Testing the new workflow

Now that I have a solid workflow happening - see the “It’s working!” blog entry here - with the mount, ‘scope and camera, I was impatient for clear skies to arrive.

A clear (and cold) night finally arrived and I was able to put the mount, scope and camera through their paces. Of course, nothing quite goes to plan and over the course of the night the temperature dropped from a chilly 8 degrees to a cold 4 degrees. The temperature change caused the scope’s focus (never super-sharp at the best of times) to shift and get progressively worse over the course of the night.

So my next investment is probably going to be an EAF (Electronic Automatic Focuser) that will do a far, far better job of focusing the scope than my old eyes ever will. I just have to make sure that it will be compatible with Ekos and using the DSLR to capture the images as it focuses.

I chose a random bag of targets - a nebula, a dark nebula and a stellar cluster. Why not??

M16 was brought to the public’s attention due to an image from the Hubble telescope - the ‘Pillars of Creation’, showing the towering pillars of dust at the heart of the nebula. Sadly, my image is nothing like that of Hubble, and I suspect I need a larger ‘scope with a longer focal length to really do it justice. One to mark down for recapturing in the future.

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This second one is a bit of a strange image - the target is a dark shadow that obstructs the stars behind it. See the Wikipedia entry for more information, if you’re curious.

I think that with more data (preferably from a darker sky), the nebulosity will show up a lot better, especially the area illuminated by the two bright stars at the image centre.

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NGC 6752 (also known as Caldwell 93 and nicknamed the Great Peacock Globular) is a globular cluster in the constellation Pavo. It is the fourth-brightest globular cluster in the sky, after Omega Centauri, 47 Tucanae and Messier 22, respectively. It is best seen from June to October in the Southern Hemisphere.

• Astro