A Couple of Faint Fuzzies!

[Robby]

Last night the clouds stayed away and I was able to take a look from home. While waiting for the moon to set I did a precise poloar alignment using K3CCDTools. It was amazingly easy & only took about 15mins! Got it pretty much spot on so that when guiiding only the RA was corrected (for Perodic Error). It made quite a difference to the final RAW's as I used to get a very slight field rotation, which annoyed me.
I decided to push the litlle 8" and give a couple of faint fuzzies ago... See attached.
NGC2207 galaxy is actually two galaxies coliding and is Mag 10.9! I was pretty happy to pull it in given the light pollution. Still it's not a stunner... 12x5min ISO1600 f/10.
IC2200 Toby Jug Nebula. Couldn't find a Mag for the neb but the central star is Mag 7.1. I wasn't sure what I'd get with it, but it's something. 7x5min ISO1600 f/10.

Both could have done with a darker sky & a bit more aperture. But hey, gotta be happy just to be out.

Cheers
PS... This should be my last DSO for awhile! Phew... I can here you say!

[silvinator]

Nice images Robby! Glad you got a chance to get out there.
I've noticed the term K3CCD being tossed around a bit on the forums and was just curious...what is it and what does it do?
What setup did you use to capture these shots?

[Robby]

You can check out my setup at http://www.2fdesign.co.nz/astronomy/guide.htm and www.star-mate.com
K3CCDTools is a astro image aquisition, guiding, processing piece of software. It's not too bad, but can take a bit of getting used to.
See more at http://www.pk3.org/Astro/index.htm?k3ccdtools.htm
Cheers

[silvinator]

Thanks for the info Robby. By the way, just had a look at your images on your site and all I can say is OMG! They are wonderful pics! I really like your setup. I don't think you have to worry about anyone sighing of relief when you say the above pics will be your "last DSO's for a while".

[cometcatcher (Kevin)]

They look like difficult to get targets. Well done.

[Mick (Michael)]

Very nice work Robby.

[[1ponders] (Paul)]

Good onya Robby. Nice galaxy capture. You said you polar laigned using K3. Do you happen to have a link explaining how to do that?

[Robby]

Hi Paul,
Yes, I guess that does need a bit more explaining.
Basically I used K3 to assist in drift aligning. I had the ToUCam in the C8, and ran K3's drift explorer, which displays a graph showing the movement in RA & DEC over time...
Here's the process I followed (extracted for K3 help file)

<font color="#FF0000">· Drift Alignment rules for the Southern hemisphere:

Step 1 - Correcting East-West misalignment

Go to a star near the celestial equator near the meridian.
If the star drifts South, the polar axis is pointing too far West.
If the star drifts North, the polar axis is pointing too far East.

Step 2a - Correcting North-South misalignment (using Eastern horizon)

Point the telescope at a star close to the celestial equator and
near the eastern horizon.
If the star drifts South, the polar axis is pointing too high.
If the star drifts North, the polar axis is pointing too low.

Step 2b - Correcting North-South misalignment (using Western horizon)

Point the telescope at a star close to the celestial equator and
near the western horizon.
If the star drifts South, the polar axis is pointing too low.
If the star drifts North, the polar axis is pointing too high.
</font>
The drift explorer window allowed me to easily see if my polar corrections were improving things.
Only problem I had was each time I made a polar axis correction I had to re-find a alignment star. Flip mirror would have helped heaps! Must get one of those.
Attached is a pic of the drift explorer from K3.

Cheers
PS.. I'm not trying to promote K3, it's just the tool I use. There are others out there, and K3 does have a few hiccups, namely the annoying licence scheme!!!..

[seeker372011 (Narayan)]

well I use the free version of K3CCD and using it to drift align means I have so far been able to avoid buying an illuminated reticle

highly recommended as capture software