Back in Business...Sort of

My brand-spanking new, souped-up MacBook Pro finally arrived, which makes it possible for me to image again. The Moon is still pretty bright, so I decided to do more Hα imaging. In choosing targets, I look for objects that have a lot of emission nebulosity. So the night before last I imaged the Pacman Nebula, and last night I did the Cave Nebula. Both are about the right size to use a focal reducer, which makes my optics quite fast.

To enable imaging control, I copied my Windows 7 VMWare image from my old laptop, and started experiencing some quirky things. VMWare attempts to use the full resolution of my display, which is very high on my new retina-display MacBook. As a result, I've got lots of screen real estate on the new machine under VMWare, but most of the fonts are now quite small.  There must be some setting to fix that, but I haven't found it yet, and actually I like having more screen space for my space photography. The other quirk is more serious. Both sessions with the new laptop have ended early with the imaging hanging up (last night, only a half hour after I went to bed after doing a meridian flip). This looks like perhaps more of the same stuff that shut me down with the older, loaner machines. My new MacBook definitely doesn't have performance bottlenecks that I thought caused this, so probably something in VMWare is not right. I'm thinking about getting a clean VMWare Windows 7 image and rebuilding from scratch. Another option would be to control the imaging session from the Mac side and only run the finding/guiding from Windows 7. That would be easy to try but not particularly convenient to run.

Aside from the bright Moon (which makes no difference to Hα imaging), conditions have been quite nice the last couple of nights. Both targets were very easily found with the PicGoto (and the PicGoto is the reason I don't try to solve the hanging problem described above by going Mac-native. I'm addicted to using it because it makes finding and aligning so much easier, and I also like using ASCOM. Unfortunately, I have to use Windows to use the PicGoto, which means VMWare on my system).

I got a lot of data for the Pacman Nebula. I've found I can deconvolute a bit more aggressively with these Hα images than I'm used to, and I'm very happy with the results. I think this is the best Pacman I've ever gotten, and I tried really hard on it a couple of years ago. My skills have improved, I guess.

The air was mostly quite still. Interestingly, my RA guiding was great but the DEC was only so-so, the opposite of what I usually see. This was first light for my 2014 MacBook Pro. T = 9-15 °C with chiller at 2.50 A. By far my best Pacman to date. Hα helps a lot on this one.

Date: 10 Sep 2014
Subject: NGC 281, Pacman Nebula
Scope: AT8IN+0.5x Antares telereducer
Filter: Baader Planetarium 7 nm H-α
Mount: CG-5 (Synta motors, PicGoto Simplificado)
Guiding: 9x50 Finder/Guider + DSI Ic + PHD 2.3.0 (Win 7 ASCOM)
Camera: DSI IIc chiller at 2.50 A, 9-15 °C
Acquisition: Nebulosity 3.2.1, no dither
Exposure: 36x600 s
Stacking: Neb 3, bad pixel map, bias included, extract R, normalize, square, trans+rot align, 1.5 SD stack, resize 2x.
Processing: StarTools 1.3.5.279 Crop; Develop 74.99%; HDR:Optimize; Deconvolute 3.7 pix; Track; CC 2014 AstronomyTools B&W to Hα; Astro Frame.

The Cave Nebula is fairly dim, and the last time I tried to image it 2 years ago my notes start out with "perhaps this is a target one should not try to image from the suburbs with a low-end one-shot color camera." However, a low-end one-shot color camera with a Hα filter does pretty well, I think.  Here's the evidence:

Extremely good conditions. Lots of moonlight, but who cares when using the Hα filter! Chiller at 6.5 °C, 2.5 A. Found easily with the PicGoto from Iota Cephei. Got about 70 min of data, did a meridian flip, and continued. Unfortunately, the imaging run hung up about half an hour after I went to bed, so I got a lot less data than I had planned for. This is two runs in a row with this problem so I need to get it sorted. The image turned out much better than I expected. Woo-hoo to the Hα filter!

Date: 12 Sep 2014
Subject: Sh2-155, Cave Nebula
Scope: AT8IN+0.5x Antares telereducer
Filter: Baader Planetarium 7 nm H-α
Mount: CG-5 (Synta motors, PicGoto Simplificado)
Guiding: 9x50 Finder/Guider + DSI Ic + PHD 2.3.0 (Win 7 ASCOM)
Camera: DSI IIc chiller at 2.50 A, 6.5 °C
Acquisition: Nebulosity 3.2.1, no dither
Exposure: 11x600 s
Stacking: Neb 3, bad pixel map, bias included, extract R, normalize, square, trans+rot align, 1.5 SD stack, resize 2x (Catmull-Rom).
Processing: StarTools 1.3.5.279 Crop; Develop 75.00%; HDR:Equalize; Deconvolute 3.7 pix; Life:Moderate; Track:RNC 0.01%; CC 2014 Photoshop AstronomyTools B&W to Hα; Healing brush to remove a hot spot trail; Astro Frame.