Nebulas And a Comet

Cosmic Variety

After three clear nights in a row I wondered how much longer good conditions could last. Incredibly, one more excellent night followed on February 6th, making four(!) consecutive cloudless nights. Once again I quickly set up my Seestar 50 to take advantage of dark, moonless skies.

The first target on February 6th was planetary nebula M76 in Perseus. Thirty minutes of stacked exposures yielded the following image.

Also in Perseus is white reflection nebula IC 348. This nebula didn't show very dramatically in a 30-minute exposure.

On the previous night my Cone Nebula exposure time was cut short at 30 minutes. This time I stacked 90 minutes of 10-second exposures and got the following image.

The dark Cone Nebula, visible on the left, has a disappointing dull red nebulosity color. Maybe I should have employed the light pollution filter.

The period of absolutely clear evening weather finally ended on February 7th. Near dawn on February 8th, however, I looked from my bedroom window and noticed Scorpius rising in clear sky to the southeast. Comet PanSTARRS (C/2021 S3) was in the neighborhood of  Scorpius' brightest star, Antares, and was predicted to pass near some globular clusters. In the past I would never have had the energy to haul out my complicated astrophotography equipment at 4:30 am, but the Seestar was outside in one quick trip and ready to image in 10 minutes. The following 5-minute exposure shows the comet (top) in the same field of view as globular cluster NGC 6287 (bottom). There's a dark obscuring galactic dust cloud between the two.

  

The comet was disappointingly small. It's fuzzy tail and coma are just visible but not prominent. I thought a longer exposure would reveal more. Unfortunately, the comet moves appreciably relative to background stars, so a longer exposure smeared the comet out. Check out the elongated comet nucleus in the following 13-minute exposure.

As long as I was outside before dawn I looked for another target. Globular cluster M80 in Scorpius was a good possibility. As clouds began drifting in I took a 5-minute exposure of M80 shown next.

Unfortunately, my good luck streak ended as clouds and haze began filling the sky. Cloudy weather and moonlit sky will interfere with imaging for at least the next two weeks.

Clear Skies Continue

More Seestar Pics

The unusual run of clear skies in early February gave more opportunities to use my new Seestar 50. Added to good fortune was a lucky absence of neighboring spotlights shining into my back yard.

On February 4th my first target was open cluster NGC 457 in Cassiopeia. This cluster, also know as the "Owl Cluster" or, "ET Cluster", has two bright stars that look like eyes. Other cluster stars can be interpreted as a body with extended arms. This image was made from stacking 10 minutes of 10-second exposures.

While searching for targets in Ursa Major I noticed a few close galaxy pairs. The galaxies I chose to image turned out to be small and dim. Tenth magnitude galaxies NGC 3729 and NGC 3718 are about 12 arc minutes apart. Although the next picture was made from a 60-minute stack of 10-second exposures, it doesn't reveal many fine details. (NGC 3718 is the galaxy on top.) If you look closely, you can see another tiny galaxy smudge to the lower right of NGC 3718. This is 15th magnitude galaxy PGC 35620, an unexpected addition to the scene.

I tried one other Ursa Major galaxy pair, NGC 3756 and NGC 3738. These 11th magnitude galaxies are separated by about 16 arc minutes. NGC 3756 is the lower member of the pair shown in the following 50-minute stack of 10-second exposures. Once again, a small bonus 15th magnitude galaxy, PGC 35799, can be seen in the upper left corner.

February 5th was another clear day and night. During the day large sunspot 3576 had rotated into visibility on the left side of the Sun as you can see in the next picture made by stacking 100 frames from a thousand-frame video.

After looking at small dim galaxies on the previous night, I decided to capture a bigger, brighter galaxy on February 5th. I stacked 80 minutes of 10-second exposures to produce the next image of galaxy M33, the Pinwheel Galaxy in Triangulum.

The Flame Nebula is near belt star Alnitak in Orion. I engaged the light pollution filter to record the following 30-minute stack of 10-second exposures.

The final target on February 5th was the Cone Nebula in Monoceros. I removed the light pollution filter and obtained 30 minutes worth of 10-second exposures. Some thin clouds moved in towards the end of the 30-minute capture, so I cut the exposure short. The dark Cone Nebula is beginning to become visible on the left of the next image. A white reflection nebula below the brightest star also shows up well.

At this point I had been blessed with three consecutive clear nights and three consecutive bedtimes after midnight. I'm not used to this level of good conditions. Could it last for another day?


   

Roaming the Night Sky

Learning to Use Seestar

An unusual number of clear, moonless nights in early February were a great opportunity to get more familiar with my new Seestar 50 automated telescope. It's so easy to carry it outside and begin observing after only 10 minutes of prep time!

On February 3rd I first targeted the famous Horsehead Nebula (IC 434) near the star Alnitak in Orion's belt. A recent firmware update now enables Seestar to take 20 or 30-second exposures in addition to the original 10-second option. So I tried using 20-second exposures for capturing the Horsehead. Image capture began successfully, but eventually stopped after running for 18 minutes. Apparently, tracking errors during 20-second exposures were too great to continue acceptable stacking. I employed the onboard light pollution filter which passes red hydrogen light. In spite of less accumulated exposure time than planned, the 18-minute result was reasonably nice.

I still have a lot to learn about image processing, however, because the previous image isn't as dramatically bright as I'd like. The red color is dull.

For the rest of the evening I reverted to the usual 10-second Seestar individual exposure times. Open star cluster M41 in Canis Major was my next target. The telescope tracked well and produced the next image after only 10 minutes of adding 10-second exposures.

Open cluster M46 in the constellation Puppis is an interesting object because planetary nebula NGC 2438 is included in the field of view. You can see the little green nebula to the left of M46 in the following image obtained by stacking 10-second exposures for 25 minutes. The planetary nebula is a foreground object lying along the line of sight to the cluster. It isn't actually part of the star cluster.

While seated comfortably inside my warm house I commanded Seestar to point to galaxy M81 in Ursa Major. This time I centered the galaxy instead of placing it on the edge of the field of view as I had done in a previous attempt. The northern celestial location of M81 diminished guiding errors during the 68-minute accumulated exposure time that produced the next image.

 

The Owl Nebula, M97, is also located in Ursa Major. This planetary nebula was my next northerly target. Stacking 60 minutes worth of 10-second exposures gave the following image.

This evening's last target was the famous Rosette Nebula in the constellation, Monoceros. It's located to the left of Orion's bright star, Betelgeuse. This nebula, mostly glowing in red hydrogen light, surrounds a central star cluster NGC 2244. I employed Seestar's light pollution filter again and stacked 10-second exposures for 60 minutes. The camera's field of view is too small to capture the entire Rosette Nebula, so the image below only shows the right half of the full circular shaped nebula. Notice the strings of dark dust to the right of center.

Once again, I'm disappointed by how dull the red color appears. There is surely a way to correct this with image processing, but at this point, I don't know how. 

During this night I learned some practical information about Seestar. Field rotation shows up as distorted areas on opposing diagonal edges of long exposure images. I've cropped these blemishes out of images displayed here. The central field of view isn't affected.

Seestar's battery inevitably ran low on this cold night with the telescope's dew heater continuously drawing power. Seestar starts complaining about low battery when the charge falls below 20 percent. The battery is good for 3 or 4 hours under these conditions. Extended operation time can be obtained by plugging Seestar into its battery charger while Seestar operates. In addition, over hours, my controlling tablet battery begins to discharge as well. The tablet can also be connected to its charger while working to extend its life.

It was well after midnight when I decided to quit. Shutting down and bringing Seestar inside took about three minutes, a wonderful advantage compared to hauling in several heavy components of my more complicated astrophotography equipment.
 
 

 
   

Seestar 50

New Astrophotography Gadget

Over the years I've tried night sky astrophotography in several forms, never with great success. My accumulated collection of quality equipment never seemed enough to produce excellent results. I don't have a permanent observatory. It's getting physically harder to haul everything outside, set it all up, and tear it down afterward, especially in freezing conditions.

I recently discovered and purchased an easier, relatively inexpensive alternative for astrophotography called the Seestar 50. At first glance it doesn't look like a telescope!

A small telescope, camera, filters, dew heater, and rechargeable battery are all contained inside this astounding device. It comes with its own tripod, and is controlled through a wifi connection to either a smart phone or tablet. The 50 mm telescope lens is visible in the next picture.

An image from the manufacturer's website shows the internal design.

The whole thing is amazingly compact, just a bit larger than a cereal box.

It's also extremely portable because the telescope, tripod, solar filter, and USB cable fit within a small hard plastic carrying case.

When my new toy arrived I wanted to explore its capabilities immediately. Inevitably, cloudy weather was forecast for several days. On January 24th I peeked outside and noticed large gaps between daytime clouds. I rushed outside, set the small telescope down on a garden wall, powered it up, put on the included solar filter, established a wifi connection to my phone, and, using my phone, commanded it to point to the Sun. Amazingly, it pointed to the Sun!

I took a couple Sun pictures and one video. It was really easy to shut down and carry inside when clouds increased minutes later, a welcome change from the effort and time needed to break down and pack up my more complicated telescopic equipment. Clouds parted long enough to capture the quick Sun photo shown below (slightly sharpened using Registax wavelets). The image is good enough to show the whole Sun with scattered sunspots. It isn't a high resolution image capable of being magnified like images I get from my dedicated solar telescope, but it's good enough to show some detail in larger sunspots.

Seestar can photograph surrounding landscape when put in scenery mode. It then acts like a camera with a telephoto lens. In scenery mode it doesn't track sky movement caused by Earth's rotation. After imaging the Sun I tested this capability by pointing at a distant neighbor's rooftop vent and got this clear detailed image.

After this brief initial session I wanted to inspect the pictures and move them to my laptop. I could see the pictures on my phone, but I'm not fond of tiny screens and lack of visible detail in small images. I assumed images would be stored in the telescope's onboard memory. (It has about 60 GB of internal memory.) Unfortunately, the image files there were empty. I learned the onboard memory only stores videos and stacked images, not individual JPEG snapshots. The snapshots were on my phone. I could view them on my phone, but they were somehow imprisoned within the telescope control app itself. I spent hours trying to figure out how to get them out of the app and into the phone's regular picture gallery where all my photos are normally stored. Online help wasn't useful. Eventually, I found a 15-step procedure to accomplish getting the images to my laptop. The phone app is designed to easily post telescope images directly to the telescope company's instagram-like online sharing app. So I had to first sign into an account (yet another password to create and remember). Then I posted an image to the sharing site. Then I copied the URL for my post from the phone into my laptop browser. Then I was able to save the image onto my laptop from within the post displayed there. At this point I was pretty discouraged. If I had to do this for every image, it would be ridiculous!

 

I also installed the telescope control app on my tablet as well as my phone. The tablet has a more recent Android version than my phone, so there was hope tablet image files would be easier to access.

Clouds persisted into the evening of January 26th. Just before going to bed I peeked outside and noticed significant gaps between clouds. I rushed outside with the little scope. This time I used my tablet to control Seestar instead of my phone. The larger tablet screen was nice. It was a pleasant warm 60 degree night. I sat comfortably next to the scope and pointed it toward the full Moon. In no time I had a couple nice snap shots of the Moon and one video. Conditions were about as poor as possible for any other imaging. The full Moon was reflected from many scattered clouds and neighbor's spotlights were shining directly into my backyard. This picture of the nearly full Moon was made by stacking 16 frames from a 161 frame AVI video.

Afterward I discovered images stored on my tablet were easy to access and transfer to a laptop, so I won't be using my phone to control Seestar.

Three days later, on January 29th, the evening sky finally cleared and the bright Moon did not rise until about 9:30. This was my first opportunity to use Seestar for long exposures of deep sky objects. In deep sky mode Seestar builds images by taking many consecutive ten-second exposures and automatically stacking (adding) them up to produce an equivalent single long exposure. My first target was the famous Horsehead Nebula in Orion. This dim nebula requires long exposure times. After a couple false starts I began to accumulate results. The image stack appeared to be building up as expected, but then it stopped getting brighter. Soon the telescope stopped imaging and told me the Horsehead's altitude had become too high for accurate tracking. I think images were being rejected from the stacking process because of tracking errors. So I switched to a much easier target, the famous Orion Nebula which has been imaged endless times by astrophotographers. I centered the nebula, commanded the internal light pollution filter to be inserted in the light path, and started accumulating 10-second exposures. During the subsequent half hour imaging time I went inside my house and monitored progress in comfortable interior warmth while the telescope continued working in the cold outside. The wifi connection was strong enough to allow telescope control from a distance! I could even watch TV while monitoring the image on my tablet! Thirty minutes later I had captured the image shown next.

Wow! The image above is better than any of my laborious previous attempts with other equipment!

Next I tried an object in the north, the galaxy pair M81/M82 in Ursa Major. Without going outside, I used my tablet to command the telescope to point to M81. It was extremely satisfying to see the preview image appear nearly centered on the tablet screen! Unfortunately, the galaxy pair was arrayed across the narrow side of Seestar's rectangular field of view, so both galaxies are near the edges. This is one of the disadvantages of Seestar. There's no way to rotate the field of view like I can when my Nikon is attached to my large refractor. At some other time of night the galaxies might be in another more favorable orientation within the field of view. I'll have to explore the possibilities in the future. I accumulated ten-second exposures for 20 minutes and produced the following image.

I should have centered on the spiral M81 and tried a longer exposure on just M81 alone. Maybe next time.

Eventually, the 88-percent illuminated gibbous Moon rose and Seestar's battery was getting low. It was time to stop long exposures. Before shutting down I pointed toward the rising Moon and took a 90-second AVI video. I then stacked 100 out of 1,000 video frames to produce the next lunar image.

Seestar has some disadvantages. The telescope has a relatively small 50 mm aperture. The altitude/azimuth mount cannot track without incorporating unavoidable image rotation during long exposures. Tracking is difficult at high altitudes near the zenith. The field of view is small. Image quality will never match what is produced by larger, more expensive equipment. On the other hand, portability and wonderful ease of use are valuable compensating advantages. On cold nights when the effort to set up complicated equipment becomes an obstacle, Seestar overcomes the motivational obstacle. Requiring only one short trip outside, it can begin capturing images within about 15 minutes of startup. And it can be controlled wirelessly from within a comfortable house! I'm very happy with the Seestar system and looking forward to using it more!