Tuesday 17 November 2009. Met Office
seeing condition: Good & Supposedly 'Clear' Skies
With Andromeda high in the sky I thought I would go for a large number of 60 second exposures of M31 (Andromeda Galaxy). I tried to use guiding but got increasingly frustrated with my F12 710mm focal length guide scope. The field of view (FOV) is too small and it is going to have to go. Being new to the Lodestar guide CCD camera I was frustrated to find the 2 bright 'stars' in the FOV were actually 'hot' pixels. PHD guiding doesn't work too well if you guide on a hot pixel :)
The mount is quite well polar aligned (I used the drift method on the Sun during those warm September sunny days) so I decided to forget auto-guiding, especially as I was planning on 60 second exposures. So I set off 60x60 second frames and went inside for a nice cup of tea. I had to abort the run half way through due to worsening haze and whispy cloud. In the end I got 75x60 second exposures of average quality. I figure I may as well learn to use the equipment and software in average conditions (if that is all the sky God is offering) rather than sit on my hands. At least I will be more prepared when we do get those crisp cold clear winter nights!
Below are 2 interpretations of my results processed using ImagesPlus. The last view is rotated to the same angle as the Wikipedia link
M31 Andromeda Galaxy
Canon 450D: 75 x 60secs at ISO800; No auto-guiding. Thin hazy cloud of varying opacity consistently passing overhead. I am sure I can do much better than this!
With Andromeda high in the sky I thought I would go for a large number of 60 second exposures of M31 (Andromeda Galaxy). I tried to use guiding but got increasingly frustrated with my F12 710mm focal length guide scope. The field of view (FOV) is too small and it is going to have to go. Being new to the Lodestar guide CCD camera I was frustrated to find the 2 bright 'stars' in the FOV were actually 'hot' pixels. PHD guiding doesn't work too well if you guide on a hot pixel :)
The mount is quite well polar aligned (I used the drift method on the Sun during those warm September sunny days) so I decided to forget auto-guiding, especially as I was planning on 60 second exposures. So I set off 60x60 second frames and went inside for a nice cup of tea. I had to abort the run half way through due to worsening haze and whispy cloud. In the end I got 75x60 second exposures of average quality. I figure I may as well learn to use the equipment and software in average conditions (if that is all the sky God is offering) rather than sit on my hands. At least I will be more prepared when we do get those crisp cold clear winter nights!
Below are 2 interpretations of my results processed using ImagesPlus. The last view is rotated to the same angle as the Wikipedia link
M31 Andromeda Galaxy
Canon 450D: 75 x 60secs at ISO800; No auto-guiding. Thin hazy cloud of varying opacity consistently passing overhead. I am sure I can do much better than this!
Same as the picture above, but I may have overdone the yellow!
Same as the first picture above, but rotated to match the wikipedia view