First Light Image for Gary Honis Modded Canon T2i

Two weeks after getting my camera back from Gary Honis the clouds parted, the moon was out of the sky, and my schedule permitted me to try it out. Finally!

As a target I chose The North American nebula, something I'd imaged before with my ST-8300 in LRGB. The imaging site had light green sky brightness, not nearly as dark as for the CCD image. The telescopes were nearly the same, an AT72 at f/6 vs. my current AT65EDQ at f/6.5. Total exposures were 81 vs 100 m so it's almost a dead heat in terms of expected brightness. Because of the high humidity and the lack of a window heater the CCD was cooled only to about 0C.

Here's the T2i image:

NGC 7000 with Canon T2i and AT65EDQ at Cherry Grove 2015

and here's the ST-8300M image:

NGC 7000 with SBIG ST-8300M and AT72 at Iowa Star Party 2013

The difference is mainly one of brightness and contrast, which is almost certainly a result of my processing. I think the CCD image is a little washed out. I like most aspects of the DSLR image except for the vertical bands that are most apparent on the right portion of the image. These appear to come from the dark frames (I shot only six) and my inexperience processing DSLR images.

Related to those bands, one big change I'm going to make this year is learning how to dither. Based on what I've read it's helpful to let the camera cool after the image is read, and that "lost time" is perfect for dithering.

For this image I powered the camera using the Neewer AC power adapter and controlled the acquisition with the Neewer controller. Both worked perfectly.

---

Only a little over three weeks remain before the Nebraska Star Party. I've prepped three images for the astrophotography contest, one from Jeffers on the way to the 2014 NSP, one from my first night at NSP, and one from last fall. I need to give my binocular mount a couple more coats of varnish and it will be ready to go.

Iowa Star Party 2013

Another star party, and continuing poor weather. This was probably the hottest ISP ever. Thursday: high temperature of 94F, dew point temperature of around 70F (heat index = 100F) Friday: high temperature of 97F, dew point of 72F (heat index = 106F) Saturday (the nice day): 91F and 61F, (heat index = 91F) Speaker's talk in the Barn: 86F and 66F (heat index = 88F) That was a very sticky 88! Some relief was found at midday on Friday in the Oakridge house, but unfortunately the A/C unit was unable to keep pace with the heat: it actually froze up. I bailed out around 3 P.M., preferring to face the heat outside where the air occasionally moved.

Friday was also public night, and the attendance was significantly smaller than I recall from my last visit. Between the heat and the fact that it was the opening night of high school football, it's understandable if people decided to be elsewhere.

And how about the sky? Thursday night was grand, although around 1 A.M. the south wind began shoving clouds northward and the southern sky started to deteriorate. Friday night was great for the public, but about the time they left the clouds moved in. The sky went partly cloudy during the early morning, but at 4 when I woke up it was about 50% cloud cover. Visual observers could deal with that, but imagers not so much.

Saturday night usable sky was all of  90 minutes pinched between the end of twilight and clouds rushing southward ahead of thunderstorms. It never cleared for any substantial time after that, and in fact around 3 A.M. a thunderstorm with heavy rain and gusts to about 44 mph (at Carroll) hit us. From what I saw the next morning no one sustained serious damage from the winds, although a couple of screened sun shades looked like they needed some repair.

Yes, imaging time was scarce, but I managed to get three objects in. Thursday night started with M8 and surroundings:

Messier 8, the "Lagoon"

Click this for a larger version. There are a number of objects here, not just the big old Lagoon. At lower left is globular NGC 6544. At about 10 O'clock from the lagoon and next to a bright double star is the pretty reflection nebula IC 5070. On the left edge of the picture about 1/5 of the way down from the upper left corner is emission/reflection nebula IC 4685. The lagoon itself is a confusing construct of NGC objects.

At this point it was a bit before midnight, and my sense was I didn't have much "awake" left in my tank. Some years ago at Jeffers I'd imaged M33 with my DSLR and TV102, so I  thought I'd try it here with the AT72ED and CCD. Here's the result:

Messier 33, the "Pinwheel"

The AT72 is really too short a scope for this object, but it was the scope at hand. I'm not happy with the color balance of this; judging by the star colors I'd almost say that the green channel is too strong. I'll doubtless reprocess this.

Friday night was clear for a while, and I was able to learn my target's star field while entertaining/educating the public. I  think I collected one frame before having to shut down.

Saturday I raced from the meeting barn to the observing field and was able to get everything running and my target composed in under 30 minutes (a not-so-minor miracle). In fact, I even had to toss my first light frame because it was still twilight. about 90 something minutes later it was over. The NA and Pelican are bright!

Nebulae NGC 7000 "North America" (left) and  IC 5070 "Pelican" (right)

Don't know why the stars bloated so badly in this one. Poor focus, most likely.  Clouds rolled in while there was still plenty of time for another image, so I count this as half a night.

Details for these images, along with their full-size versions can be found on AstroBin.

---------------------------------------------------
The last year's star party log sheet runs like this:

HOASP (Autumn 2012): three nights of rain.
WOW: Registered but did not attend; I would have had one good night at best out of three.
Jeffers: 2 good nights out of 3.
South Dakota: 1 out of 3.
Iowa Star Party. 1.5 out of 3

Add those up and it was 5.5 good nights out of 15. Disappointing. Perhaps this autumn will be better? If it is, I'll probably be making more runs to the club's dark-sky sites. Stay tuned.