Tonight is probably the first perfect night for star-gazing for a very very long time! The sky looks clear and the forecast also looks very promising! So lets see which surprises this night is going to have 🙂
The object for tonight is IC342. It is a spiral galaxy in constellation Camelopardalis. The galaxy is about 10 million light years away from us. In other words that means the light travelled about 10 millions years before it finally hits my telescope 🙂
In fact, this object is very weak. A brightness of about 12mag is very close to the limit I can image with my telescope here from Böblingen. Still I think it is worth a try. The first frame just came in. It has been recorded with binning 1×1 and an IR filter. The exposure of this single frame has been 800 seconds – actually one of the longest I ever did. I am not so sure if this is a good idea – especially regarding the final image quality… lets see….
The seeing is above the average this time. After a while, 11 IR (800s, 1×1 binning), 9 R and G frames (200s, 2×2 binning) and 8 B frames (200s, 2×2 binning) have been successfully captured! I will post the result pretty soon. Good night everyone!
Hello again! One short night later I finally composed the collected frames using DeepSkyStacker 3.3.2 with Kappa-Sigma Clipping. Actually, I am very satisfied with the result. Unfortunately the object is not that colorful but the structures are quite good visible. And again, I am surprised that it was possible to image a 12mag object from a city like Böblingen with an cheap 8″ Newton telescope 🙂 A full resolution image is available here. The most important image data can be found in the table below.
 | Date | 2012/10/17 |
 | Location | Böblingen / Germany |
 | Object | M33 (Triangulum Galaxy) |
 | Camera | Atik383L+ |
 | Guiding | yes, QHY5-II Mono via OAG |
 | Telescope | 8" GSO Newtonian |
 | Barlow lens | none |
 | Mount | EQ6Syntrek |
 | Cooling | -15°C |
 | Luminance | 11x, 800s, bin: 1x1 |
 | Red | 9x, 200s, bin: 2x2 |
 | Green | 9x, 200s, bin: 2x2 |
 | Blue | 8x, 200s, bin: 2x2 |
 | Dark | 10x |
 | Flat | 10x |
 | Total exposure | ~3h53min. |
Further details on the equipment used can be found on the equipment page.
Clear skies, and see you next time!
Last updated: July 23, 2022 at 12:47 pm