Success at last
As I have said earlier, being a member of the ASV gives me access to their dark sky site a couple of hours north of home. Last weekend, it was the new moon, and so I booked some time off work (yay for having too much accrued leave) and got myself organised to take advantage of a dark (moonless) sky.
Because it can be pretty cold up there, I was not wanting to sleep in the car (been there, done that, and it wasn’t much fun) I booked myself a room so I could stay in (relative) comfort. The ASV facilities are a bit spartan, but really, you’re not up there to sleep - you’re there to view the night skies.
I arrived with plenty of daylight left, so had time to set the mount up and get it aligned towards the South Celestial Pole. (Or at least pointing in the right direction…). I got all the gear mounted and ready to go before waiting until the skies were dark enough to see the first few stars.
One of the other SV members was there and provided some very helpful advice on getting the mount aligned. A 3-star alignment routine showed I was about 1 degree out in both Azimuth and Altitude, so I ran through the semi-automated polar alignment routine in the mount’s hand controller. This got me a better alignment, as the subsequent 3-star alignment showed. But it still wasn’t good enough - ideally you want to have an alignment error measured in arc-seconds (1 degree = 60 arc-minutes = 3600 arc-seconds) so I ran the process again. This time I was “close enough” and wanting to start capturing images as soon as possible.
I had the idea that I could use my PoleMaster as the imaging camera for Kstars / Ekos when it came to polar aligning. Nope. The image got captured properly, but the alignment software failed to process it - probably because I didn’t have the necessary index files downloaded. So I gave up on using the laptop and simply used the hand controller for the mount. (When I got home I fixed the problem by installing the dedicated QHY PoleMaster software. Now I need a chance to test it out…)
It seems to be a “right of passage” that new astrophotographers capture Eta Carina. Even though I’ve imaged it before, it’s never been at a dark location, so I was excited to see how big and bright the nebula appeared. Even the low-res image on the back of the camera showed I was in for a great night’s imaging.
After Eta Carina, I traversed to the Tarantula Nebula. I caught this before, but with a wide-angle lens and the nebula was a tiny blue spot in the sea of stars that make up the LMC (Large Magellanic Cloud). With a telescope the nebula just about grabs you by the eyeballs.
One of the good things about the ASV dark site is that you can walk around and talk to other enthusiasts. You can also use the kitchen facilities to make hot drinks. Trust me - when the temperature is falling and you need something to do whilst the camera is capturing photons, a hot coffee and a snack is ideal.
As I was walking back to the photography field, the other ASV members there were using the Society’s 40" telescope. I managed to snag a view of M83 - The Southern Pinwheel Galaxy - through the eyepiece. As I looked at this fuzzy blob in the eye piece, it was staggering to think that those photons hitting my retina had been travelling for 16 million Earth years. (M83 is one of our closer neighbours, too. There are visible galaxies that are so far away, the light we see today left those stars when dinosaurs were walking here on earth.) So now, I had to capture M83 with my own scope and camera.
By this stage, it was past midnight. The air just kept getting colder, and the high humidity meant that everything was coated in condensation. My car had a layer of ice on it, and my breath was condensing in my beard - it if was below zero I would have been growing icicles…
However, the skies were too good to ignore, so I turned the camera to my last target for the night - M8 - the Lagoon Nebula. I had captured this from home, but the light pollution made it a difficult target to do justice to. I also caught M20 - the Trifid Nebula - as my ‘scope has a wide field of view. Sadly, I had to drop the image duration down to 20 seconds, as my not-quite-aligned mount was giving stretched stars. Next time, a proper alignment (down to an error in arc-seconds) is definitely on the cards!
I eventually crawled into bed at about 1am. Everyone else had either departed for the night or retired to their bunk room. I don’t blame them - it was a balmy 2 degrees Celsius at that hour and any sane person would be curled up under a pile of blankets.
As before, descriptive text bits are courtesy of Wikipedia.
And now, on to the images!
Eta Carina
The Tarantula Nebula was observed by Nicolas-Louis de Lacaille during an expedition to the Cape of Good Hope between 1751 and 1753. He catalogued it as the second of the “Nebulae of the First Class”, “Nebulosities not accompanied by any star visible in the telescope of two feet”. It was described as a diffuse nebula 20’ across.
Johann Bode included the Tarantula in his 1801 Uranographia star atlas and listed it in the accompanying Allgemeine Beschreibung und Nachweisung der Gestirne catalogue as number 30 in the constellation “Xiphias or Dorado”. Instead of being given a stellar magnitude, it was noted to be nebulous.
The name Tarantula Nebula arose the mid 20th century from the appearance in deep photographic exposures.
Tarantula Nebula
Messier 83 or M83, also known as the Southern Pinwheel Galaxy and NGC 5236, is a barred spiral galaxy approximately 15 million light-years away in the constellation borders of Hydra and Centaurus. Nicolas-Louis de Lacaille discovered M83 on 23 February 1752 at the Cape of Good Hope. Charles Messier added it to his catalogue of nebulous objects (now known as the Messier Catalogue) in March 1781. It is one of the closest and brightest barred spiral galaxies in the sky, and is visible with binoculars. Its nickname of the Southern Pinwheel derives from its resemblance to the Pinwheel Galaxy (M101).
M83 - the Southern Pinwheel Galaxy
The Lagoon Nebula (catalogued as Messier 8 or M8, NGC 6523, Sharpless 25, RCW 146, and Gum 72) is a giant interstellar cloud in the constellation Sagittarius. It is classified as an emission nebula and as an H II region.
The Lagoon Nebula was discovered by Giovanni Hodierna before 1654 and is one of only two star-forming nebulae faintly visible to the eye from mid-northern latitudes. Seen with binoculars, it appears as a distinct cloud-like patch with a definite core. Within the nebula is the open cluster NGC 6530.
The Trifid Nebula (catalogued as Messier 20 or M20 and as NGC 6514) is an H II region in Sagittarius, in a star-forming region in the Milky Way’s Scutum-Centaurus Arm. It was discovered by Charles Messier on June 5, 1764. Its name means ’three-lobe’. The object is an unusual combination of an open cluster of stars, an emission nebula (the relatively dense, reddish-pink portion), a reflection nebula (the mainly blue portion), and a dark nebula (the apparent ‘gaps’ in the former that cause the trifurcated appearance, also designated Barnard 85). Viewed through a small telescope, the Trifid Nebula is a bright and peculiar object, and is thus a perennial favorite of amateur astronomers.
