First Light with my QHY5L-II Colour Camera

So as I mentioned in my last post I bought myself a new Planetary Camera which was the QHY5L-II Colour. As luck would have it, the day after I received the camera there was a lovely clear and calm night which enabled me to give it a test.

My first little play was in using the double star Castor as a focusing point. Whilst using it for focusing I decided to take a picture of it because the camera was actually showing the split.The colour is a little off because I forgot to set the white balance at this point in the imaging run but some playing about in Photoshop has at least improved it a little.

Next up was everyone's favourite planet, Jupiter. This lovely bright planet was something I used to like using my old Xbox Webcam for so with this camera I was hoping for better. Unsurprisingly it was just as good as I expected and I clearly picked up Io and Europa as an added bonus. I will have to say that I once again tried using my barlow which resulted in a terrible image. I have actually done a bit of reading on this and I think the problem is something to do with the small pixel size and the high Focal Length of the telescope being pushed too high when using the barlow. Oh well, the barlow is good for visual work at least until I potentially get a faster scope with a bigger aperture.

After Jupiter I turned to the Moon and decided to view and image a couple more objects from the Lunar 100. First up was L5 which is the crater Corpernicus. This archetypal large complex crater has a discernible hexagonal form with a terraced inner wall. It is a rather obvious crater and supposedly it can be picked up in binoculars although I haven't tried this myself.

My final target of the night was L27 which is the crater Archimedes, a large crater lacking central peak. It is the largest of any crater on the Mare Imbrium and is lacking a ray system. It's interior is devoid of any real features with only a few tiny craters around the rim being notable. An interesting thing to note is that if you look really closely and know where to look you can actually make out L66 which is Hadley Rille located next to the mountain range below Archimedes. I haven't classed myself as having checked this one of the list yet because I like to make sure I have seen everything visually.

Overall, I have loved my first night with the QHY5L-II and look forward to see what else I can image. I seem to be on a loser when it comes to the barlow although someone online suggested I go back to my old 2x barlow and see what I can manage with that as it may work better with the new camera.

Planetary Imaging Taken to the Next Level

My lovely wife offered to let me buy myself something astronomy related for my birthday this month and I quickly realised that £1,299 for an AZ-EQ6 Mount was probably not what she had in mind. I therefore decided to upgrade my Planetary Camera from the modified Xbox Webcam I had been using. I did a fair amount of searching across the web and decided that the best value camera I could see whas the QHY5L-II which comes in either colour or mono versions.

To be honest I did debate about getting a mono version as people do say it can provide a better image but I decided there were to many issues with going the mono route. For example, I would need to buy a filter wheel and LRGB filters which would probably have doubled the cost at least. But more imporantly, the time taken to image is longer and with the weather here in Scotland being crap, I just felt I could capture more with the colour version.

There are some nice little perks with this camera, the main one being it comes with a parfocal ring so I can try and ensure that it will focus at the same point as my reticle eyepiece. This should hopefully make it much easier to locate and center objects for imaging purposes. A 2nd aspect that I like is that the QHY5L-II gets a positive write up in regards to guiding which is something I hope to do once I can get an EQ mount.

Now I am just hoping the weather will clear up in the next day or so which would enable me to properly test it out.

Some Fun with the Moon

So on a recent night with the sky full of intermittent clouds I decided that I would return to our nearest neighbour, the moon. With such a bright target, it wasn't a huge issue when clouds passed in front as most of the time I could still make things out.

My first target of the night from the Lunar 100 was L20, a crater known as Posidonius. This floor fractured crater is located on the north-easter edge of Mare Serenitatis. The interesting thing I noted about this crater is that I could clearly see that the surface of this crater had some hilly elements and there was another semi-circular rim within the main rim.

Next up was L34, a plain of basaltic lava flows known as Lacus Mortis which is latin for "Lake of Death". In my image you can make out the prominent crater Bürg and beneath this you might be able to make out some darker lines which form part of an extensive system of criss-crossing rilles collectively designated Rimae Bürg. It was much clearer to see this visually but my webcam has at least picked up some of it.

My final target on the moon was L72 which is the dark-halo craters present on the floor of Atlas crater. I could clearly make out the darker patches when looking at the crater visually and even in the webcam image below you should be able to make them out.

I did attempt to use my recently purchased x2.5 Barlow and whilst it was much better than my previous barlow the image still wasn't great. Seeing conditions were pretty crap which didn't help, but i suspect it is just a mutlitude of issues adding up. Next on the list is a new webcam so we will see how that performs when I get it. After that I suspect I need to find a way to get better focus control.

One Last Look at Comet Lovejoy C/2014 Q2

Whilst I had already obtained an image of Comet Lovejoy C/2014 Q2 with my 55-250mm lens, I decided that I wanted to see if I could also get something through my 127 Mak. Luckily, there was an hour of clear skies on the 18th January and so I set up my rig and got to work. After a fair bit of trial and error I decided that the best I could do with 25 second subs and that is what I went with along with ISO 3200. Even with the 25 second subs only about 3 from the 10 were usable due to my rather un-astrophtographic mount.

Anyway, my results are below and I am happy enough despite the light pollution and noise (I took the pictures at ISO 3200). I think you can actually make out the hint of tail towards the 10 O'clock position.

A Few More Messier Objects

So recently when the skies have been clear I have been undertaking a fair bit of Astrophotography. However, I have not forgotten about visual astronomy as well and recently I decided to spend some time looking at a few Messier objects I had previously not seen before. The objects I ended up looking at were two Open Clusters in Auriga, Messier 36 and Messier 38 (Starfish Cluster).

Messier 36
RA: 5 36 Dec: +34 08
Type: Open Cluster
Magnitude: 6.3

Messier 36 is an Open Cluster approximately 4,100 light years away and 14 light years wide. This cluster was rather small in the eyepiece and despite there being up to 60 members I could only make out about 4 or 5. I did struggle a bit with the rather full Moon that was present as it really washed out the view making it hard to see any of the dimmer stars. The biggest surprise however was that I actually managed to pick up the cluster in my finder scope as a faint fuzzy patch.

Starfish Cluster (Messier 38)
RA: 5 29 Dec: +35 51
Type: Open Cluster
Magnitude: 7.4

At 4,200 light years away, the Starfish Cluster (Messier 38) is similar in distance from Earth as Messier 36. However, at 25 light years across it is bigger and this ensured it did appear as being bigger in my eyepiece. To my eyes the cluster had a definite X shape that gave the cluster a very interesting appearance. Again, the Moon did affect my ability to properly see it in all its glory but it was nice to still make it out.

I did also attempt to view Messier 37, which is another open cluster in the same area of the sky but due to how I had set up my telescope, the view was blocked by my house. Next time I will need to pay more attention to how I set up the telescope!

Comet Lovejoy C/2014 Q2 & The Moon

So Christmas has just passed but my birthday is in January so when my parents offered to get me an early birthday presnet I jumped at the chance of getting another Lens for my DSLR. The lens I got was a Canon 55-250mm STM lens which isn't going to be that useful with a fixed tripod due to the very limited exposure times I can use before star trailing occurs.

However in a moment of madness I decided to see if I could use it to capture Comet Lovejoy C/2014 Q2 which is currently quite low on the horizon. Amazingly with the lens set to 200mm I was able to pick it up at ISO 3200 with 2 second exposures. So I decided to stack 15 images together to produce a photograph of the comet which you can see below.

I love how the comet appears as a green hazy object, quite clearly distinct from the surrounding stars. The tail is fair to meagre for me to pick up, especially with the comet being so low in the horizon and with the moon being around. Maybe in a couple of weeks I will try it again and see what I can accomplish.

In addition this lens is always going to be useful for taking Moon images which I have already used it for as can be seen below.

Dark Skies & A Canon EOS 700D

So my first play with the Canon 700d had enabled me to get an image of the milky way but I wanted more so I recently headed out to Harperrig Reservoir which is reasonably dark and decided to take a few widefield images.

My first image was taken with my Samyang 14mm F2.8 Lens at ISO 3200 with the lens stopped down a few notches to try and reduce the orange background glow I was getting. It is basically just an extremely widefield shot of the Orion/Taurus region.

It is a nice enough image although in hindsight I should probably have lowered the ISO rather than stopping down the lens as I believe this would have reduced the noise a bit more. Ah well, this is all just one big learning experience anyway. Either way there is a lot here that I can play with in the future and I look forward to taking it to a proper dark site.

Next up is an image of Orion taken with my Olympus 50mm F1.8 Lens at ISO 3200 and with it  stopped down to F4. I was hoping that stopping it down would reduce both the coma and purple fringing I have noticed with this lens.

I love that I managed to pick up the Orion Nebula (Messier 42) although I am disappointed I managed to frame it so I didn't get the fully body of Orion but there will always be another time. There was still a little bit of purple fringing even at F4 but this was easy enough to remove with Photoshop. I decided to crop and enlarge the Orion Nebula element of the image because I love it!

My final target with the Pleiades (Messier 45) which is an Open Cluster in the constellation of Taurus. I once again used the Olympus 50mm F1.8 Lens at ISO 3200 with it  stopped down to F4.

To be honest, it is a bit small in the 50mm Lens but I did manage to pull out a slight amount of nebulosity in the image which I wasn't actually expecting. If you can't see the nebulosity that easily then hopefully the cropped and enlarged image below will highlight it better.

Overall I quite happy with all these images, especially as I am limited to a fixed tripod at the moment for them.