1st Night - Mt. Hood

Because of bad weather, we could not shoot in Washington but drove straight to Lost Lake near Mt. Hood.

Here we received a great lecture from Dave on his technique to take sunset and night sky images. I loved his very methodical approach. Not a crazy collection of "try this" and "your camera can do X", but a step-by-step approach.

Sunset / Sunrise / Landscape photos:

1. Better to use a tripod (though I took a couple of photos without it if I saw a great opportunity and didn't have the time to move tripod)
2. Set camera to Aperture Automatic
3. Set aperture to f/8 - f/11
4. Set ISO to 100 (unless it gets really dark - but 100 was always enough for me for all the sunset/sunrise images!)
5. Use Live View!!!
6. Use level in Live View to level the camera.
7. Set White Balance to value that makes picture in live view look like real image
8. Set EV correction, so that histogram doesn't get clipped on either side. Don't worry if image looks too dark - can be corrected later in Lightroom.
9. Use one point focusing. Focus on a point that is twice as far away as the closest point in my image (rough estimation of hyperfocal position)
10. And now focus on composition - not on settings anymore (check them frequently if light changes signifcantly)

Star / Milky Way photos:

1. Of course, use a tripod!!!
2. Set camera to Manual
3. Use maximum aperture (i.e. minimum f value)
4. Set camera to infinite focus (for the 14-24mm Nikkor lens, I have to set it just to the right of the midpoint of the infinite sign)
5. Use rule of 500 to determine maximum exposure
6. Use high ISO: 2500 - after experimenting with my D750 and the 14-24mm Nikkor lens, I determined that I can go to ISO 4000 without getting too much noise
7. Shoot - and always check image in camera. Try to make the histograms just separate from left side. Although if there is a lot of dark foreground (e.g. trees) that could create a spike on the left side. But we don't want any of the sky area to have zero signal pixels.
8. And now focus again on composition!!!

It was a great first night where all of us were amazed how well we can do this with so little experience:

Sunset over Mount Hood

Milky Way over Lost Lake

Sunrise over Mt. Hood

Continue on 2nd night: Mt. Bachelor

Night Skies of the Pacific Northwest Tour

I joined the Night Skies of the Pacific Northwest tour with Dave Morrow. And to make it worth the drive up there, I took my telescope with me to stay 3 nights at Likely Place in Northern California on my way back (yei to power onsite and not having to carry around batteries and solar panels!!!)

First, I had to drive up there. On Friday, I went to Redding and the next day to Olympia in Washington. I'm always amazed about the diversity of the land and how empty it is once you leave the urban areas.

Leaving the bay area (bay bridge)

Northern California somewhere between the bay area and Redding.

Southern Oregon

Portland

Crossing the Columbia river from Oregon to Washington

Sunset near Olympia, Washington














Continue on 1st night: Mt. Hood

Cleaning my front lens

Because of all the dew build, my front lens looked pretty bad:

After I successfully installed the dewbuster, I went on cleaning it.

Trusting Astro-Physics, I decided to go with their instructions. The main problem was that their recommended cleaning solution (Baader Wonder Fluid) isn't available in the US. Apparently, it's not allowed to ship to the US because it's very flammable. So I ordered one, had it shipped to my brother in Germany and my nephew brought it here in his luggage when he visited us!!!

Here is everything that I used:

1. Air blower
2. Soft camel hair brush
3. Baader Wonder Fluid
4. Purosol Enzyme Optical Fluid
5. Intrinsics Wipes
6. Rubber gloves (whenever I handle optics I put on gloves to avoid fingerprints)

Following the Astro-Physics instructions, I first blew over the lens. There wasn't any visible difference, but it for sure took out anything loose.

Next, I used the camel hair brush. Again, I couldn't see much of a difference, but it was clear that the brush took out some dirt:

Now, the lens looked like this:

Not much of a difference to above.

Next, I used the Baader Wonder Fluid. I sprayed a little amount on the tissue and carefully wiped over a small area of the lens until I cleaned everything.

The lens now looked like this:

And the wipes like this:

This clearly took out a lot of dirt. Next, I used the Purosol to deal with the remaining dirt:

Much better! Finally, I used the Baader Wonder Fluid to remove any remaining Purosol fluid:

This looks very good!!! The remaining small, silvery spots are apparently only VERY hard to get rid of and have almost no impact on the image. I decided not to tackle them.

Better Dew Control with DewBuster

I could never completely get rid of my dew problem (I often had some condensation in the morning). Which over time led to a buildup of gook on my front lens:

First, I wanted to make sure that I won't get dew anymore. I decided to go with the DewBuster. First, I considered the Kendrick DigiFire controller. But then I felt that it was overkill to control the dew controller through the computer (plus the dewbuster is significantly cheaper). It took me a little to configure the dewbuster, I finally decided to go with:

• two dew controllers (one for the main scope, one for the guider scope)
• 4 12V outlets (this would allow me to get rid of my small Anderson distributor)

Unfortunately, the dewbuster does not come with Anderson connectors but only with RCA connectors.

After a little over a month, the dewbuster was delivered. Installation was easy. I only needed to order RCA connectors for the cables. I put them on the power cables on my scope:

On the lens, you just clip the temperature sensor under the dew strip and let the other sensor dangling in the air:

Over the next nights, I played with the temperature - the best results were with 5 degrees (as recommended by Ron Keating :-)

This should do the trick - and no more dew buildup!!!

... which means, I can finally clean my front lens!!!

A looooooooong hiatus

For several months, I had to put my beloved hobby on hold. First, winter season means snowboard season!!! Second, we got our wish and El Nino gave us lots of rain in California. Third, it's hard to carry my scope outside with a broken leg (again: Snowboarding :-(

I spent the time to upgrade my equipment and fix a number of things:

• I switched from 50mm round filters to 50mm square filters to reduce vignetting when using the super reducer
• With that, I needed new filter wheels - I decided to get two filter wheels:
• a 7 position wheel for backyard photography (narrowband and mid-band filters)
• a 5 position wheel for dark skies (LRGB filters)
• A couple of times, I had some issues with my USB hub. I bought a new one from Kendrick - specifically design for Astrophotography (led's, heated, outdoors)

(too bad that it doesn't come with only 4 outputs)
• I still had problems with dew and decided to get a Dewbuster
• I sent in my 16070 camera to fix the vertical stripes - received it back
• Once I could try the dewbuster and make sure that it works, I could finally clean my front lens

Of course, the first time I tried everything together several things failed or had to be adjusted :-S

Sharpless 132 - my first unguided image

Sharpless 132 is an emission/dark nebula in Cepheus:

(click on image for full resolution)

It is about 10,000 light years away from earth in the Perseus arm of the Milky Way. It's ionized by two Wolf-Rayet stars: HD 211853 in the middle of this photo and HD 211564 (not visible in this image). Many stars in this nebula are relatively young and of the same age which indicates that they were born out of the nebula - but the process seems to have stopped.

This is my first unguided image. I took 80+ images with only very few that showed star trails. Those were mostly in areas of the sky where I didn't calibrate my model (my horizon in TSX isn't 100% accurate).

This nebula has a lot of fainter regions further out. But those aren't too strong in narrowband but more in visible light. Maybe in the future I will image this nebula again from a darker side with a larger chip.

Unguided Imaging

Now, where I have my MyT mount back in action, I wanted to try to do some unguided imaging. I spent two nights setting everything up:

1. Setup the scope - do a rough visual polar alignment
2. Home the mount
3. Take an image of the place that the scope points to, plate solve (all sky as the scope will be quite far away from the expected point) and sync the mount to this location
4. Run a model with 10 points, use this to do a more accurate polar alignment. As the polar alignment will be still pretty far out, I'm using the tics information in the polar alignment tab
5. Run another model with 10 points, now do the accurate polar alignment
6. Now run a model with 200 points, create a Super Model
7. Use this model to improve the polar alignment (it was already very accurate)
8. Run a 30 point model to realign the model with the new polar alignment
9. Check polar alignment error - was neglectible
10. Next, use PEMPro (the beta version with Ascom support!) to measure the periodic error
11. Add the periodic error to the mount

I did some test exposures and could easily take 10 min exposures without any star trails or elongations!

Next, I wanted to use SGPro - using the DirectMountGuider for unguided imaging. Unfortunately, it didn't perform a Meridia flip. When looking through the log file, I found the following lines:

[10/24/2015 4:27:13 AM] [DEBUG] [Pier Flip Thread] Meridian Flip: Telescope has performed meridian flip).

[10/24/2015 4:27:43 AM] [DEBUG] [Pier Flip Thread] Autoguider (Direct Mount Guider) failed to flip calibration data!

[10/24/2015 4:28:46 AM] [DEBUG] [Sequence Thread] Blocking Pier Flip: Failed to meridian flip, aborting sequence (True)

I sent this to the SGPro forum and got the reply that this will be fixed in the next version of SGPro. And the moment I asked when that will be ... the developers announced the release of the next version. And sure enough, this was fixed!