Following a change out of my guide camera to a QHY5P-II C model I was glad of some clear conditions on the night of the 9th August to set it up, calibrate and optimise it. With guiding established I used my main imaging camera (an ASI 533MM Pro) to take some tests images of M16 (The Eagle nebula) in Ha; shooting just 8 mins of data (4 x 2 min subs) which looked fine in this rich hydrogen region of the Milky Way. I then went on to image M31 (the Andromeda galaxy) in RGB shooting half a dozen images with each filter, giving a little over half an hour’s worth of data in total (18 x 2 min subs) which also looked fine. Finally I used the remaining hours of night time to shoot some OIII and SII data (9 x 4 min OIII & 10 x 4 min SII) of the Soul nebula (IC1848) to complete an SHO composition of the nebula using the Ha data I had taken on the 7th August.
The Eagle nebula
Whilst imaging I also used a Sony A77 Milc camera driven by an AstroTrac on a fixed tripod to take some time lapse data of the sky using a 16mm lens to try to capture any early Perseid meteors. I set up my deckchair for some comfortable viewing and despite seeing several bright meteors, my camera was pointed the wrong way to capture all but one (as is usual for such undertakings!) I attach the image showing the meteor captured at 02:09 hrs which can be seen in the lower right of the frame during this 30s exposure with the camera set to ISO 3200 and F2.8. The wide field image afforded by the 16mm lens used covers some 85 x 48° of sky and due to the high sensitivity settings used also captured M31 and M33 galaxies amongst others in the frame. The glare of the last quarter moon was partly shielded by the house, but caused an all over sky glow.
Capturing Perseids
M16 was stacked in DSS and processed in Pixinsight and Adobe CS2. M31 and IC1848 were stacked in Pixinsight and processed in Pixinsight and Adobe CS2. The single meteor image was processed in Adobe CS2.
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