M1 Crab Nebula

Yesterday evening I tried to capture the M1 Crab Nebula, it is the remnant of a supernova explosion that happened in 1054. I tried to photograph this nebula already many times, without success. Last year I couln't find it. A few weeks ago I tried with the webcam but I also couldn't find it. Yesterday evening I tried again, but just before I was able to start exposures the locking screw of my Crayford focuser broke off. The risk of going on with my eos400d clashing on the ground was too big. I had to repair my focuser (tap new M4 tread+install new scrw) and try again. This night everything went fine. This is a combination of 14x10min (autoguided) exposures at ISO800. Totalling 2hr20min. I used 4 darks and 4 bias frames to correct the picture. Here's is also a crop from the widefield above:

Orion Nebula on a cold night out with the telescope

Last night we and a couple of amateur astronomers were out on the flying field near Netersel again. After some hours of observing my battery failed and I had to stop. Morelinux suggested to try to photograph M42/M43 (the Orion nebula) my eos400d on his Meade LX90 SCT. Since this is a pure visual instrument I got many guiding problems (also because of the long focal point). I made 40 exposures of 15sec but only 12 were good enough for stacking. This is the result of a stack with Deepskystacker of 12x15sec at ISO800 with a Meade LX90 200m SCT @ F/10 (F=2000mm). 10 Dark frames and 10 bias frames were used to compensate the noise. Postprocessing was done with CS2 incl. the GradientXTerminator tool. We logged and saw many objects this night, and also got some visitors from the modelflying club (many oohs and ahhs). At the end of the night (3.00hrs) it was freezing about -3.5C and we decided to stop.
Here's a picture of us in the freezing cold.

Dickens festival in Wintelre

This weekend was the Dickens festival in Wintelre, here are some impressions....

Chitchat....





Gravedigger.....







A distinguised couple....

It was a little bit quiet on the weblog, that is because we were builing our first model airplane. Today it had its maiden flight......
Here we are preparing it for the 2nd flight.









And here it is going for a takeoff.

The (mrs.) Simonsen limit

Things sometimes can get out of hand: see http://simostronomy.blogspot.com/2008/11/simonsen-t-m-diagram.html

M42 Revisited

This night was clear again. The 2/3 moon created some problems but I had to try the Orion nebula again after learning many things. The problem with the previous session was that the long exposure (LX) didn't really work (I thought it did....) This picture is much better: 25x30sec @ 25% gain with 18x30sec darks.

Astro-webcam problems probably solved

When I used the modified SPC900 webcam (fitted with ICX-424 B/W chip) I did not know that the long exposure (>1/25sec) control worked ok. After some testing I saw no difference in using/not using the long exposure control (which is mandatory for good deepsky pictures.......). The problem was were the correct settings for the long-exposure (LX) control in WxAstrocapture. After setting the LE (long exposure) control to the correct comport and setting its settings to default I got much better long exposure pictures.......I am very anxiously waiting for the next clear night out with the webcam....