Shaving the Yak

Generally crap results last night but I did make some basic progress.

I can reliably connect to the mount from windows with a batch script that deletes the connection and restablishes it
I can set the camera to taking small-ish jpegs for doing the polar alignment then have backyardeos switch to high-res for imaging
I can use a filter ring to stop the Takumar 200mm lens down to 37mm which is about f/5.6. This seems to reduce, if not eliminate the severe chromatic aberration i was seeing with it.
From my side-yard I have a smallish slice of unobstructed sky but i have a good view of Polaris and the Zenith.

Aside from that it was a sh*tshow with false starts and loose clutches stopping me doing any real imaging. Wednesday night is supposed to be clear and i’ll try to do my prep in advance and get a solid couple of hours outdoors.

Polarissima Borealis (Can’t really see it, I just like the name)

Polar Area – Takumar 200 lens stopped down about 1/2 stop with filter rings(58 down to 49). 60 seconds at ISO 400

I was out last night mostly to work on focusing the Takumar 200mm lens, hoping to reduce chromatic aberration but I decided to image the polaris region to see if i could spot this beauty. In the middle of the highlighted circle above you can see for sure Gaia DR2 1152635154843863808, a magnitude 12 star and just up and to the right is NGC 3172. I can see it with the eye of faith but it’s tiny at 1X.7 arc minutes and low surface brightness at 13.7 mag/arcmin²

The plate solve below from astrometry.net is the only way I knew it was in frame then i tracked it down in stellarium.

Y Mask Success – Sirius-ly

The mask worked very well last night. Sirius is bright in the south and easy to focus on from our porch. This is with the 200mm Takumar lens f/4 ISO 6400 1 second.

I taped the lens to keep focus after this shot but I see that I moved the focus ring way too much when I adjusted it according to this. I’ll untape it and move the ring so it’s closer to the infinity mark. It will probably mess up the focus but that’s easy enough to fix. It was surprising how much i would move the focus ring to move the diffraction spike.

I’ve loosened and turned the focus ring per the video and hopefully the infinity focus is just to the right of the infinity mark with enough play for fine adjustment. I note that to bring the central diffraction spike UP on the Y mask i have to move the ring to the right – i.e. closer to the infinity mark.

Missed It By Thaaat Much…

I’m home in Ottawa, confined to quarters by the covid quarrantine but last night was clear so i got out in my side yard for a look. I haven’t go my mount set up but I wanted to see if i had a clear enough view of the pole to do alignment. I would say no problem – polaris is high enough in the sky to stay well clear of houses and i have a decent view between my house and my neighbour’s.

I figured i was aimed close enough to polaris to get it in my field of view but nope. NGC3172 in the bottom right is the charmingly named Polarissima Borealis – it’s not really visible in my image but i still like the name.

I’m looking forward to having the mount set up. I still won’t be able to do a multi star alignment but i had good luck finding things in florida just based on solid polar alignment. I suspect Polarissima Borealis is hopeless because it’s small and faint but there are a bunch of galaxies in the general area M81, M51, M101 should be in easy view.

UPDATE: After much poking around I identified the reddish star to the right in my image as OV Cep – a 5th magnitude star. The dimmest stars are around magnitude 10-11. Seeing was quite good and my focus is good. My image was taken at ISO 1600 for 3.2 sec at f/4 using the Takumar 200mm lens on the Canon t3i. I’m pretty happy with the lens and it’s about as much power as i can handle.

A Messier Evening

M51 is the whirlpool Galaxy. 23 MILLION light years away! It’s much prettier than my sad blur above but i’m delighted to have found and photographed it. The smaller blur on the left is NGC5195.

I took a number of exposures at 180 seconds, f/8, ISO 800 with a Takumar 200mm lens. I tried combining them with DeepSkyStacker but didn’t see any improvement. The image seems quite noisy and the stars are artifacted so if i’m out tonight i’ll try f/4 ISO 400 and maybe 240 seconds. I’ll also try 60 seconds.