Random Musings of an Amateur Astronomer
Posts tagged celestron cpc 1100 images
Messier 1, The Crab Nebula (NGC 1952)
3Located in the constellation, “Taurus,” the Crab Nebula was first discovered in 1054 A.D by Chinese and Arab astronomers. Messier made this his first catalogue entry, hence the name Messier 1. The name “Crab Nebula” comes from it’s resemblance to a crab.
How to find the Crab Nebula
The Crab Nebula was formed when a star ran out of fuel and blew itself up in a grand explosion called a supernova. The nebula itself are the bits of that star flying through space at nearly 1500km/s. This rate More >
Celestron’s New Heavy Duty Pro Wedge
310 years ago
by admin
in Astrophotography
Last year, Celestron announced the introduction of a “new Heavy Duty Pro Wedge”, especially for use with the CPC series of fork-mounted telescopes. The non-heavy duty version which is replaced had been marred by horrible reviews, flimsy parts, and amazingly, competition from various firms which apparently knew how to make good products (such as Mitty). So, when they claimed a new design, more rugged, durable, and based on their learnings from the previous wedge, I couldn’t help but More >
4x Powermate, 2x Barlow, f/6.3 Reducer Comparison of M2
210 years ago
by admin
in Astrophotography
Again with data from June 26th 2010, I diligently put some effort into determining exactly what the impact of barlowing would be on M2. Sort of like the M13 comparison, I thought this would be an interesting way to really see the difference.
In this comparison, the constants were a big, bright full moon, haze, the CPC 1100, Orion StarShoot Pro v2.0, and the f/6.3 reducer. Processing was done in MaximDL and I left the reducer on even with the barlows – generally a weird thing to do – simply More >
M64, The Black Eye Galaxy
0For whatever reason, hitting some of the famous DSO’s proves to be more challenging than I expect. This is 165 seconds of exposure time on the CPC 1100 with f/6.3 reducer up, from data gathered on June 26th. Each raw image here barely looked like much; I had to use a fairly aggressive Unsharpen to bring out some contrast, followed by Gaussian Blur to kill off the pixelation. Again, given the overall poor conditions of the night I was pretty pleased with how this ended up.
M64, The Black Eye
More >
Working under difficult skies!
110 years ago
Last night was the first night where stars were generally visible here for the first time in a LONG time – since about May 13th… Ouch! Overall seeing conditions were generally poor, but I thought I’d go out and see what I could do. On top of the generally poor seeing conditions the sky offered atmospherically, a big, bright full disc moon complicated matters more. However, I thought I’d get out there and take advantage of it while I had an opportunity and see what I could get done. Stars More >
