Hoegaarden Astronomy & Photography
M109 is located very very close to Phecda, one of the stars in Ursa Major’s bowl. In fact the star caused reflections in this image. About 4 hours of data, 115x 120″ on ISO800. Guiding was done through OAG. Manual focus corrections.
The images were obtained using Sequence Generator Pro, and saved in TIF. This creates B/W images. To get your color back they need to be debayered. This can be done in AstroPixelProcessor by checking “Force CFA” in the menu 0/RAW/FITS
It has been cloudy for the last months, this February New Moon was totally clouded out! With exception of lastThursday, February 20th: after an active rain zone passed through – with heavy wind and hail – the night sky cleared out.
After midnight till 4 am a clearance allowed me to test the setup. The test subject was the dwarf galaxy Leo 1 next to the bright Regulus.
This image was a quick test. Not only for the optics/camera combination, but also for the automation. SGP was used to automate, autofocus, and Solve& Sync. Where before I could not match the Solve coördinates from SGP back into Cartes du Ciel, this time it worked. The secret was to run both applications as an administrator. So both will connect to the EQMOD hub. Syncing in CdC (Manually) will update the EQMOD coördinates, hence also the SGP co*ordinates. And it works in both directions: Solve & Sync in SGP will update CdC. This is great!
I still had Luminance images also, but I did not add these: it were fuzzy frames and some reflections appeared. I suspect this Luminance filter is not ok.
After creating the Heart nebula in a mosaic a month ago, we had some semi-clear nights last week, in which I could try and stitch the Soul nebula to the Heart.
Unfortunbately these nights were also very foggy, sometimes fog banks floated over, with barely star visibility. The good news is that SGP (Sequence Generator Pro) kept up trying, despite star loss in PHD, to continue making lights. While sleeping. So that’s really wonderfull.
The end result, needless to say, did have that much gradient sin the final image that I do not consider it a result. It’s more an exercise. The final mosaic had 10.000×12.000 pixels and took 1,5 Gb TIFF or FITS size. Both AstroPixelProcessor and Photoshop had issues digesting this large file. In fact it’s so large that Astrobin or this website cannot upload it.
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