Photo Mini-Trip: Andy's Place in Bonny Doon
Oct 22, 2005
This was supposed to be a rendezvous with Shahram and Chris Kitting, but it
ended up being a solo trip. Cirrus clouds made a long trip for Shahram and for
Chris over the hill too risky. Instead of Locatelli's, this time the site was
my friend Andy's lot at the summit of Bonny Doon. Mary, Andy, and the new owners
of the Englemann's place all enjoyed an evening under the stars. Mary fixed
up something "very simple": foccacia bread, prawns in drawn butter,
and home baked manhole cover-sized chocolate chip cookies. I chipped in a bottle
of cabernet savignion. Mary - thank you! It was sufficient to power me through
the night. My photo goals were to rig the ST2000XCM with the Megrez APO and
GM8 and get some deep sky images, and also diagnose problems with the autoguiding
calibration.
The Eagle Nebula. 17 x 1min stacked (not sure if all
were accepted) in Registax3. Tracking was poor. Small adjustments to
brightness and contrast, and unsharp mask in Photoshop 7. The .tif image
looked much better before "save for web" in Photoshop. Not
sure why.
|
The Helix Nebula. 20x1min stacked in
Registax3 and curved in Photoshop 7. Tracking was good, after I figured
out the calibration command. No wavelet adjustments made. To fill the
frame here, the original image was strongly cropped. You can click to
see a larger image... but I wish you wouldn't. It's just 20 minutes, and
this nebula has a notoriously low surface brightness; it requires several
hours to do it justice. |
I finally solved the self-guiding calibration issue; increasing the x,y time,
and calibrating before each exposure. To verify, I took two single 5-minute
exposures of the Plieades.
The Plieades: 5min self-guided. Through cirrus clouds
|
Same, but better centered, and through more cirrus |
