It was cold on Monday night: 33°F at the top of Palomar Mountain, where I did this month's bit of astrophotography. I thought my fingers were going to fall off.
The sky wasn't perfect, but it was pretty good and nothing went wrong. I got a full night's worth of images and all of them were usable to create the final image stack. My target was the Crab Nebula, aka M1, the remains of a supernova that exploded in 1054. It's fairly small and distant, which puts it at about the limits of my telescope. In the end though, the image turned out better than I expected. There are a few odd artifacts in the interior, but the colors are nice and the resolution is fairly good. The stars aren't quite round, which suggests my guiding was mediocre. The noise that I've gotten previously when I use the narrowband filter is mostly gone thanks to increased dithering. And refocusing with the filter in place produced a nice, sharp image.
So overall, not bad. Until I get a bigger scope, this is as good as it's going to get.
Very cool! It would be great to see a time lapse sequence, from the first glimpse of the supernova and throughout the centuries as it expanded. Maybe I ought to check the internets...
if you like astro sims, i thought this was pretty cool
theia/earth collision
WOW. That is seriously impressive.
Sweet shot.
Absolutely beautiful shot!
Awesome shot Kevin. Congratulations. Looks like the underside of a pink cauliflower....
wow! great job! I wish our eyes could see it without magnification!
NICE! The Crab is on my list but I haven't managed it yet.
I took the liberty of plate-solving your image (nova.astrometry.net) and turning on "grid". The star eccentricity is right along the DEC axis, which would indicate either polar alignment issues that your guiding wasn't able to keep up with, or maybe a lot of backlash in DEC. Keep it up!
"It was cold on Monday night: 33°F at the top of Palomar Mountain"
Some local weather reporters in Los Angeles, well aware that they and their audience know it's much worse elsewhere in the nation, called recent lows, like 41°, "California cold". Which it is, for the unprepared, or those with limited or no winter gear.
This morning, in a discussion of the predicted "20 below" for the Iowa Republican caucuses, one of the group members noted that "20 above" was already too cold for him.
There's a good description of being under dressed in 20 below (or lower) in Northern Wisconsin in Neil Gaiman's "American Gods." Very accurate, I might add.
So 33 (above) is a warm spring day in Wisconsin. There is no "bad weather", only "inappropriate clothing."
I'm glad that I can see these photos, thank you.