Last night was first light with the Staranalyser.
It is easy enough to use in itself, but like all things new, there is a learning curve!
I captured 3 AVIs from Antares and 2 from Achernar with the TouCam, C8, K3ccdtools. I put in the f/6.3 reducer for the Achernar capture which helped to sharpen up the star image a bit.
I decided to use the ToUcam for 2 reasons:
- The thread in the nose piece for the DMK was being cantankerous with the staranalyser (I have shortened the nose piece to use it with the PST)
- The ToUcam gives a colour spectra which I thought might be easier to identify Fraunhofer lines on than a mono image...
The spectra was wider than the ToUcam sensor so I had to capture across the diagonal. That's OK... can fix that later...
I stacked the avis in Registax, but found the rotate image option in Registax doesn't rotate the whole image inside a larger canvas, so the star image disappears
. This makes calibration difficult if you want to use the star image as one calibration point (which I do ATM as a newbie
).
So I used PS CS3 to rotate the image and crop it. PS, however, doesn't save an image as a .PIC or .FITs file... so I saved it as a BMP, and loaded it back into Registax to save it as a FITS. I tried saving as a TIFF, but had no end of grief getting Registax to open it without errors...
. Registax always saves the FITS file as separate files for each channel, so it's necessary to convert the image to monochrome in PS before saving, so that any of the FITS files will have the full spectra.
Once I got the images in VSpec, identifying spectral features is the next challenge... There is a distinct absorption line/band in the IR part of the spectra. At first I thought it was Fraunhofer A, but the more I think about it I think it is the H20 absorption band at about 7250A. Anyway that's what I've assumed for the time being
.
Learning VSpec is going to be a challenge though, I feel...
I've attached some images:
- Antares spectrum image
- Achernar spectrum image
- Antares spectrum binned in PS
- Antares spectrum binned and desaturated in PS
- Antares spectrum produced from 1 (no binning in PS)
- Antares spectrum produced from 4 (binned in PS)
There is obviously a difference in the shape of the spectrum produced by binning in PS, so this is obviously an artifact and to be avoided (I was curious about that effect
).
Al.