Thursday, May 13, 2010

Cygnus Dreamin' Part 2


Hey, its been clear night skies since the start of the week and I just felt guilty of wasting three nights in a row doing nothing for the advancement of amateur astronomy in the Philippines-meaning, I was too lazy to set-up my gears. Scorpious was awesome at midnight and the Summer Milky Way was simply fantastic! So, to redeem myself of my inactivity, I set up my astro gears last night, tested the alignment and covered everything with a big plastic sheet for an astrophotography session the following dawn. I intended to shoot some nebulosity in Cygnus as this was visible from our roofdeck. Actually, I have always wanted to shoot objects in Scorpious but the Great Wall of our house blocks the beautiful southern skies. Anyway, I went to sleep and set my mobile phone to alarm at 2 am - just in time for Cygnus to be well placed in the northeastern sky. I had difficulty rising up when my phone sounded its wake-up alarm. I just had a couple of hours sleep and the warm bed beckoned me to sleep a little more. Heroic minute-for the love of astronomy immediately flashed in my head and I found myself booting-up my laptop for imaging session. The sky was relatively clear and I had no trouble finding the guidepost stars in Cygnus. I looked up the position of the Crescent Nebula from The Sky software and manually star-hopped until I found it. I thought that it would be better if I removed the Focal Reducer to gain some better image scale but that proved to be costly mistake. I had to focus again and it took me almost an hour to nail the focus and re-acquire the image. Time flew fast and it was already 3:15 am when the first sub was taken. I set 30 subs at 3 minutes each on the GuideMaster software and let it do the acquisition and guiding. I went down and took a catnap until my wife woke me up to tell that its already bright outside. I hurriedly went outside and was amazed that the sky was really bright even it was still 5 am. I had to thrash several subs due to skyglow and left me with only 20 useable subs. I dismantled my gears and started to do the processing while having breakfast. Here is the result of the beautiful Crescent Nebula in the star-filled region of the Milky Way. This is a work in progress and I hope I can add some color data later on when we go to Buso, Antipolo this weekend.

No comments: