A talk which may interest members:

“Landing on a comet

Wednesday 14 June, 6.30 pm, Lancaster University, Cavendish Lecture Theatre in the Faraday lecture complex.

Professor Monica Grady (Open University)

ESA’s Rosetta spacecraft was launched in 2004, arriving at its target comet in July 2014. The Philae lander was deposited onto the comet’s surface in November 2014, operating for 70 hours before its battery failed.

Monica Grady was scientific advisor to the lander’s Ptolemy instrument team. In her talk, she will relate what it was like to land an instrument on a comet, and discuss some of the results from the mission.”

Ian

On a recent holiday in the Scottish Borders near Jedburgh, I managed to find a short lived gap in the weather – between the strohg wind and the clouds, imaging was impossible. I drove about 10 miles from Jedburgh towards the Cheviot Hills and found [combining OS maps and Google Earth is wonderful!] a possible imaging site if the weather played fair. The site was brilliant with exceptionally dark skies and no light pollution.

Eventually it did for a brief time. I got set up with a few problems and lost some time by being greedy by trying to run two cameras simultaneously – one widefield in the hope of catching a few early Perseid meteors and one on a Williams Optics 72mm telescope on my Skywatcher goto mount. For some reason, focussing the widefield lens didn’t occur smoothly so as I saw cloud approaching, I started imaging with the WO scope and an astro-modified Canon EOS400D [the usual internal red filter that blocks the red light from nebulae has been removed]. I managed three shots – one of 3 minutes exposure, one of the planned four minutes [I was hoping for more] and one of 2 minute until curtailed by a flat battery. Then cloud arrived…

The image is of the North America Nebula, NGC 7000. Situated close to Deneb in the constellation Cygnus, it is a vast cloud of excited hydrogen.

North America Nebula

Moral, don’t be too greedy!

It isn’t my best ever picture by a long shot, but at least it is a picture. The weather has been so attrocious that nothing has been possible. Short glimpses between clouds has been the best I could manage so far since about October. Anyway, managed to grab a few shots of Orions Great nebula, M42. Quite pleased given the difficulties on the night given that my mount decided not to autoguide properly. I used my Meade 8″ LX200R mounted in equatorial mode on my yard pillar in Kendal. The telescope had a f6.3 focal reducer attached to increase the field of view giving an effective focal length of 1260mm. I used my red-filter astro-modded Canon EOS400D at ISO1600. I took quite a few shots which I didn’t use for various reason  poor, trailed stars and cloud!  The final image is a composite of 227 seconds in total, comprising 1×120 seconds, 1×60 seconds, 1×20 seconds, 3×9 seconds subframes. These were overlaid in Photoshop to produce the final image – the shorter exposures allow the bright central portions of M42 to be not burnt out – they certainly were in the longest exposure.

Clearly, it needed more light but given the frustrating passage of clouds and the telescope issues, I’m quite pleased with the result. As Liz, my wife, said ‘You’d have been really pleased with that a few tears ago…’ To true but the better you do, the higher the standard you expect!

After days of wind, rain and cloud – not in any order but sometimes all at once! – we had a clear and moon free early evening. I took advantage and set up in back yard to try and capture M1, the famous Crab Nebula. After an irritation with the mount choosing align stars on the horizon, I finally got it sorted with only two star rather than 3 star alignment. I decided it would do, got M1 in the field of te 66mm Williams Optics scope and took a five minute exposure with my modified Canon EOS 400D – fitted with an EOS light pollution filter. It looked like I had some drift [alignment?] so I compromised on only 3 minute exposures. Just over an hour later I had 21. I then took the usual flats, bias and dark  frames [oh it takes so long to get darks… [3 minutes each of the back of a lens cap!!]. The Moon was rising, I was tired so I then packed up. Having processed this tonight, I’m quite pleased with the result – but as ever, more time needed.

M1, The Crab Nebula

It is just soo small –  this is a crop from the frame. North is up. This is the remnant of the supernova that the Chinese observed in 1054. The angular diameter is 6′ x 4′ – 1/5th of the Moon. Still at 6500 light years away and only 5 light across…