Seek him that maketh the seven stars and Orion, and turneth the shadow of death into the morning, and maketh the day dark with night

Amos 5:8

I was fortunate to get quite a bit of good weather recently. That has allowed giving Voyager a really good workout, imaging as many as three targets in a night, switching automatically between them.

Certainly one of the show case constellations is Orion. It has been a favorite of mine since I could identify it when I was still in single digits. Almost all the time spent in Orion by Astrophotographers is spent on a few showcase objects, the Great Orion Nebula, The Horsehead and the Flame, Messier 78, and sometimes Barnard's loop. However, there is far more available to shoot than just these few objects, and some of them are quite spectacular in their own right.

Recently, I have been shooting one of those objects, NGC 1788, the Fox Face Nebula. This is an interesting region with beautiful contrasts between bright Blue and Golden stars, a reflection nebula (NGC 1788 proper), dust, and even a Ha region (the right side of the fox - left from our perspective). This is a wonder LRGB target.

I have also been shooting NGC 2359, so called Thor's Helmet, named because of the resemblance to a Viking Helmet. Personally, I think it looks a lot like a spider, but no one asked my opinion when they named it, and there was already a spider nebula anyway. This is located nearby to Orion in Canis Major, one of Orion's Hunting dogs. This is a good LRGB or narrowband target. I did it in SHO (the Hubble palette). This object is unusual in that the OIII is as strong or stronger than the Ha. A very hot star is essentially blowing a bubble in the gas of the area.

Now that I have much more time under my belt with Voyager, I am still very pleased with it. I'm almost certainly going to switch my imaging over to using it. I'm very impressed with how reliable it is, and how well it recovers from problems.

To illustrate this, there was a night recently where they were calling for some clear skies but there were lots and lots of clouds. As it turned out it stayed mostly cloudy throughout the night. But Voyager dutifully ran and tried to collect some data. In the morning, it had found just four 5 minute periods when it could take an image. 3 of those were spoiled by clouds during parts of the exposure. But I did have one 5 minute exposure to show for what was by all counts a hopeless night. The point is, it kept recovering and kept trying. This will be a great help on nights that are partly cloudy from time to time.

I Immaterialize
And Slowly Drift
Into the Unknown
With the Cold Winds with Soul
The Wintery Plains Lie Untouched
I Ride on My Elements
Towards the Stars Unseen

(My Journey to the Stars - Burzum)

I continue to work with Voyager instead of SGP. Last night I finished up getting the data I needed for NGC 896, the Lantern Fish. What made it notable was this was the first time I have used Drag Script in Voyager to collect data from multiple objects over the course of a night. There were some early errors that forced me to stop the script, edit, and restart a few times. But data from the last two objects + sky flats of OIII and SII were gathered without intervention.

Automation is a marvelous thing, at least when it works right.

The image above shows just one small part of the Web Dashboard.

Another thing I like is Roboclip, which is an observing list, integrated with nice capabilities for doing framing. It is very well done. I have a Roboclip data base for my target list elsewhere on this site.

I highly recommend checking Voyager out. It is quite likely I'll be purchasing it. This is one of the objects I was shooting last night.

Monday, January 6th didn't look very promising, but I got enough clear weather to take an image of Messier 38 and to take test shots of a number of other objects.

This was my first go at using my AT8RC after collimating it again. It was also a chance to try the flats I took after collimating and see if they were working properly.

The resultant image came out reasonably well, and I can check another Messier object off the list.

Well, my wife went off shopping so I got a chance to process IC 443, the Jellyfish. Subs were 10 minutes each binned 1 by 1. For Ha, and OIII I ended up with 12 subs each. I got 11 SII before switching targets. Total integration time was 5 hours 50 minutes. The Jellyfish is strong in Ha and SII. The SII is surprisingly strong. The OIII on the otherhand is pretty weak. Here are the results in the Hubble Palette, SHO.

I have been fortunate to have some reasonably good weather of late. I have spent parts of 4 nights gathering data on NGC 1491. While the common name for this is the Fossil Footprint Nebula, I like to call it the Burning Man. After culling, I ended up with 17 hours and 20 minutes of data in Ha, SII, and OIII. I spent the most time on the SII since that signal is quite faint. I totally overcooked my first try at processing this data. Hopefully, this version is a bit better.

Beside a garden wall, when stars are bright
You are in my arms
The nightingale
Tells his fairytale
Of paradise, where roses grew

(Stardust, Mitchell Parish)

Wednesday night, December 11th, the clouds made way for clear skies. The Moon was full but I was not about to let that stop me. Most of the night was spent imaging the Burning Man Nebula, NGC 1491. But it took a while for that target to clear the trees. In the meantime, I imaged the Double Cluster in Perseus, NGC 869 and 884. I reduced my exposures to 1 minute to help ensure that I minimized over saturating the sensor in order to preserve good star color. The result was 20 subs each of R, G, and B binned 1x1 for a total integration time of 1 hour. With bright clusters like the Double Cluster, that is plenty of time. The telescope used was my AT8RC with the CCDT67 focal reducer/flattener.

I used PCC in PixInsight to calibrate the color. Here is the result:

The bug has bitten me again. Recently I went out to the observatory, dusted things off, lubed the wheels to the roof, and generally made things ready for usage. I also updated the computer I use for image capture.

On the evening of November 1st I got a break in the weather and a chance to see if the system still worked. I decided to have a go at collecting some Ha data for NGC 6960, the Witches Broom, or the Western Veil. It isn't my best data ever but the system did work with the exception of a USB cable to my focuser that needed to be replaced.

On November 22 and 24 I got more good weather. This time I collected Ha, SII, and OIII data on some of the detail in the Heart Nebula, IC 1805. In particular I got the area surrounding the open cluster, Melotte 15.

After the Heart Nebula, I was feeling pretty good about the Hubble Palette so I decided to try NGC 1491 on the night of November 27th. I call this Nebula the Burning Man. While I collected Ha, SII, and OIII data, I have found SII signal too weak to do much with it. I need to decide what direction I want to take with this. Here is a quick pass at the Ha data.

In the meantime, I got some good weather for at least part of the night again on December 5th and 7th. The Moon was a factor so I decided to go after one of the Messier objects that I still had not image, Messier 76, the Little Dumbbell. While visually dim, from an imaging point of view it is a bright object with good surface brightness.

In the full-size uncropped version of M76 there are at least 6 galaxies captured going down to at least 18th magnitude. Not bad since the Moon was definitely a factor.

Throughout this, I have been upgrading the software that I use. I now have upgraded, PHD2, TheSkyX Pro, SGP, and PixInsight.

I also upgraded to Nebulosity 4 since it can be used as an ASCOM driver. I wanted to give N.I.N.A. a try and it has no native SBIG drivers. Unfortunately, that experiment failed for a number of reasons. I do really like the integrated object browser within N.I.N.A. It is a nice piece of software for free. It still lacks features found in the paid alternatives, that may be important to you, but the price is right if you don't need those features.

One of the challenges in imaging is simply figuring out what to image. Fortunately, there are plenty of targets out there. Attached is a excel file that contains information sorted by Hour Angle. Using this list, it should be easy to find a target that is currently available for imaging. Simply figure out what hour angle is at transit around the middle of the night and then choose targets that are around that hour angle. Enjoy!

This list was produced using SkyTools 3. Fortunately, they have a generous policy for sharing data made with the tool. They just ask for attribution.

The list includes all Messier Objects that are not double stars, and all Spiral and Barred Galaxies that are greater than or equal to 11th Magnitude and are greater than or equal to 4 minutes in size. It contains many named Nebulae (both bright and dark) and assortment of other excellent objects that were added to the list. Sometimes an item is in the list simply because I enjoyed imaging it, even if it was a somewhat more challenging target.

The list is made for those in the Northern Hemisphere. The most southerly object is currently the Cat's Paw Nebula, NGC 6334 at -36  06'.

For those who don't have Excel, I suggest either getting the viewer or the excellent LibreOffice. Both are currently free.