that probably isn't the case with the image I selected from Nasa's site.

I processed the first attempt with r,g,b as the channels and merged them. I used curves on each channel to adjust them a bit and merged the three into an rgb image. Below is my first attempt.

Ring Nebula (green tint)
My first quick image process of raw fit file from at the Hubble space telescope.



As you can see there is a red and green tint to this image which is not true colors that we'd see. My curve mixing was pretty good on this image, for a first attempt. There is an error in the image I didn't mask out, but the nebulosity is pretty good in this image. The sharpness is stunning of course, thanks to the great source image NASA provided.

Not entirely happy with the colors I choose, I decided to reprocess it from the same fit file. I did this with red for channel 1, blue for channel 2 and green for channel 3 of the exposure I downloaded. This gave me a more true to natural color of the Ring Nebula, but I didn't process the curves as well brining out the subtle shades in the nebula that I was able to get with my first attempt. Clearly there is a lot more to learn.

As you can see the Hubble images provide a pretty stunning result. Quite a bit better than our c14, and it only took me a little bit of time in photoshop to get this image.


Ring nebula (closer to true colors) second attempt from Hubble image below.





The best thing about my new 94 inch telescope is, it didn't cost me a dime and the images are just sitting their on the NASA website ready to be processed.

(Compare the Hubble image with a single still we took of the Ring Nebula some years back at the Lincoln Park observatory.)


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad