NGC7380 – The Wizard nebula in HA

NGC7380 Wizard nebula in HA
NGC7380 Wizard Nebula in HA

NGC 7380 (also known as the Wizard Nebula) is an open cluster discovered by Caroline Herschel in 1787. William Herschel included his sister’s discovery in his catalogue and labelled it H VIII.77. It is also known as 142 in the 1959 Sharpless catalogue (Sh2-142). This reasonably large nebula is located in Cepheus. It is extremely difficult to observe visually, usually requiring very dark skies and an O-III filter.

Technical Details
Sky-Watcher 80ED Pro Black Diamond
SBIG 8300M
HEQ5 Pro
QHY CCD QHY5 mono
Frames: Baader 7nm Ha 2”: 34×1200″ -5C bin 1×1
Starlight Xpress Starlight Xpress FW 5*2″
3003×2166
Dates: Oct. 5, 2014
Locations: Home obs
Integration: 11.3 hours

Darks: ~10
Flats: ~10
Bias: ~100

Avg. Moon age: 10.86 days
Avg. Moon phase: 83.71%
Mean SQM: 17.00
Mean FWHM: 1.50
Temperature: 15.00
RA center: 341.867 degrees
DEC center: 58.074 degrees
Orientation: 179.381 degrees
Field radius: 0.956 degrees

My first CCD attempt is the NGC7380 The wizard nebula in HA (for now) 🙂 It took 4 nights to gather the data, as I am still battling with meridian flips, ADU’s, Dark noise and the rest of the CCD parameters…

Enjoy!

Get the altitude of any location – Astrophotography

One the gazillion little data that you need to have, in order to adjust the telescope mount in order to track celestial objects correctly, is the altitude of the location you are setting the gear up.

So here is a handy website that helps you determine the altitude of a given location

http://www.altitude.nu/

Seems quite accurate.

Galaxy M101 – Location Greece Mount Taygetus

The famous M101 Galaxy!

M101 Galaxy
M101 Galaxy

Technical details :

Contains: NGC 5477, NGC 5473, M 101, NGC 5457
Imaging telescopes or lenses: Sky-Watcher 80ED Pro Black Diamond
Imaging cameras: Canon 350D
Guiding telescopes or lenses: Sky-Watcher 80ED Pro Black Diamond
Software: Pleiades Astrophoto PixInsight
Resolution: 1016×936

Dates: July 24, 2014
Frames: 30×243″ ISO400
Integration: 2.0 hours
Darks: ~10
Flats: ~30
Bias: ~30

Avg. Moon age: 26.86 days
Avg. Moon phase: 7.86%
Bortle Dark-Sky Scale: 2.00
Temperature: 22.00
RA center: 210.790 degrees
DEC center: 54.363 degrees
Pixel scale: 4.405 arcsec/pixel
Orientation: -89.651 degrees
Field radius: 0.845 degrees