Deep Sky Imaging Session - June 29, 2014

I, together with some members of the Astronomical League of the Philippines headed out to Caliraya, Laguna again for a deep sky imaging session. Although the weather prediction is not that good. We proceeded as planned and were rewarded with one of the clearest imaging session that I had encountered. Absolutely no clouds!!! I brought along my CCD imaging gear which includes ATIK 16HR ccd camera on Canon EF100-400mm f/4.5-5.6 IS L lens mounted on top of Vixen GP-DX mount. Well, Murphy's Law is once again there to tryu to ruin my night as I had to struggle figuring out why my autoguider is failing me and cant locate star. It took me more than an hour to figure out the culprit and it was my blunder not checking that my guider had a very very out of focus star and was trying to lock on noise which I thought were faint stars in the field! :) LOL Silly old me :) LOL Nevertheless, I got my tempo back and started to image NGC7000 North American Nebula and IC5070 Pelican Nebula in Cygnus. To capture both of them at the same time, I had to use my Canon lens set at 100mm f/4.5 to frame both nicely. Unfortunately, with the guidestar blunder, I lose more than 1.5 hours of time thus I was only able to do a RGB set of 1.5 hours only as my mount had reached meridian flip mount reversal mode :( Oh well, I will try to get the luminance and Ha channel in my next imaging session . With less than 1 hour left before dawn, I quickly catch up with a short exposure of M31 Andromeda Galaxy in Andromeda to finish my imaging session. I also ended up imaging a very long crepuscular rays before sunrise :) It was a tiring but fruitful session despite Murphy's gremlins haunting me during the early evening :) Group shot taken by Jeremy Arabes.

Lunar Imaging Session - June 15, 2014

After several days of cloudy and bad weather, I was finally able to test out the William Optics Megrez 90FD f/6.2 refractor at prime focus on the Waning Gibbous Moon. Seeing is not that good as expected and very hazy as well. Nevertheless, I'm glad to be able to get first light on it despite the poor condition. Hope to be able to do some more testing at high resolution in the days to come when seeing condition is better.

Deep Sky Imaging Session - May 31, 2014

Last May 31, I was with some of my fellow members of Astronomical League of the Philippines (ALP) to do some observing and imaging under the dark skies of Caliraya, Laguna. The sky was mostly clear except for some light drizzle which last only for a few minutes or longest of about 10 minutes. I was planning to autoguide my Kenko Sky Memo sky tracker but unfortunately, the plate that I fabricated was slipping from the tangent arm because of balance issues so I had to forgo it and instead try to image NGC6334 Cat's Paw and NGC6357 Lobster Nebula in Scorpius using Canon EOS 1000D (M) DSLR with Canon EF100-400mm f/4.5-5.6 IS L lens set at 300mm f/5.6 . Total exposure of 1 hour at ISO 800. I had a hard time composing the 2 nebula together just looking through the camera viewfinder only as since the plate was slipping, I wasn't able to install a finderscope to help me compose the the duo :( Nevertheless, I was able to finally compose it correctly and despite the frustrations I encountered earlier in the evening. I hope to be able to do some more deep sky imaging in future sessions......