Log Book Entry No.33

Created: 14 Feb 2014 12:42:26

Last Revised: 14 Feb 2014 12:42:26

LaurieNevay

20140213 LN Observation

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20140213 LN

Reasonably clear and forecast to be good. Worth a try to get some practice in.

• CCD at -15oC
• Aligned to capella - very high in sky.
• Went down from 46 to 37 DE to theta_aur as capella saturates the camera.
• Take subframes to practice focussing. Recorded 400 frames of theat_aur for analysis later. SNR is good as super bright. Peak around 30000 ADU. Jumps around A LOT so will have to align by centroid. Then can have a look at PSF.
• Exposure 0.1s
• 300 exposures recorded in 10m12s
• 400 exposures recorded in 13m37s *Sat bhatinov mask carefully on front of scope. Recorded 50 images with same setup as before. Not so clear.
• Exposure 0.5s
• Not so clear. Pattern seems very small indeed on CCD compared to internet images. Collimation is definitely poor and its windy so don't expect it to be great. Anyway, reasonably good in focus.
• Having a look at the Pleiades. Too extended to see anything nice and certainly with the seeing. The stars are very bright and the nebulosity not so, so quite hard to observe under these conditions.

• Imaged Andromeda ok. 30s exposures.

• Theta Aur with Bhatinov mask:
  

• 4_stack_andromeda_horizontal_profile.PNG:
  

• andromeda_5min_cross_section.PNG:
  

• andromeda_5min_cross_section_near_top.PNG:
  

• andromeda_30s_cross_section_middle.PNG:
  

• andromeda_30s_cross_section_top.PNG:
  

• andromeda_30s_exposure.png:
  

• andromeda_300s_exposure_exponential_scaling.png:
  

• bad_tracking_5_min_exposure.png:
  

• bad_tracking_5_min_exposure_gaussinan_scaling.png:
  

• The final stack of 4 images, each with 5mins exposure. Noticeably blurry, but the stacking does obviously improve the noise.

• An example of a 5 min exposure.