TV-101 BLOG PAGE: Deep Sky Imaging Session

Sunday, November 18, 2012

Deep Sky Imaging Session - November 17-18, 2012

I went with some members of the Astronomical League of the Philippines to Caliraya to observe and image the heavenly bodies under dark sky. I brought along a semi portable imaging setup which includes the trusty Canon EF100-400mm f/4.5-5.6 L Lens with ATIK 16HR ccd camera mounted on Vixen GP-DX mount. When I arrived at the site at around 7:00pm, the sky was very clear! I hurriedly setup before having dinner as I want to have my setup already polar aligned so that I can start early. I saw constellation Orion already rising from the eastern horizon so I prepared my imaging setup to image the NGC 2024 Flame Nebula and B33 Horsehead Nebula altogether so I calculated that I need 300mm to get a good composition of the DSO I wanted to image that evening. Aside from the imaging setup mentioned, I also brought along an autoguider system with a LX mode webcam mounted on an Orion Mini50mm guider and connected to the Starbook-S via the Shoestring Astronomy's GPUSB interface. Unfortunately, my autoguider doesn't seem to function properly as I cant command the PHD guiding software to calibrate :( Maybe somewhere the numerous steps that I might have missed to get the connection right :( Anyway, It's my first time to do autoguiding so I was expecting to confront some problem during the learning curve :) I image the Flame Nebula as well as Horsehead Nebula with a 12 x 5 minutes subexposures per channel totalling around 4 hours. This is the first time that I needed to exposed that long in order to get one object. Overall, I'm still happy to get some first nebula through the CCD camera :) Practice makes perfect I guess :)