Ruined Images

Ok, enough equipment posts for now. Last night I got out to do some imaging. Hurray! Summertime is tough in Florida for decent nights—high temperatures and high humidity mean afternoon thunderstorms pretty much every day, and usually poor seeing at night. The past week or two have seen cloud cover as well, late into the evening. Not last night, though—last night was pretty good, and I took advantage of it.

Now I’m fairly new to CCD imaging—the images I took last night represent only my fourth, fifth, and sixth attempts at LRGB CCD imaging. Two of my targets—M27 and M52 (picked somewhat randomly by the way)-- were one’s I’d never imaged before. The other, M31, is a favorite, although this was my first attempt with the CCD.

Anyways, as it turned out, some of the most interesting occurrences of the night had nothing to do at all with the targets. Now when I’m imaging, sometimes I watch the subs come in, and other times I just look at the sky. I find it ironic that since I’ve started CCD imaging, and the computer is set up to automatically take the subs for me, I actually spend more time just looking up, not less. Wonderful! Anyways, at this point, I was doing luminance subs on M27, and I was watching them roll in, when this popped up on one:

Veteran imagers will recognize this instantly. A meteor, caught on film! Ok, caught on digital at least. Neat! I’ve had this happen before, but not often (when I’m not specifically targeting meteors). Sure, the frame is no use to me now for M27—but I’ve got plenty of others to use!

But even more intriguing was later. I went back to do another set of luminance subs (I thought I had accidentally used the wrong filter on the first set—turned out I didn’t), and I caught this:

What is that? My first thought was a satellite, but it was moving sooo slowly! I mean, you have to realize, these are 10 second subs, and the field of view of my CCD is pretty small—so this thing is moving slow! Here’s a shot of the next few subs:

My next thought was that it’s an asteroid. That would explain it moving so slowly, as it would be much further away. But in that case, it almost seems like it was moving too fast! So I’m not sure. I’m going to do more research. I’m thinking it’s a satellite, but I had the foresight to scribble down the time of one of the subs, so hopefully I can figure out how to check and see if there could have been something else out there.

So quite a few subs got ruined. Perfect! I love ruined images. I was watching the subs come in when the satellite/asteroid/whatever appeared above, and I admit I leaned forward in my seat, awake, alert. I decided I would try to follow the object, I could always come back to M27. Unfortunately, but true at least to my prowess with the telescope, I slewed in the wrong direction, twice, at maximum speed, and lost it completely. Wonderful. Oh well.

And in case you’re wondering, I did get some nice shots. Here’s my preliminary version of M27:

Yeah, my processing skills need a lot of work. But I’m pretty pleased. I had never imaged this object before, in color or otherwise and, well, I’m happy with it, for now. And isn’t that what its all about?