Galaxy M51 flyby

Over the first few days of May, comet C/2012 K1 (PANSTARRS) flew past galaxy M51 (The “Whirlpool” Galaxy).  On the night of 2 May, I was out on the Tebay Road until the very late early hours of 3 May, making just about every mistake in the book as I tried to assemble a three-frame mosaic of the flyby.

I could have got the whole picture in the frame of my 300mm lens, but decided to take three adjacent frames through the telescope, the equivalent of an 805mm lens.  The idea was to take the three frames, 20 exposures of one minute for each frame, and stitch the results together to make one 36-megapixel photo with a total exposure of about an hour.

It was an ambitious project, and getting it completely wrong taught me a load of new lessons about the scope, my method and all that complicated stuff about knowing your left from your right…

You get the idea, don’t you?  Always stick to the plan, because recalculating at 2am with a notepad and a red torch when half your frames have been spoiled by clouds and the rest ruined by a succession of schoolboy errors, can only lead to misery.

Fortunately I had also programmed a remote scope with iTelescope.net under the New Mexico skies, so I had plenty of processing to play with over the weekend.

3 May 2014: Comet C/2012 K1 (PANSTARRS) passing the Whirlpool Galaxy M51.
iTelescope.net telescope T14, 106mm Takahashi FSQ.
Camera SBIG STL-11000M.
9x3minutes Luminance, 1x3minutes each RGB.

Now that’s what I call a flyby!

If you fancy a go at processing this image yourself, please feel free to copy the original calibrated frames from DropBox here.

 

Third clear night in a week!

A text message from Stuart Atkinson alerted me to look at the forecast for the night of 26 April, and at half past ten that night we drove out to the Tebay Road under partly cloudy skies.  As forecast, they cleared and we managed a good four hours of observing and astrophotography.  Stuart has written up the session here, so I’ll stick to my photos.

First up, of course, the new standard photo of Comet C/2012 K1 which was almost exactly at zenith (directly overhead) at midnight.

Then right next door, also at the zenith, the Pinwheel Galaxy M101.

26 April 2014: M101 “The Pinwheel Galaxy” (Mag 7.9) from Tebay Road.
Altair Wave 115/805, ISO 1250, 20 minutes.
20 frames of 1minute.

Then I took the camera off, popped in an eyepiece and just had fun looking at stars, star clusters, galaxies, planets, minor planets and all the other stuff that’s in the sky.  Much of the time we were just gazing without the telescopes. Happy times!

Here’s Stuart’s great shot of my scope set up behind the car against a wonderful sky.

Two clear nights in a row!

Aaahhhh… late April in Cumbria!  Sunny days turn into clear nights, and we had two in a row for a change.

On 19 April, I returned to an old favourite location at the top of the Shap Road.  Like the previous night, my first target was the comet C/2012 K1, which I will try and capture at each session with identical exposure and processing in order to observe the comet’s development.  It was a windy evening high on the Shap Road, with the electricity pylons and their cables making some strange wailing sounds.

Job done on the comet, now I can relax and tackle a couple of other targets.

First, the Whirlpool galaxy M51, an iconic feature of the northern night sky and one of the “must have” shots in any astrophotographer’s portfolio.  I’ve seen it many times in books, magazines and online but believe me, the first time you take this yourself is a very special moment.  It is a faint object, at magnitude 8.4 it is way beyond naked-eye visibility, and individual frames show very little even at 60 seconds exposure.  But when it emerges from the processing software…

19 April 2014: M51 “The Whirlpool Galaxy” (Mag 8.4) from Shap Road.
Altair Wave 115/805, ISO 1250, 20 minutes.
20 frames of 1 minute.

Then another iconic target, this time quite low over the southern horizon towards Kendal, the Sombrero galaxy M104.  Another WOW! moment when this comes up on my processing screen.

19 April 2014: M104 “The Sombrero Galaxy” (Mag 8.0) from Shap Road.
Altiar Wave 115/805, ISO 1250, 20 minutes.
20 frames of 1 minute.

 

 

 

 

 

Dark skies and new standards

On 18 April, I drove out to a new location near Tebay to the east of Kendal, in search of higher altitude and darker skies.  I had been keen to try this spot for some time, and conditions were just right.  With reasonable elevation above sea level, and hills providing shelter from the lights of the only nearby town, it was as good as expected.

My first objective was the comet C/2012 K1 (PANSTARRS) which has been exciting the astronomy community.  I have been very keen to get the new kit up and running in order to join the amateur and professional astronomers contributing observations, photographs and measurement data for this comet.

I could not be more pleased with this, my first serious contribution.  You can see that I have added a Photoshop layer of information, showing the angular scale of the capture and various technical details.  This and others in the same vein will be part of my regular submissions to CIOC, the NASA-sponsored collaboration between professional and amateur astronomers which has evolved from the earlier collaboration prompted by observations of Comet ISON.

Once the comet is in the bag, I have to catch another target to exercise my processing skills.  This time I choose a globular cluster in the constellation of Hercules, catalogued as M13.  This cluster measures about 145 light years across, is about 25,000 light years away, and contains hundreds of thousands of stars.

18 April 2014: Globular cluster M13 (Mag 5.8) from Tebay Road.
Altair Wave 115/805, ISO 1250, 8 minutes.
16 frames of 30 seconds.

I had known there would only be a short gap between the end of dusk (where the Sun is 18º below the horizon) at 22:47 and Moonrise at 00:12 and, sure enough, about half an hour later the Moon hoves into view over the hills in the East and brings the session to a close.

The Moon rises and brings activities to a close shortly after midnight.
Nikon 300mm f/8, ISO 1250, 1/125 sec.