Hogging photons…
Ok, so last week I was super excited that Monday night was going to bring a week of clear skies…and it did! Sorta.
Monday and Tuesday were good, got some great images, but my plot for the object path was a bit off and I didn’t have the rigs in the right place in the yard to get that extra 2 hours without imaging high magnification images of my covered deck. I noticed this Tuesday morning when I shot my calibration frames and “Blinked” my images (e.g. looked through them quickly with software). Each image has a timestamp and I could see when the last one was shot.
Due to some evening activities on Tuesday, I decided to leave them where they were in order to speed up setup and capture what I could, then move them for the rest of the week. I considered moving them late Tuesday night, but I was too tired and just let it be.
This is pretty much everything I have — Tuesday morning.
Now Wednesday, things get interesting. The apps I use to predict cloud cover say Wednesday will be all good, and it started out well, but at about 2230, an hour after starting imaging; clouds. Small wispy ones at first, then it got worse.
At about midnight the weather reports didn’t look promising, so I brought in all the telescopes, covered the mounts, and called it a night.
Friday and Saturday, which I was hoping were going to be my last nights of imaging, were just as bad. At this point, I am pretty good with my 2 One-Shot-Color (OSC) images from the Esprit and EdgeHD. A close up of the Elephants Trunk and the Crescent Nebula respectively. That said, I am looking to increase the quality of my images, so I am looking for at least 16 hours of integration for each one. At about 11, I was almost there. The good thing about OSC is, if you need to pull up early, there’s still data to work with and get at least a pretty good image out of it.
The mono imaging of the North America Nebula however….not so much. I have about 8 hours of Ha, 4 hours of Oiii, and no Sii. For the non-APers reading this, for mono imaging you shoot either individual colors (RGB) or emission lines (Ha, Sii, and Oiii) in order to make a color image. Everything is greyscale at first. So at this point, I really can’t make a workable image because I only have some of the puzzle pieces. On Friday I wanted to shoot some Sii, so I could at least get started on that line, but 3-4 images in the clouds came.
Go away!
That leads me to tonight. The weather is sketchy this week, so I decided to shoot more Oiii rather than keep on with the Sii. I can do a respectable HOO pallete (Ha for red, Oiii for green and blue) with just 2 emission lines, or even kludge an SHO image out of it. The remainder of the week, if I can eek out some Sii, I will.
The good thing is, my OSC images will have about 20 hours on them, and I can pack those scopes up (or move on to another target if the weather is good) and get to processing. Interestingly enough, since it’s been 6 months since my last imaging, I shot all new calibration frames on the offending nights. That’s what they’re good for.
Hopefully I will have an nice NGC7000 for ya, but at least we have something!
Have a good week everyone…clear skies,
-M
