The Running Man - NGC 1973, 1975 and 1977 in LRGB

The Running Man - NGC 1973, 1975 and 1977 in LRGB
Originally uploaded by Mickut

LRGB image of the often neglected companion of M42 The Great Orion Nebula. The Running Man nebula is a combination of an open cluster and reflection, emission and dark nebulae. I wanted to show the eerie faint red glow of the ionized hydrogen behind the bright reflective parts as well as the immense depths of darkness available in the vast nebulous region.

The battle against reflections continues. I've been suffering from horrendous internal reflections, and after matting most of the inner surfaces I still have a serious problem with something reflecting to the edges, the current suspect is the inner surfaces of the filter rings. Time to go looking for a very dark matte black with an extremely fine pigment.

The blind can see

It works! giving an old image of the M31 for the solver yielded a quick positive identification and a nice annotated version showing the objects discovered.

After a few tries I managed to compile the current development version of the astrometry.net blind solver and with a few tweaks also the annotation component under Cygwin. Now I can start working on the interesting projects of plate solving based polar alignment and plate solved goto refinement as well as make preparations for future gallery entries with nice lists of objects and suitable metadata.

200mm f/3.6 Leitz Elmaron test

200mm f/3.6 Leitz Elmaron test
Originally uploaded by Mickut

Got a lens to be used for guiding, so I had to test that the old piece of glass is still in a drawing condition. This stacked 5 frames of 5s each was taken thru pouring rain, and processed a bit to enhance local contrasts to enable inspection by human eyes and normal display devices.

M101 first light

M101 first light
Originally uploaded by Mickut

First test imaging was done in a bit of a hurry and by surprise, thus nothing worked and polar alignment was off by a mile. I'm still waiting for the filter wheel, thus didn't spend too much time trying to get guiding working, although it's clear I should've done so. But after all, the SXVR-H18 seems like a decent camera despite some rather dissappointing features, mainly the CCD distance from flange is a too long (around 24mm!) to allow using a filterwheel with SLR optics for widefield imaging.

Time to quote a fun danish band: Haps, haps, haps, nu skal vi ha snaps. @ Manala, Dagmarinkatu 2, Helsinki, Suomi http://bit.ly/aKs0ZF

Kevyt lauantai-iltapäivän ohjelma koostuu hyvästä lounaasta ja (toivottavasti) mahtavasta pelikierroksesta. @ Hillside Golf, Luolaistentie 24, Vihti, Suomi http://bit.ly/dxEzuQ

Devaamassa (eli Grassroots Brewing Deva double IPA) @ Pikku Lintu, Rättärinpolku 2, Helsinki, Suomi http://bit.ly/9LV7SH