Category: Deep Sky

Friday night was my second night out with my 11″ SCT (Elf) and the new Hyperstar adapter. Clouds, heat and humidity made things a challenge but I managed to get this before packing it up. First, I spent a while collimating the Hyperstar. This was not too hard and I hope it will stay but we’ll see. A few months ago, I learned that my CGEM mount has as polar alignment routine, not just the common star alignment, and using this gave me very little drift over the evening.

Anyway, I queued up 120 30 second images with what is essentially a 532mm f/1.9 telephoto lens. Unfortunately after about 40 minutes it clouded over and I had to cut it short. Also I found airplanes or satellites in a few of the images so I wound up with 69 images to combine. The largest galaxy is M81 or Bode’s Nebula. Above it is M82, the Cigar Galaxy. In the lower right and not very impressive in comparison is NGC 3077, the Garland Galaxy. The Hyperstar is used for wide angle small scale imaging so we don’t see a lot of detail here. Horizontally this image is about 4 times the width of the Moon.

I had my first chance to try out my new Hyperstar V4 with my 11″ Celestron SCT (Elf). With this configuration, Elf becomes an 11″ f/1.9 lens with a focal length of 532mm.

This was not a night for long integrations. It was just a shake down cruise. Below are some images of, top to bottom, Omega Centauri, Centaurus A, and Markarian’s Chain. In this configuration, the camera has a 2 degrees by 1.4 degrees. Each of these images are 50 sixteen second images combined. Minor stretching was done but no other post processing. I want you to see it almost as it came out of the camera. Click for a larger view.

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The greated globular cluster of them all, Omega Centauri was 9 degrees above the horizon when I shot it. Amazingly this was not too unlike what you see after one second. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega_Centauri

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Centaurus A is about 3 degrees higher than Omega Centauri. Obviously a little small for this scale. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centaurus_A

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Markarian’s Chain starts with M84 in the upper right and proceeds in a backwards J to NGC 4459 at center left. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markarian%27s_Chain

Here are a couple images taken in the early hours of Saturday May 30, 2020 from the River Ridge Observatory. The Moon didn’t set until 2 AM so I spent several hours essentially piddling around and then stayed up all night. I used my Canon Rebel 800D with a 50mm f/1.8 lens riding on my 11″ SCT while it was busy imaging something else. I used a so called “city light suppression” filter to try to mitigate some light pollution. By the way, this was to the south from the RRO and Little Rock was to the southeast. Each image is a combination of six 5 minute frames then processed in Photoshop. My Photoshop skills are still a work in progress. The CLS filter tends to cast a green tint so that had to be removed. The dark circle in the lower right is the telescope.