Afternoon on the "Reuselse Moeren"

 This afternoon we walked on the "Reuselse Moeren". We saw a roodborsttapuit (English?) and a nice hare.

UGC10822 Draco dwarf galaxy (neighbor to our milky way)

Last weekend on 2 nights I photographed the UGC10822 Draco dwarf galaxy. It is a neighbour of our own galaxy, the Milky Way. Standing on a distance of 263.000 light years. It has a magnitude of 9.9, but a very low surface brightness of only 17.2!!!
That makes it a very difficult object to photograph. This galaxy has intensively been studied and astronomers believe this galaxy contains large amounts of dark matter.
On the original 5h40min stack the galaxy was almost not visible. On this inverted picture you can see it. The picture also contains many faint galaxies, here are some:
UGC10854 m15.82 (bright left mid), 130 million lightyears distant.
PGC2577314 m16.38 (left top)
PGC2577420 m17.56 (left top)
PGC3136246 m16.20 (mid top), 720 million lightyears distant.
PGC2575568 m17.12 (mid top)
PGC2576050 m17.12 (mid top)
PGC4013667 m18.11 (mid top)
PGC2568758 m16.77 (mid top)
PGC3136201 m18.46 (!!!) (right top)

Used equipment: Skywatcher 200mmF5 Newtonian on NEQ6, fitted with Eos400d. Skywatcher 90mmF10 refractor used as guidescope, fitted with SC3 SPC900 with ICX-424 CCD.

Takahashi polar alignment successful!

With the help of a very experienced amateur-astronomer we were able to align the Astrotechniek CP-180 mount. After that I checked alignment with EQalign. It showed that alignment was well within 0.5arcsec on both axes, we left it like this. The azimuth of the mount is max. adjusted on the ad-hoc modified plate extension. The mount also had to be tilted backwards (like before). This mount was certainly built for lower latitudes. I already expected this during the first trials, but now I'm sure.
After that I tested autoguiding with PHD, the 100% aggressiveness was readjusted to 20%.
With the stainless steel Bahtinov mask and live view on the Eos the Tak was very quickly focused.
60s. test-exposures (with Hutech-LPS-P2 filter with full moon) were made of Aldebaran. In the corners I still saw minor coma, can be miscollimation.
Current status: mount well aligned, focus ok, autoguiding ok.
Next steps:
- Bring laptop of Halley people in order so it also works with the mount and the autoguiding
- Careful collimation of the Takahashi
- Search for max. exposure time @ISO800 with LPS-P2 and Halpha filters during night without moon.
It was a good evening/night, now we are ready for some nice astrophotography with this setup......to be continued.

Last saturday 9-4-2011: Starparty in Netersel

Last Saturdaynight we had a very nice starparty at our standard location on the model-airplane field near Netersel. We were with a large variety of telescopes: a Meade LX-90 200mm SCT, a small apochromatic refractor, a classic Vixen R-150S on EQ3-2 and 2 200mmF5 Skywatcher Newtonians (both on HEQ5pro mounts). When I arrived on the field there were some members busy with flying their model helicopters. They really wanted to see the moon, so I quickly installed the Newton in its mount so they could have a look. There were many oohs and ahhs, they said they first went home for dinner but promised to get back later that night.

After that many other visitors came, but despite of the moon we could still show them some nice objects. After showing M51 I tried the Whale galaxy on them. In the 8mm Hyperion (at 125x) it was very obviously visible to me (and other astronomers), however, the visitors still could not see them. After putting in my 33mm SWAN (30x) they could barely see it. This shows how much experience you get when you regularly observe objects. After that I made a comparison on the "Whale" between a 7mm WO UWAN and my proven (standard deepsky "weapon of choice") 8mm Hyperion. Unexpectedly, the Hyperion won on both transmission and contrast, I did not expected that.

Around 300am in the night the moon finally set and I was able to view some nice objects, here is the list:

Globular clusters in Ophiuchus: M10/12 very much resolved in the 8mm Hyperion (125x), M14 very faint, not resolved (8mm Hyperion)

Galaxies in Canes Venatici: 

NGC4631 Whale galaxy in 33mm SWAN (30x), very nice needle visible, bright. 

NGC4656 Hockey stick: also very nicely visible in the same eyepiece.

After that we went to the famous Hercules globular clusters:

M13: Resolves perfectly up to the outer boundaries in 8mm Hyperion (125x)

M92: Only outer regions resolve in the 8mm, bright center

After that we went to the summer triangle planetary nebulae, first Lyra:

M57 The ring nebula is visible, but details are not very shart in 8mm Hyperion (125x)

And after that Sagitta:

M27 The Dumbbell nebula shape is clearly visible in the 8mm Hyperion (125x)

I noticed that by 300am M51 was directly overheat in the zenith, so I gave it another final try:

M51: I was very amazed to see the outer ring structure in this nice galaxy. I never saw it this good.

2 weekends on the "Strabrechtse heide"

Last 2 weekends we had nice walks on the "Strabrechtse heide", there are a lot of animals to be seen. Here's a Stonechat (Roodborsttapuit)

A roe-deer (sorry for the unsharpness...)

A Stonechat (Roodborsttapuit)

A green frog.

Canadian goose.

Cormorant landing.

Little grebe

And last but not least: a black woodpecker!