Petri Kehusmaa Astroblog

I took this image an hour ago. This comet has been very popular target lately due to it’s sudden brightening. It is clearly visible to naked eye and with binoculars it’s spectacular fuzzy ball. This image has been taken with STL11K and TMB80 APO in my new observatory.

There is now live webcam feed coming inside my observatory. The picture is updated every 2 minute. You can access webcam by clicking the link at the right bar.

It took about 4 hours to get my new observatory computer up and running. Now there are 3 serial ports, 4 port USB Extender and 4 USB2 ports available for equipment (UPS, Boltwood Cloud Sensor II, SBIG STL11K, SBIG ST7, DDW, Digital Feather Touch Focuser, AP 900GTOx2). It all seem to work together! This computer also sends cloud sensor graphics to my web site via FTP.

Cloud Sensor Graphics will be out of service today while I change my observatory control computer to one with more CPU/memory capacity. Estimated out-of-service time is 2 hours.

This is the start of my ‘Bubble Nebula Wide Field’ -project. My goal is to take very long Ha exposure and at least 1 hour of each color channel (RGB). This is 170 minutes of Ha. Taken with TMB80 APO with TV 0.8 fr/ff and STL-11K-C2 CCD.

This great nebula has been in my target list for a long time and it was time to capture it with my TMB80 APO and STL-11K. There is not a great deal of details but I like the composition and color. This is HaGB combined and total exposure time is 3.5 hours. Thanks for looking.

Last night I was able to finalize my permanent pier polar alignment with PEMProv2 (for now at least). The measured alignment accuracy was pretty impressive, 0.2 arc-secs in azimuth and 0.4 arc-secs in altitude. With this accuracy, I’m able to do 10 minutes unguided exposures with less than 1 arc-sec tracking error!