My Widefield Imaging Setup and Wiring

One of my goals this year was to remove the 240 volt AC supply and replace it with a single 12 volt DC supply. Its obviously safer with all that dew forming on the wires. Having said that I was running a supply out to a sealed box by the scope and then using 12v DC adaptors from there. The supply was also protected with the RCB's in the house so it was pretty safe. The real reason for the change was to reduce the setup time and the amount of equipment needed and to that end, the case with the 5 metres heavy cable rolled up inside is no more. Having damaged the scope a while ago I have had time to do some positive changes and converting the supply to incorporate Cigar lighter connections should ensure that the current will flow in the right direction thus avoiding another expensive fry up.

Astro photography with a Light Pollution filter

I live in a heavily light polluted area between Bournemouth and Poole on the south coast of England.

To show you how bad it is, checkout this single 160 second image of Messier 3 taken with my astro-modded Canon 40d. Even though much of the street lighting has been upgraded to white LED down lighters rather than the old sodium lights, you can see its still a problem. The unwanted light pollution bloats the stars and hides some of the detail.

     

This second image was taken using the same camera and settings with only one difference.I inserted an Astronomik CLS Visual Light pollution Clip-Filter

The filter is 1 mm thick and made of glass. Simply push it in place in front of the sensor and its ready!

This is how the filter works (I will try to keep it short).

Visible light is measure in wavelengths from 400 to 700 nano metres. To give you an idea where the colours are, Blue is 425nm, Green is 510nm, Yellow is 570nm and Red is 650nm.
The orange type of artificial light pollution, say from street lighting ranges from 525 to 620. Whilst blue light pollution from LED's such as the new street lighting is 418nm. All of these wavelengths need to be blocked by the filter.
The filter allows through over 90% of the following wavelengths that come from space.
425nm to 520nm and 620nm to 700nm.
Specific wavelengths often needed are;
H-Alpha 656nm  from red emission nebulae

H-Beta and O-111 for enhancing blue objects

Messier 67 (NGC 2682)

Messier 67 (NGC 2682) is sometimes called the King Cobra Cluster.
It's an open cluster of more than 500 stars in the of constellation of Cancer the Crab.
At 2700 light years away and 21 light years across, M67 appears to be roughly the same size as the full Moon.
Messier 67 is also one of the oldest known open clusters at the ripe old age of about 3.7 billion years.
Seeing over the past few weeks has been poor and I'm still honing  my setup down after my frying my mount's electrics.
Usual 80ED / 40d setup. ISO 1600 x 240 seconds.

Orion through the clouds

Having broken my HEQ5 mount by connecting it to the wrong side of the 12v supply and frying the mother board I have had to resort to using my old home made Barn Door Mount.
The new board costs around £109 so it will be a few months before I can use my Skywatcher ED80.
This image started out as a timelapse but the clouds rolled in and left me with just a few images covered in cloud. So this image is a single shot only 10 seconds duration using my nifty fifty Canon f1.8 prime lens. The camera was my old Canon 40d with an Astronomik light pollution filter inserted. The image has turned out to be quite popular on twitter being seen almost 700 times so far, so I'm quite pleased that what looked like a poor evening for astrophotography produced this image.

M42 combining RGB and HA images a year apart.

I really like this image of the Orion Nebula. Using images shot in 2015 before my camera was astro modified with images from 2016 after the Canon 40d was modified allows me to add some blue oxygen colours back into the image that are missing in the HA image. On my wish  list is an Astronomik OIII- CCD clip filter which block light pollution and lets on blue oxygen light. The new filter should allow me to shoot say 30 subs using each filter then combine them in post processing.
This image contains 7 minute subs and 2 minute subs as the very bright central region is blown out in the longer exposure for the faint clouds.

Tadpole nebula IC410

The Tadpole nebula IC410 is a faint dusty emission nebula (magnitude 7.8) over 100 light years across.
Its found in the constellation of Auriga (the Charioteer) some 12,000 light years away and 4 million years old.
In order to get this image I shot 35 exposures of 6 minutes each (That's 3.5 hours).
I chose a moonless night so that the sky was as dark as possible.
The longer the exposure the more detail, and I wanted to pic up the two Tadpoles which name the nebula.
If you look closely just below the centre of the picture you can see the enormous tadpoles (10 light years long) where new stars are being born.

The Crab Nebula. Messier 1

On July 4th 1054 Astronomers in China Reported a star so bright it could easily be seen during the day for 23 days.
We now know that they were witnessing a Supernova which could be seen with the naked eye for almost 2 years. The exploding star is today still travelling outwards at over 3 million miles an hour creating the beautiful Crab Nebula in the constellation of Taurus. Its now 10 light years across and 6,300 light years away. What remains of the star that exploded is called the Crab Pulsar and can be found at the centre of the nebula. Spinning at 30 times a second its now a tiny Neutron star, 1.5 times the mass of our Sun crushed into an object just 6 miles across. Can you imagine that!!!!!
I find it hard.
No longer visible to the naked eye, binoculars will reveal a small smudge but a telescope and a dslr sensor can reveal some of its beauty.
The image was taken using only 36 minutes of data with poor seeing (that's when you look up and can only see the bright stars because of the moisture etc in the air) so I will be revisiting this object when conditions are better.

The California Nebula

The California nebula is in the constellation of Perseus and is an emission nebula that is supposed to resemble the state of California. Its glowing red due to the large star at the top of the image named Menkhib, which is one of the hottest stars in the night sky at six times the temperature of the Sun. Its relatively close, between 1000 and 1500 light years away and only just fits in the frame.
I use an ASTRONOMIK CLS VISUAL Light pollution CLIP-FILTER in front of my Canon 40d astro-modded sensor which blocks light pollution like street lights but allows H-Alpha wave lengths which are red in colour such as ionised hydrogen.

M33 Triangulum galaxy or NGC 598

M33 Triangulum galaxy is sometimes called the Pinwheel galaxy. Its a spiral galaxy 3 million light years away in the constellation of Triangulum. It contains some 40 billion stars and is about 60,000 light years across.Triangulum is the third largest galaxy in our local group after Andromeda and The Milky Way. It is just visible to the naked eye but only with very good vision and  very dark skies.Its currently interacting with Andromeda and in a few billion years may collide with it and us.

NGC 891 (Caldwell 23) Edge on Barred Galaxy

Whilst the Andromeda Galaxy is only 2.5 million light years away, this little gem is 30 million light years away (so the light hitting my telescope has travelled for 30 million years to reach me). Scientists believe that this galaxy closely resembles our own galaxy The Milky Way.
Discovered in October of 1784 by William Herschell its found in the constellation of Andromeda and is part of a group of galaxy's called NGC 1023. Its very faint with an apparent magnitude of 10.8, so cannot be seen with the naked eye.
This image was taken at ISO 800 with a total exposure time of 1hr 44 minutes.