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 1^st 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 1^st 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.