Cloudy Night Fun - Robotic Telescopes

So the skies continue on the whole to be rather cloudy and my telescope sits sadly in the cupboard unused. However, thanks to Sky at Night magazine I became aware of the opportunity to use robotic telescopes for Deep Space Object imaging purposes. Deep Space Object imaging is something I would like to do in the future but the cost of buying a decent set up means it is likely to be a couple of years away before I can sit outside in the back garden myself taking photographs.

The site I decided to try was itelescope.net which does cost money to use but there is a free trial package that at gets you in to the site and enables you to take a few photographs. What I liked about this site is that one of the telescopes I could use on the free trial was in Australia meaning I had the chance to get some images of Southern Hemisphere DSOs which I would never probably see even if I do get an imaging set up in the future. The trial is fairly limited in that it only allows you to take one shot images from a selection of targets and it doesn't give you access to the RAW files but it did give me an idea of what you can do. From reading the site if you sign up for one of the paid packages you can get much more control over how you conduct your imaging.

Anyway due to the trial packaged I was pretty much limited to picking only two targets from the Southern Hemisphere and so I decided that I would go for the Eta Carinae Nebula (Caldwell 92/NGC 3372) & Eight Burst Nebula (Caldwell 74/NGC 3132). The system limited me to a single 10 minute exposure using a Takahashi SKY90 telescope & a SBIG ST-2000XMC CCD camera and so that is what I used. The initial JPG provided looked a bit crap to be honest so I ended up trying to process the FITS file that was I able to get from the itelescope.net ftp server. After a couple of hours in Photoshop I managed to produce the two images you see below and I am reasonably happy with them considering I was limited to a single shot although I suspect a more experienced person could get more out of the image.

So first up is Eta Carinae Nebula (Caldwell 92/NGC 3372) which sits in the Carinae Constellation. This nebula is actually four times as large as the Orion Nebula but its location in the Southern Skies means it isn't as well known to those of us in the North. I think I managed to get a fair amount of detail out of this image although there may be a little bit of over exposure in the core regions due to me trying to tease out some of the dimmer clouds.

Next up was the Eight Burst Nebula (Caldwell 74/NGC 3132) is a planetary nebula in the constellation Vela. To be honest you can probably see from the image that a Wide Field image wasn't really the best for trying to capture this rather small target. It was still nice enough to play around in Photoshop with however as I tried to find a way to try and stop the central star overpowering the image.

Overall I found it nice to have the change to take some DSO images but I can't say it felt like I was actually doing anything. The feature disabled trial on itelescope.net just made it feel like I was clicking a button and that was it. I am not sure the images I obtained meant much more to me that just typing the objects name in Google and seeing them there. I suppose it did provide a little bit of fun for a couple of hours and it did enable me to practice some image editing in Photoshop but I really am not sure it would interest me much in the long term.  It is possible that using a fully enabled itelescope.net might have meant more to me as it would enable me to image southern DSOs with much more control but for now I am a little bit too cheap to use it.

As an additional note, I also played around with the website Imaging with Nasa which is completely free to use. To be honest due to it being free it was a little bit limited it what I could do and you have to sit in a queue of requests. I am actually still waiting on my images to come out of the site and it felt even less involved than itelescope.net.