Koehler Urban Astrophotography

10/29/2022 - Target -- M33 -- The Triangulum Galaxy. Clear skies, no moon, no wind -- excellent night for observations.  Indi Allsky Charts for 20:30-24:31 on 10/29-10/30. Started setting up before sundown. Configured the LX10 with the Meade 0.63x focal reducer and inserted the Astronomik CLS filter in the Canon T3I.  Initial polar alignment error (dead reckoning) 327'.  Ended up ~-4.5'.  Ultimately ~94x3 minute frames were collected.  On 10/30, placed white tissue paper over the OTA with it pointed to zenith, placed the Canon T3I to aperture priority & measured correct exposure. Dialed this into manual mode and collected 25 flat frames for use in calibration.  Later in the afternoon, collected a range of photos of the sun with solar film in place. Sadly, didn't notice at the time the opportunity to use several sun spots to update focusing (set the previous night in cold conditions). A single 180s frame with some background suppression processing and st...

Jupiter at opposition and at perigree ... epic time to create some stacks for processing.  Extracted the venerable Svbony SV305 out of the indi-allsky camera for some planetary imaging. Set up the CGEM DX with the Meade LX10 with the 3x Celestron X-Cel LX barlow.  Leaves still on the trees, so no polar scope ... just used the cell phone compass for a rough north alignment. Using Kstars/Indi/Ekos, started a polar alignment by steering the OTA to Kitalpha (star). Using phd2 drift alignment tool (running on the Odroid via remote desktop), started at -250'.  Tightened on the right side of the mount to get to -155', then -72', then overshot to 5.8'. Ultimately, after alot of back and forth (and a meridian flip that almost went unnoticed) got this down to -0.2'. Clear skies after 11pm, little to no wind. Seeing is not expected to be great. Clearoutside.com forecast for 9/25...downloaded at ~10:50pm.  Montgomery County Astrophysical Observatory forecast from cleardarksky.c...

 7/3/22 -- Great day, clear night.  Moon at 17% and setting as the evening started.  No wind, mild temps, relatively low humidity.  Tonight's target: IC 5070 (the Pelican Nebula). Started PHD2 on the Odroid XU4 with an initial drift alignment error of -200' (pre-meridian flip).  Tightened on the right side of the mount (facing the front).  First adjustment, -186'...-150'...-65'...then over-corrected... 13.5'.  Ultimately settled to -0.85'. Ultimately, Ekos/Indi collected 108x120s lights.  Covered the OTA and pointed it at the house... then started a batch script at ~4am to collect bias and dark frames during the remainder of darkness.  In the afternoon, covered the OTA with a white tee shirt and collected flat frames at 1/1000 at ISO 100 along with dark flat frames for Astro Pixel Processor. In examining Telescopius' telescope simulator, concluded that a 2x binning (Scale set to 0.5 in the integration tab) would likely be best.  This wou...

 20220629 -- At 11:57:01, the Indi Allsky  camera on the back deck caught a meteor!  The system has an Svbony SV305  with the ancient C-mount Kodak 16mm movie lens.  Astrometry results . This shows a size of 12.4 x 7.78 deg and a pixel pitch of 35 arcsec/pixel.  While quite a stretch in the sky, this appears to align with  June Bootids . Indi Allsky camera shot for 06/29/2022 at 23:57 showing a meteor. AAS WorldWide Telescope view for the  plate solved shot .

04/19/2022:  Refurbished & extended the deck... changing the perspective on the sky from the back yard.  Southern views are now possible without lugging the telescope to the front yard.  With a clear night, this calls for some testing.  Albeit with an enormous (if waning) moon at 90%.  Conditions overall: Meteoblue Astro prediction for 04/19/2022. Clear skies, giant moon. Cleardarksky.com prediction for MoCo seems to agree (mostly). Note Seeing is also frowny face. Test target...largely inappropriate for this kind of sky but it's just a test... is  M65  simply because it's exceptionally high in the southern sky...and that's the interesting aspect of the sky this deck extension may open up. Indi Allsky is setup with the (ichy) 8mm Kodak c-mount lens... but is showing this exposure profile from ~20:30 to ~21:00: Indi Allsky exposure in Seconds from sundown to ~21:00. Single 13.8s exposure from Indi Allsky cam with the 8mm Kodak C-mount lens showing a...