The delight of BackyardEOS, A rare night in February

Last Friday night was an exceptional evening in Minnesota.

• The Moon was out of the sky from dusk to almost 1 A.M.
• It was clear
• The dark site observing field was essentially snowless
• It was an incredibly warm evening--by 1 A.M. it had fallen only to around 40F.
• The wind was for the most part very light to calm, so there was no real wind chill factor.

 Best of all my evening was free!

It's difficult to emphasize how rare that evening was. The February 17 average high and low for nearby Cannon Falls is 29 and 10, so it was a good 20 degrees warmer than average. Usually the warmer weather correlates positively with clouds, too.

I originally intended to image the Witch Head nebula because my previous image of it is rather poor; noisy and crossed by an amazing number of geosynchronous satellites. A slow start to the evening made me go with something a little easier--the far brighter M42 area. It turned out better than i expected for 2.1 hours of 5 minute exposures at f/5.6:

I was able to faintly capture some of the dimmer clouds in the outlying areas just to the left of M42. The red patch at the upper right of center edge is an extension of the Horsehead nebula area.

When M42 began to sink I went to comet 45P and got almost an hour and a half of that:

This wasn't deep enough to get even a hint of the fainter, bluer tail. Oh, well...I'll take it!

One of the best things of the night was using BackyardEOS for the first time. It's a joy to use, and despite its power it keeps things easy to use. Next time I'm going to use it to tackle the mystery dithering!

I also got a demonstration of PoleMaster, a hardware/software tandem that makes getting an excellent polar alignment easy, fast, and actually fun (well, compared to drift aligning, anyway). It's definitely on my to-buy list ($300 from OPT). I would really like to take some very long light frames this year in Nebraska, and this would help. Even though PHD2's polar alignment utility is slick and gives good results, I can see how much easier (and probably better) PoleMaster would make getting a good PA.

Workshop presentations

The topic at the recent workshop was guiding for astrophotography, and a club member sent me a link for a really good explanation of how to guide.

Here it is (It's for PHD 1.13, but although some things have changed with PHD 2, this remains a great read!

The folks working on PHD 2 have also prepared a guide for using it. It's not as comprehensive a treatment as the above source gives, but it's a fine explanation of PHD 2 usage.

Want to download PHD? Here's where you go:

PHD 1

PHD 2

I recommend PHD 2 because of its new features--I particularly like the drift polar alignment tool. If you have multiple guide scopes, guide cameras, or imaging mounts, you may like the ability to create profiles for different combinations of those. I've found version 2 to be more stable than version 1, but that may only be on the OS I use (Windows Vista) I hope to upgrade my imaging laptop this year to a Windows 10 model and will have more to say when that happens.

Brief update

Last night was our club's second imaging workshop. The topics were guiding and focusing, and I can't say I did a good job as the sole presenter. The audience was amazingly diverse in interest and skill levels, and I had been given all of 24 hours to prepare. Regardless, it seemed as if most had a good time and there was a sense that we should meet more often.

After my presentation we went to the observatory and tried to do some guiding. The club scopes use ST-80/Starshoot Autoguider combos for guiding, and the software is good old PHD. At first we couldn't get the guiding working; the scope was wildly out of focus. Once past the focus issue, the mount simply refused to respond to movement commands from PHD during calibration.  As it turned out the SSAG to mount cable had gone missing; it may have been removed when the scope pier was replaced and never returned. A hunt failed to turn up the cable, but luckily I had one with me and we were finally able to get the mount guided. By this time most of the attendees had dispersed (it was 15F) so not much more happened.

-------------------------------------------------------------

Next weekend is a candlelight skiing event at a central Minnesota state park, and I'll be shooting some demonstration images to complement views through a friend's refractor. I really hope it won't be as cold as it was last night!