June 21, 2009: Henry Coe State Park

Stephen Migol

While most of the TACos were up at the GSSP, I celebrated the shortest night of the year up at Henry Coe SP. I'd originally planned to go up on Friday evening, but suffered an allergy attack and didn't want to have a relapse with the high winds that were blowing. Once the winds died down by Sunday, I was raring to go, as the car had been packed since Friday.

Arrived just after sundown, no body else around. There was a steady breeze across the lot, but with strategic car placement, I was able to shield most of the gear from this distraction.

My polar alignment was right on the money this time around, much better than other sessions.

The valley didn't show signs of clouding up, so the available sky for observing and imaging was limited.

Got started doing some basic eye-candy imaging with my DSLR, going after M27 since it was well placed. Getting critical focus was difficult, even with using a diffraction grating. I'm still not sure how to use that properly. Sometimes I get it right, sometimes I'm not sure. I tried using a sky glow filter, but noticed that this caused the appearance of extra lines, making it harder to focus properly. I burned about an hour with this trial and error.

Finally ditched the filter and went without.

Imaged M27 and a swath of NGC7000. Between the two, I unfortunately kicked a tripod leg and even with doing a re-alignment, my images of NGC7000 show field rotation that may be hard to fix. I'll get this target again with a wider-field view.

The processed images of M27 are here:
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3620/3651026738_56b25ee5d7_b.jpg
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3643/3650816519_6aa6a951d2_b.jpg

Many thanks go to Rogelio for giving the pointers on using Pix Insight LE for processing.

During the imaging session, I used a set of Celestron 15x70 binocs that I've received from a late friend who also enjoyed stargazing. It was the first time I've used them in the field and I was greatly enjoying sweeping the milky way while the camera snapped away on autopilot.

I packed up at around 3:15 am, with the eastern horizon starting to get a little grey with the coming light of dawn.

A short but productive session!

Things learned:

1. Don't kick the tripod.
2. Still learning focus methods, especially challenged by skyglow filters.
3. Need to record better darks for a processing library.

I'll be out of town for a couple of weeks, so the next chance I get to go observing will be in late July. Hopefully Coe will still be open!

Stephen