Fun with color, among other things
A few nights ago, before this latest
string of rainy, cloudy nights, I went to the observatory to just
have some fun. Since it was just past 1st quarter moon,
the sky was bright enough that only a few objects, other than the
moon, was visible. My actual goal was to work on a problem with auto
guiding. I found by reading the LX200GPS Yahoo group that one of my
guiding problems was a setting on the telescope, specifically the
anti backlash setting being too high. I would never have thought it
would have been the problem, but it was. Before resetting the value,
from 92% as shown to be a good value in PemPro, the scope would go
into an unstable oscillation when trying to guide. By changing the
value to 2%, problem solved. Thanks, Dr. Clay. It took all of about
10 minutes to make and verify the correction. I had allowed myself
about an hour to work on the problem, which is usual for me, so I had
some time play. What follows is the result of that playing.
Since the moon was just past 1st
quarter, I decided to do what I call “running the terminator”.
The terminator is the dividing line between day and night. The
moonscape is most interesting on or very near the terminator, so I
will just look all the way up or down the terminator at the sites.
This time, I took images. To have a little fun with the processing, I
greatly increased the saturation of the colors to see if I could
tease some of the limited amount of color from the images. So,
presented here is “the terminator” with color enhancements (over
enhancements, actually). The bottom 2 images didn't get much change
with enhancements, so they didn't get any changes. So, even though
all the images are in color, only the top few have the saturation
turned up. Top image is the “top”, or north, pole of the moon.
Others are in order going south.
As mentioned in a previous post, the
“moon camera” is pretty much just a modified web cam. In general,
it's nor suitable for deep sky imaging, ie, imaging galaxies and
nebulae. Just for fun, I decided to point it at M42, the Great Orion
Nebula in the sword of Orion, just to see what I would get. It was
able to get some of the nebula, as well as the Trapezium, the 4 stars
illuminating the nebula. You can see the 4 stars with the nebula
around them. Not the best image, no surprise, but interesting none
the less.
Finally, also at the same time, and
while the “big” camera was still attached, I decided to check the
tracking by imaging M81, which is a galaxy relatively close to the
North Star. I used only the red, green, and blue filters (not the
luminescence filter), but exposed for only a minute, literally. One
minute red, one green, one blue, and 3 one minute exposures with no
filter. The tracking turned out pretty good. But, as expected, the
images are very noisy and the galaxy quite dim. So I tried a
different approach to the processing. After the normal processing in
Nebulosity, I tried playing with layers and masks in GIMP. I was able
to tease more signal out this way, but it also brings with it more
noise. Even with the extra noise, it made a great improvement in the
galaxy.
