Some news despite the frustrating weather
The weather is not really the best these last weeks. Upside is about the water levels for the ground, downside is the very few hours available for shooting.
Well, I got my battery Ecoflow Delta 2 back from repair (long story, don’t want to talk about it …). And it allows me to move my setup in the wild, and not stuck in my garden. With my other setup (Celestron C9 Evo AltAz), the mount has its own battery but with the Nyx-101 I need an external power source so the Delta 2.
While my first tests on IC1805 were done in my garden with some light pollution from the street and the hill blocking the object a bit, I went now to my favorite place : in the middle of nowhere and the Bortle scale is better there.
I have few things in my car : the tripod with the mini-computer and the Nyx mount attached, the Askar APO with the camera and the guiding system on top, the battery Delta 2, my bag with accessories such as bathinov mask/power cables/a Wifi access point, and a chair (the Nemo Stargaze recliner, google it, it’s very cool)
When my car lights hit the place, there are already my beautiful friends: 5 deers (probably siblings) and three foxes, and I’m thrilled.
The setup is mounted in less than 4 minutes, everything is powered and wifi connected. The day before, I tried with a cloudy sky, and I gave up after an hour as the clouds were blocking my Polar alignement. This time, clear skies, but I know it will end around 1 or 2 AM so I need to speed up a bit.
Polar alignement steps are done quickly but when I hit the last step, I felt the alignement was good enough as anyway I will guide the telescope. And I also missed the alignement stars step … it gave me a hard time to get the Heart Nebula framed correctly. I spent an hour on it … the object was there, but not ideally centered. Thinking about it now, I should have restarted the alignement process, I would not have wasted this hour … anyway, every error is to be learnt for the next time. And on top, I got a human visitor … unexpected at this place … a hunter, asking me what I was doing here. “I’m shooting the sky”, he answered “ok, don’t stay too long” … “well, I’ll stay for 2 or 3 hours” ….”careful, there are wild animals” … “ I know, I saw 5 deers and 3 foxes, and I can hear the boars from the near woods” … “well, yeah … there are 50 boars in total in there and they have their piglets so they are a bit nervous” … “…ok, I’m only using my red light so I will not be a target for them, I think” … end of discussion, but now I’m a bit nervous too … to be hit by boars is definitively not an experience I’m aiming for … anyway, back to shooting.
I finally get IC1805 framed correctly (quite), and start to shoot, 60 lights of 120 seconds each, my guiding camera is doing a good job (so the mount too), and shots are coming in nicely. I have a Halpha/OIII filter to catch the Hubble colors of gases, but every single shot is only about stars, I’ll figure when I will stack these shots if I got something. Around 1 AM, my guiding system is starting to be weak, the clouds are coming, so I stop and I’m deciding to shoot the biases and darks … a lot of them (100 each), because I can see a strong AmpGlow artefact and I need a lot of darks to cut it off with the stacking process.
Well, the picture of this post is showing a couple of things:
I don’t have enough exposure time. Two hours are not enough, the object is still very faint. But it was expected.
Despite a change of orientation of the Askar APO (I reversed it to be able to lock the focus harder), I’m not sure about my focus accuracy. It seems good, but I’m not sure 100%
The objet is not centered ideally, and the left side of the picture shows the impact of the AmpGlow despite the darks shots : a piece of the heart is “eaten” by the artefact
I got pretty well the Fish Head at the bottom/mid-right. And the colors are great to me !
And finally, the core of the Heart is showing beautiful blue/green … and I’m sure that it is because of both the location and the Askar D1 Halpha/OIII filter.
Next weather forecast for clear skies is about a week from now at best … I’ll probably sleep in my car for a hopeful 5 hours shooting with both filters (Halpa/OIII and SII/OIII)
Exif : Askar FRA300 + PegasusAstro Nyx-101 + + ZWO ASI183MC Pro cooled at -10°C / Askar Duo Magic D1 filter 2” Halpha/OIII
60 lights 120s each Gain 111 / 100 biases / 100 darks / 100 flats (yes, I did the flats :) )
Stacked with Siril - No post-treatment except histogram automatic
