Alister's Astronomy Pages

My first target with my new setup was M27, the Dumbell Nebular. I struggled with this one a bit as it was only just a little brighter than the light pollution. However I was pleased with the results.

My polar alignment was now much better and as a result I could use exposures of upto 90 seconds. However I was now seeing small periodic errors in the mount that were elongating stars on longer exposures. As I still had my meade DSI I decided to use that as a guide camera and to have a go at autoguiding.

I had already purchased a Skywatcher Startravel 102 and 120, both are short tube F5 achromatic refractors. As it was October the obvious targets were M31 the Andromeda galaxy and M33 the Triangulum Galaxy. These are both quite large objects, so large in fact that M31 wouldn't fit on my SAC 10's imager so I pinched my wife's Canon 350 digital SLR fo these 2 targets. The Canon was attached to the 102 and the meade DSI to the 120. Both telescopes fitted to the Celestron CG4 goto mount with a home made bracket. To guide I used PHD guiding from stark-labs.

M31 was actually a difficult target. While the centarl core is visible to the naked eye the spiral arms are very diffuse and faint. As a result they were almost completey lost in the light pollution. The above image took 5 exposures of 5 minutes each with the canon at 800 asa with alignment using stark-labs Nebulosity software and processing in Photoshop.

Next up was M33, quite a large object again and also quite diffuse. As I was already set up for M31 I left the cameras as they were and simply told the CG4 to go to M33. In retrospect I should have put the Canon on the Startravel 120, or pehaps I will re-visit this one with the 10" LX200 OTA working at F3.3.

I think as you can see there was a lot of processing used to get some contrast into this image. I'm not really all that happy with it and will have another go at this one again.

I have just purchased a really, really cheap scope from ebay. It is a small refractor with a 50mm objective and a focal length of 350mm. It has a 1 inch focuser, which I have already modified to take 1.25 inch eyepieces and my Meade DSI. The plan is to use this as a guide scope for my LX200 with a barlow if needed to up the focal length. The cheapie scope weighs next to nothing and cost just £11.00. To my surprise when I dismantled it I found it had a nice airspaced doublet lens and my initial tests indicate that it will make a good cheap guide scope that's not going to add much extra weight to my already overloaded CG4.