M42, M43, The Running Man and some Bino viewing

Saturday night was clear, after a day of clear skies, this was most unusual, and after the clear day I was expecting heavy clouds. Still, I wasn't going to look a gift horse in the mouth. I already knew what I was going to do, and at 1830, darkness setting in nicely, I carted the gear outside and setup. Early I know, but I wanted to make the most of it.

Plonked down the mount, powered up, went to polar align and realised as I was looking through the polarscope, I'd forgotten to set the axis for the correct date and time. So I did this (little did I know I got that simple task wrong, but more on that later). Polar aligned, swung around to Rigel, adjusted my RDF (I must have knocked it at some point) and focused the camera. I got focus, checked it with a test sub, then locked the drawtube, only to find, that tightening the focus lock, was enough to shift out focus... grr... Ok, loosened it a little and refocused. All set. I adjusted manually to the M42 region and shifted around with the tracking motors till I got the nebula just where I wanted it, taking framing shots as I went. I tested for longer exposures, but 2 minutes was all I could manage, I'd obviously messed something up, but couldn't see what. Ah well, 2 minutes it would be. I pushed the ISO to 1600 and set the camera gathering 2 minute subs, or so I'd thought. I'd set the camera to 30s, for my test shots, and forgot to set it back to bulb mode. I check it regularly, and noticed after only 17x30second subs, so I didn't lose too much time, and besides that would help with the core. I adjusted the camera, set the timer remote for 90 subs and set it all running.

My youngest wondered what I was up to, so we trotted out and I showed him. He was very surprised what I was getting when he looked at the preview screen on the camera. He wanted to have a bit more of a look around, so I grabbed the 15x70's popped them on a tripod and showed him some sights.

First off, M45, such a lovely sight in bins. I had him look both around the bins, and then through the bins, and he was astonished at the number of points of light in the darkness. So we went on a little tour of some of the grander sights, better suited for a 7 year old. M42, and he could see the glow easily enough. He wanted to look at that orange dot, so I pointed the bins to Betelguese for him, not really a lot different. I pointed out Orion and Gemini and the Big Dipper, nothing wrong with learning the constellations, should be easy for him. He asked me what that "twinkling bright star" was, a bit below Orion, ah said I, that's Sirius, the Dog Star, brightest star in our night sky. We had a quick discussion then about the distances involved, how Sirius is pretty close, the Pleiades, about 450ly's away, really meant we were looking back in time 450 years. He thought this was pretty cool. When I told him, how far away M31 was, he wanted to see that too. And was amazed we could see something so far away that the light we were looking at it left it 2.2 million years ago.

Then back closer to home, and the Beehive cluster (although, apparently it's the Beehive galaxy... a reference to Super Mario Galaxy, but quite sweet). And again, he was astonished by how many stars there are that you can't see without bins. Then onto M38, and more importantly the Smiley Face. I thought he'd like that one, and he did. Then a quick turnaround, back to the Big Dipper for a look at the Horse and Rider (he passed his Roman army eyesight test) and mummy came out to check. So we showed her the Pleiades and I think she was quite impressed, and we went inside. Where we spent a little while looking at the planisphere and explaining to him how to use it.

Time passes ....

I keep popping out and checking up on what's going on, all looking good. What I didn't notice, 2 hours into the run, was that the objective was dewing up, which I'm a bit miffed about as I lost an hours worth of data because of it (I tried to include them in the stack, but it made the result look unfocused). I noticed the mount power light was flashing, so I plugged the powertank into the mains (that wasn't one of my best conceived plans) putting the plug and power supply into a plastic box, in a bin bag.

The three hours up, I went back out to find, the powertank was no longer charging, nor doing anything for that matter, the mount had stopped moving altogether, the last three subs were a blurred mess. It turns out the power supply to the powertank had fried in the process of trying to keep things running. Damn. Thankfully I have another one I can use and it looks like the powertank has charged up again. I need to think my power supply out more carefully. I'm thinking, either a mains supply in a plastic tooldbox, or a leisure battery in the same housing.

Anyway, I downloaded the subs, stacked them, threw away that result as it looked out of focus, restacked without the subs with the dewed objective, threw the data from last week into the mix so I had 17x2mins @ISO800 (from last week), 17x30s @ISO1600 and 50x120s @ISO1600. I used 11 darks, 17 flats, and 15 dark flats, stacked in DSS with a Log(SQRT) stretch and tweaked in PS.



I'm done with this target for now. I don't think I'll be able to do much more with it, until I'm guiding or using a modded camera or both. I also managed to figure out the likely cause of the reduced sub length from last week. I messed up the align a little. I'd used the wrong time and was an hour out. Ah well. I'm really pleased with the end result though.