Category: Astro Diary

A colleague and fellow astroimager (Welford Observatory), with whom tips and tricks in the coffee lounge at work are exchanged, suggested I try PixInsight (PI) for processing some astroimages. I tried the demo version once before and I, like many others before me, found it very complicated and daunting and gave up quickly.

He pointed me towards Harry’s Astro Shed as he has posted various get you started video tutorials for PI. So I bit the bullet, paid for a licence (£lots) and got stuck in.

Yes, it’s still very complicated but with Harry’s help I also discovered it’s very powerful. The calibration routines for applying bias, dark and flat frames to the raw data are the best I’ve ever used. Move over Nebulosity 3 you’ve been outdone.

After practicing on some old images it was time to try it out on some new data using the recommended workflow.

The first thing to do was to take a new library of dark frames. They shouldn’t change from one imaging session to another so you can take them, create a master for different exposures times and they can be used over and over again. I did these on a cloudy night, a bit time consuming but the system can be left to do its thing.

The next night was clear so I decided to have a go at the region around the Horsehead Nebula in Orion. This is a region full of nebulosity which responds well to H-alpha filters. I took 36 exposures of five minutes each, not really long enough for faint nebulosity but I wanted to get as many exposures as possible in one go as a test of PI.

I’m often a bit lazy when capturing flats but I was careful to make sure I got good ones and then calibrated, registered and integrated the images in PI. With some histogram stretching, denoise and contrast enhancement I’ve ended up with possibly the best astroimage I have ever taken.

Be sure to click through to Flickr and see the full resolution version.

I’m now a total PI convert, it’s expensive and complicated but now I’ve got a hang of the basics there’s no stopping me now!

 

There are currently (as of 11th Feb 2015) 1544 Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (PHAs). These are small bodies that have the potential to make threatening close approaches to the Earth.

Most are very small, from a few metres to a few tens of metres across, but there are quite few larger ones a few kilometres across. Clearly if one of these larger bodies hit the Earth it would make a mess. A big mess. Fortunately no PHAs are known to be on a collision course with the Earth.

2004 BL86 is one such PHA which was thought to be around 600–700m across. It’s orbit is known well enough that it has been given a numeric designation (it’s name means it was discovered in 2004 and BL86 is a sequential tag indicating it’s order of discovery in that year).

On 26/27 January 2015 it made a close approach to Earth, about 3.1 times the Earth-Moon distance away at closest. Small asteroids come close to Earth all the time, often closer than this, but what made this one unusual was the size of the object. This large size meant it would be bright enough to be readily visible by amateur astronomers.

As it approached Earth professional observatories started observing the asteroid using radar and it was discovered that it was an almost spherical object (unusual for small bodies) around 325m across. They also discovered it has a small moon (this is not unusual for PHAs).

After observing the asteroid visually through my telescope (likely to be the highest numbered asteroid I will ever view visually) I took a couple of videos using my asteroid occultation setup and a sequence of 20s images taken 20s apart. Once aligned and stacked these images show the asteroid’s movement as a dashed line.


The asteroid appeared about as bright as a 9th magnitude star (typically stars down to 6th magnitude are visible naked-eye from a very dark site).

B33 – The Horsehead Nebula

Imaging opportunites have been few and far between this autumn. Whenever it has been clear there has been a bright Moon, it has been too windy or I’ve been busy. But at last we had a clear night with no Moon and I could finally image something!

My choice was the Horsehead Nebula in Orion. An object I’ve not imaged before. The Horsehead is a famous dark nebula (Barnard 33) shaped like a horse’s head which is silhouetted in front of a huge bright emission nebula (IC 434 or Sh2-277) known as the Flame Nebula. The whole complex surrounds Alnitak which is the lefthand star in the distinctive line of three stars that make up the Belt of Orion. The Horsehead is found just below Alnitak.

I imaged using my QHY22 camera and a H-alpha filter. This filter only transmits light from a specific deep-red visible spectral line. This light is emitted when a hydrogen electron falls from its third to second lowest energy level. H-alpha light is interesting to amateur astronomers as it’s emitted by emission nebula and local light pollution (even moonlight) won’t interfere with the imaging. By imaging using a H-alpha filter you can get great images of nebulae with high contrast. The payoff is that you need long exposures (typically 5-15 minutes each) and for that you need really good auto-guiding.

Auto-guiding involves using a second telescope mounted in parallel to the imaging telescope with a second camera taking continuous short exposures (typically 1-2s long). Using a clever bit of software the position of a ‘guiding star’ on each exposure is compared to the previous and if it has moved due to errors in the telescope tracking the rotation of the Earth the software automatically applies a correction to the position of the telescope so that the star remains exactly in the same place whilst you are imaging. Without guiding you are limited to shorter exposures of around one minute each as the errors in tracking add up and the stars will start to trail slightly.

My guiding setup has been working really well since I set up the Starshed Enterprise and I can usually get five minute exposures with no visible star trailing. To reduce noise in the resulting image you need to stack as many exposures as you can get and I typically aim for a minimum of 20 exposures. Twenty exposures of five minutes each is around two hours of imaging including taking dark frames for calibration.

It’s preferable to get all of the imaging done before the object crosses the meridian (due South) as although you can continue imaging for a while afterwards eventually the telescope tube will hit the mount and you have to perform what is called a ‘Meridian Flip’. This involves re-pointing the telescope from the eastern hemisphere to the western hemisphere and is a bit of a faff. On this evening I started early enough and the Horsehead was far enough east that I didn’t need to perform a flip for two hours worth of imaging.

In the end I managed to get 19x300s exposures. I had to stop as the secondary mirror was completely dewed up (a bit like how a bathroom mirror steams up after a shower). I could have cleared it with a quick blast from a 12V hairdryer but the whole observatory was dripping with dew and it was close to flip time so I packed up. I need to experiment with heaters or fans to prevent dewing up of the secondary as it has been a bit of a pain.

Capturing, stacking and processing was all done in Nebulosity 3. The resultant image is still a little bit noisy (grainy) but I’m pretty pleased with the result. I plan to capture some more exposures at some point to improve the image further. I might even be able to take some of the surrounding area and create a mosaic image as the nebulosity stretches way beyond the field of view of my setup.

Sh2-101 — The Tulip Nebula

Emission nebula in Cygnus. Taken with 300mm F/4 Newtonian telescope with QHY22 camera 2×2 binned. 12x300s exposures with H-alpha filter and TS Coma Corrector. Autoguided with QHY5-II. Captured and processed in Nebulosity 3.

I’ve been taking some images from the Starshed Enterprise when it has been clear over the past few weeks. Experimenting with different settings etc. I’ve now got a nice system going, autoguiding is working well and I’m starting to get some nice images.

Messier 51 (Whirpool Galaxy) was the first galaxy shown to have a spiral structure when in 1845 Lord Rosse observed it with his giant 72″ telescope in Ireland. It is found in Canes Venatici below the tail of Ursa Major (the handle of the Big Dipper) so is well placed for observing at this time of year as it’s almost directly overhead. It has a smaller companion which it is interacting with (NGC 5195) seen as the compact galaxy at the end of a dark dust lane in one of the spiral arms. Tongues of material are being thrown out from the system as they interact, three distinct fingers can be seen stretching upwards in my image.