Shooting from the Driveway

A good night in the driveway last night.

After solving the little equipment issues, waiting out weeks of bad weather and waiting for the Moon to go away, I finally had a nice photographic night. Setting up at sunset I shot until the Moon rose. Most of the targets I have shot before, Orion, Rosette, Markarian’s Chain. I also shot Melotte 111, an object that has always intrigued me. The full frame camera and the TV-76 has a wide enough field to capture this very large and nearby star cluster.

I want to use this combination camera and telescope with a very wide field to work over the dark nebulae of the Summer Milky Way. With 384mm focal length the full frame camera gives me over 5.35° x 3.56° field of view. The beehive also lent itself to the wide field, another large object that was worth a stop to shoot.

Aside from one little equipment issue to start, more an operator education issue, the gear worked great. Note to self… Must turn off camera WiFi before the camera will link to the computer via USB. I am currently using APT to control the camera, a very impressive bit of software. The auto-guider worked perfectly, frame after frame nearly identical. I can slideshow through dozens of sub-frames and not see any difference, no drift!

A single sub-frame of the Rosette Nebula is shown to the right. The Rosette is an emission nebula with most of the light emitted at the wavelength of Hα 656.28 nm. My Canon 6D is stock, no astrophoto modifications. Despite an IR cutoff filter that blocks much of the Hα light the camera captures a fair amount of the nebula. Perhaps I should get a 48mm Hα filter for the camera to shoot from the driveway.

With everything working so well I really need to haul the rig up to Hale Pohaku for a night of imaging under darker skies than I get down at 1000ft. Next weekend is dark-of-the-Moon weekend. Need to plan an outing?

It will take a bit to process the results of the night. As usual, keep an eye here on Darker View for the finished photos.