Happy 2023 from the Terrace

The condo association gave me an early Christmas gift cutting down the sky obscuring dying tree outside my terrace. Trees across the way still block my light polluted skies. Nonetheless, I now have a descent strip of sky between 20 and 45 degrees altitude to work with during Orion season. I'll still make trips to my favorite darkish site in Harvard, MA but this will cut down on my carbon footprint as well as freezing toes during winter months. An additional benefit is access to WiFi allows me to monitor the scope using Chrome remote desktop. I'm pleasantly surprised with NGC2359 acquired with 15s subs which I first imaged with 60s subs last April from the McCoy's landing darkish site.  I'll definitely revisit NGC2359 between now and April from the terrace. 

The experiment with finder only All Star Polar Alignment has worked better than expected. Typically, I have only needed the two alignment stars plus two calibration stars after rough alignment with Polaris which is not visible from my south facing terrace. Typically less than 2 degrees of azimuth and less than 1 degree of altitude correction have been needed to correct for axis deviation from polar alignment. Thus far the Celestron AVX GoTo puts targets in the NightOwl  field of view (FOV). To center faint targets I just use Precise Goto which puts a bright star in the field which when centered in the FOV and centers the target with an offset.  Below are targets acquired on 12/27/2022 using 60x15s or 120x15s exposures.  Update: M42 reprocessed for reduced contrast and saturation.

M77 Irregular Galaxy

NGC 1788 Reflection Nebula

Left to Right: NGC2024(Flame Nebula), NGC2023, Horsehead Nebula (B33)

NGC2359 (Thor's Helmet) -- To be revisited

Orion Nebula (M42) again 😂

Short Cold Night at Harvard

The December 8 forecast was to be in around 32 by 9PM I decided to keep the night short. Astro-twilight was about 6:05 PM so I  arrived at the town of Harvard parking dark site around 4:30PM. Setup and all star polar alignment went smoothly. I deviated from the original target list dropping  M31 and NGC 1342 while adding M77 and NGC 2024. I probably should have stuck with NGC1342 instead of M77 which would be better imaged at a longer focal length. A combination of the dew hood and an ~8 mph breeze from the north challenged the auto-guider. And, having forgotten to bring my balaclava head covering the wind chill challenged my face during tear down at the end of the night. Fortunately I did remember to bring gloves and hand warmers. The five targets imaged appear below. Additional notes follow the images.

IC 5146

M33 (Triangulum Galaxy)

Messier 77(NGC 1068)

NGC663

NGC2024 (Flame Nebula)

All imaging was done at F/4 (800mm) with Celestron 8 AVX + Starizona Night Owl focal reducer corrector + ZWO ASI294MC Pro. Image area reduced to 3104x2116 pixels. Imaging temperature -10C. Of note, optical configuration was kept assembled and dark frames acquired the following day. Processing was with Autostakkert! I decided to experiment with acquiring dark frames with camera rotated slightly clockwise and counterclockwise from original. These were found to have little effect on post processing. For this reason I will likely acquire flat frames after the night of imaging with a reassembled optical configuration. I'll also return to the Orchard site which has less of an issue with passing cars.