A Cosmic Pinwheel

This is a heavily-cropped image of M101, the Pinwheel Galaxy,

taken last night through significant sky glow and haze. I used the 8 inch f/4 Newt with no filtration. This is a stack of 15 images x 30 seconds at a gain of about 20 db. This is an unbinned image. Tracking was less than perfect, but the final result isn't too bad. The Universe can really pull detail out in mediocre conditions.

The Sunday Sun

Sunday afternoon was just perfect for solar imaging. I set up the PST-DS and mated it up to the DS 2.3+ with Barlow. The images below were 500 frame AVI's, stacked in Registax (the 150 best frames) and wavelet processed.

The first image is a crop of the larger, almost full disk image that follows it. It shows AR 2546--a large spot that could swallow earth, but which is also uncharacteristically quiet (no flaring).

Mallincam Universe--First Light, 05/05/2016

Finally, after a couple of weeks of unrelenting cloud, the weather cleared last night. The pristine dark sky gave me the opportunity to try my newly-delivered Universe for the first time. The imaging system consisted of the  8 inch F/4 Newt running the 2 inch focuser (necessary to get full illumination of the enormous Universe imaging chip), the ZEQ 25 mount, the Universe camera (unfiltered) and a Surface Pro 3 running Windows 10.

I did have some issues with the Universe software under Win 10--specifically crashes involving null pointers--but things finally settled down after a few reboots. As I did not have a lot of time to image (it doesn't get dark here in Indiana until around 9:30 local time and I had to be in work early this morning), I just did a rough focus without the focusing mask and started capturing images.

As I don't yet have a 2 inch skyglow filter, I decided to stick with a brighter object--M51. I was surprised how tolerant the Universe was in terms of skyglow--it really looked as if I was using a filter and the histogram function did a very good job of darkening the background (the lower sensitivity of the Universe compared to the Skyraider and video cameras was also a factor, I am sure).

The Universe software is not as "intuitive" as the Skyraider interface, but it took me only a few minutes to feel comfortable enough to image with it. I imaged in unbinned mode with high gain. The amazing thing is how wide the imaged field is with the Newt! The image below is a stack of 5 images x 30 seconds. Some amp glow is visible in the left upper corner, but the emphasis here is on the FOV--quite impressive and offering significant zoom potential due to the high resolution of the camera.

Even with the 2 inch focuser, some significant vignetting and coma distortion are visible (and tracking was less than perfect as I did a very quick polar alignment), but the overall image is very pleasing. I'm looking forward to using this camera on the VRC6 (which I may keep at its native F/9), and with the 14 inch ACF--where I think it will really shine!

As I was packing up, I captured one image of the Pinwheel Galaxy just to see how well the camera performed with a fainter object. The result is below. It is a single, 45 second exposure with histogram adjustment only. Again, the camera has done a good job of pulling the galaxy out of the unfiltered background and the spiral structure is clearly evident.

I'm very happy indeed with this camera, which makes a very good addition to my Mallincam "family."

More Moon!

I spent some time tweaking the collimation on my F/4 Mallincam Newt. Before collimation, I thought it gave some wonderfully sharp images. After collimation, they looked even better.

This image was taken with the newt and the DS 2.3+ imager, proving that together, they are a formidable combination!

The Moon 4.13.16

Imaging DSOs becomes problematic when the moon approaches first quarter. I decided to take the time to fully collimate the VRC 6, which was a little out of alignment. I decided to test it on the moon. The image below was taken with the VRC 6, 0.5x focal reducer, and DS 2.3+. It is a stack of 250 frames from an avi, stacked in Registax with final processing (unsharp mask) in Photoshop. The collimation really sharpened up the image!

This image was taken with the same setup, but using a 2x barlow:

M82--The Cigar Galaxy

Saturday evening (4/9) was as good a night for imaging as we've had here in a while, despite the cold (33 degrees F). With not even a slight breeze to disturb it, the ZEQ 25 tracked almost flawlessly. I took this image with the VRC-6 (plus .5x focal reducer and skyglow filter) scope and the DS 2.3+, which gives a very decent wide field view with an F/ratio of 4.5.

This full-frame image is a stack of 30 images, stacked and tweaked in Nebulosity, with final finishing in Photoshop. The focus was a little off on the scope, but the image is reasonably good--I need to buy a Bahtinov Mask for this scope (the mask I have for the 8 inch Newt is too big).

M82 is a bright, starburst galaxy, with the starburst being triggered by the nearby M81 (Bode's Galaxy). The core of M82 is around 100 times brighter than that of our own Milky Way and this image brings out striking color in the galaxy's core.

The Sun on April 3, 2016

Last Sunday was a great day for solar observation! The sky was clear all day and the sun had a couple of large prominences on display.

The images posted here were taken with the PST-DS and the Mallincam DS 2.3+. The colors are as captured by the camera. Each image was captured as a 500 frame avi. The avi was loaded into Registax 6 for alignment and stacking. The best 200 frames from each avi were stacked and wavelet processing was also performed in Registax.  The result shows some nice detail on both prominences, including complex loops and other structures caused by the sun's magnetic field: