Tuesday 24 March 2009

Iridium 57 and M67

I got another Iridium flare last night, this time a mag -3. I really like this one, using the 50mm prime certainly gathers a load more light, and 50mm gives a very nice image scale.

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I also watched the ISS drift gracefully over with the boys.

A bit later on, as the sky was clear, I decided to setup the scope for gathering a couple more hours of data on the Leo Triplet. There were two problems with this, one I couldn't find them again, and two the wind was gusting strongly causing issues in any sub that went longer than 1 minute. After probably 45 minutes trying to find them and work out my max sub length, which wasn't enough for galaxies anyway.. I gave up and went for a cluster. They don't need the sub length, so that's fine... Anyway, whilst I was looking through the captured images prior to the stack I found this

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I also spotted another satellite higher in the sky, but I've not been able to determine what it is.

Anyway, I swung the scope around and worked in locating M67. This to took a while, and it was only with reference to nightwatch, I realised I'd got my scales wrong and was looking too high. So downwards a little, and there it was. Excellent. I set the gear going for 60s subs.

After capturing and processing with bias frames I ended up with this

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I have to say I'm not happy with the result, it's come out very green, and I've had to try and process that out. This only seems to be happening since I started using Bias frames, so I'm going to restack this image, my M81/M82 and my triplet images without the Bias frames and see how they come out. I think I may go back to my original methods as the colour balance was always better for me.

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