The skies were so clear on Friday June 3rd and since it was a weekend I was able to stay out pretty late and view the skies above. I went out around 11pm and didn't start packing up my telescope to come home until around 2am. Since it's summer time the trees in the back yard obstruct my view allowing me only to see directly over head. Now I have to pack my gear into my car and drive about 30 seconds down the road to the park, which isn't such a bad thing. I have a great view to the North, South, East and West; although the view to the west is quite light polluted due to Plattsburgh being in that direction. I slowly watched the constellation Virgo disappear in the light pollution although Saturn was still quite bright next to the star Porrima.
I have just recently downloaded a firmware hack for my Canon point and shoot camera called CHDK. This hack doesn't overwrite your current firmware, so you have to load it each time you want to use it. This is a nice feature because I don't always want to have these options when taking pictures. With this hack there are all types of things you can do with your camera from time lapse photography, to exposure times of 1/60,000 (and faster with some of the available cameras) of a second to 30 minutes. Both exposure times are a bit extreme but within the range is a nice happy medium for taking afocal astrophotography images, which is exactly why I installed it on my camera. If you have a canon point and shoot and are interested check out CHDK's wiki and make sure your camera is compatible. Mine isn't fully compatible, but I found a link for the CHDK ported thread for my Canon Powershot SX210 IS.
The night started with me viewing M57 (The Ring Nebula) a planetary nebulae in Lyra. After viewing it magnified with my 12.5mm eyepiece I decided to try and image it. I didn't have much luck, not sure if it was polar alignment issues or if it was issues with my motor drive not set at the right speed, but I tried like heck. So after a little bit I just gave up on the imaging of M57 and just enjoyed it's pretty smoke ring look. A few days before though I also attempted and had the same issues. I did happen to get some cool light trails from an airplane that passed in my field of view while taking a 90 second exposure. I was hoping that M57 would come out nice and crisp with the light trails from the plane, but even that night I was having issues. I seem to have the most issues when using anything other than my 32mm eyepiece for imaging.
Also the same night I was trying to image M57 I went for M13, The Great Globular Cluster in Hercules again so that I could try to get another image of it less noisy due to high ISO. Since I have this hack allowing longer exposure times I can drop down the ISO from 1600 to around 400, and get a nice crisp image with less noise. Looks like I got some space junk floating through my field of view on this one. Thought it was maybe a satellite but it wasn't visible to the naked eye, and I didn't see any signs of a satellite using Stellarium. That night was the night of light trails in my images.
Anyway, on the 3rd I decided to aim to the south towards the constellation Scorpius which contains quite a few double stars and quite a few star clusters. The one I was after was M4 which is near the star Antares. I took somewhere around 10-12 pictures of M4 hoping to stack them all together when I got home to make for the largest image stack I've done so far. Needless to say I had quite a bit of issues with star trails again due to bad polar alignment or the motor drive not being at the correct speed. I did however get two great shots of it with no star trails, or I should say very little star trails. So I stacked the two images and had Rachael Alexandra edit them for me. The two shots were an exposure of 64seconds, F3.1, ISO 400. When stacked and edited I got this beautiful image of M4.
While I was taking the images of M4 I did some naked eye observing and enjoyed the view of The Great Rift in the milky way. It's a series of overlapping, non-luminous, molecular dust clouds. Basically The Great Rift looks like a division in the Milky Way separating it into two streams of stars between the constellations Aquila and Cygnus. I also looked towards the constellations Sagittarius which is just west of Scorpius. In my light polluted area I was able to make out a faint fuzzy object, and using my pocket star atlas from Sky & Telescope I determined the small faint fuzzy I was looking at was the Lagoon Nebula. While standing at the park that I was viewing from I noticed quite a few meteoroid's in the sky. One in particular caught my eye and took my breath away. It was extremely close to where I was standing and very bright. It couldn't have been any further than 10-15 yards away from where I was standing, and by the time it burned out it was about eye level to me. Probably the closest one I have ever seen. If it wasn't dark or if it hadn't burnt out before hitting the ground I would have searched to see if any of it made it completely to the ground before burning out.
After I was done imaging M4 I pointed over in Sagittarius and found a cluster of stars. I'm still not 100% sure of what object it was I was looking at, but I'm thinking it was M23, an open cluster of stars. I attempted imaging it but got a lot of star trails and all types of motion. I'm including the image in case anyone can look at it and give me a definitive answer as to what it is I was imaging. At first I thought it was M24 star cloud but it looks quite a bit like M23 the open cluster.
I have just recently downloaded a firmware hack for my Canon point and shoot camera called CHDK. This hack doesn't overwrite your current firmware, so you have to load it each time you want to use it. This is a nice feature because I don't always want to have these options when taking pictures. With this hack there are all types of things you can do with your camera from time lapse photography, to exposure times of 1/60,000 (and faster with some of the available cameras) of a second to 30 minutes. Both exposure times are a bit extreme but within the range is a nice happy medium for taking afocal astrophotography images, which is exactly why I installed it on my camera. If you have a canon point and shoot and are interested check out CHDK's wiki and make sure your camera is compatible. Mine isn't fully compatible, but I found a link for the CHDK ported thread for my Canon Powershot SX210 IS.
The night started with me viewing M57 (The Ring Nebula) a planetary nebulae in Lyra. After viewing it magnified with my 12.5mm eyepiece I decided to try and image it. I didn't have much luck, not sure if it was polar alignment issues or if it was issues with my motor drive not set at the right speed, but I tried like heck. So after a little bit I just gave up on the imaging of M57 and just enjoyed it's pretty smoke ring look. A few days before though I also attempted and had the same issues. I did happen to get some cool light trails from an airplane that passed in my field of view while taking a 90 second exposure. I was hoping that M57 would come out nice and crisp with the light trails from the plane, but even that night I was having issues. I seem to have the most issues when using anything other than my 32mm eyepiece for imaging.
2 images @ 64sec. F3.1 ISO400. Edited by Rachael Alexandra.
While I was taking the images of M4 I did some naked eye observing and enjoyed the view of The Great Rift in the milky way. It's a series of overlapping, non-luminous, molecular dust clouds. Basically The Great Rift looks like a division in the Milky Way separating it into two streams of stars between the constellations Aquila and Cygnus. I also looked towards the constellations Sagittarius which is just west of Scorpius. In my light polluted area I was able to make out a faint fuzzy object, and using my pocket star atlas from Sky & Telescope I determined the small faint fuzzy I was looking at was the Lagoon Nebula. While standing at the park that I was viewing from I noticed quite a few meteoroid's in the sky. One in particular caught my eye and took my breath away. It was extremely close to where I was standing and very bright. It couldn't have been any further than 10-15 yards away from where I was standing, and by the time it burned out it was about eye level to me. Probably the closest one I have ever seen. If it wasn't dark or if it hadn't burnt out before hitting the ground I would have searched to see if any of it made it completely to the ground before burning out.
After I was done imaging M4 I pointed over in Sagittarius and found a cluster of stars. I'm still not 100% sure of what object it was I was looking at, but I'm thinking it was M23, an open cluster of stars. I attempted imaging it but got a lot of star trails and all types of motion. I'm including the image in case anyone can look at it and give me a definitive answer as to what it is I was imaging. At first I thought it was M24 star cloud but it looks quite a bit like M23 the open cluster.
1 image @ 64sec. F3.1 ISO400 no editing
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