Article initially written for the AAO’s Publication revealed on twenty ninth June 2021.
Over the last yr I’ve been establishing my telescope within the yard to do astrophotography as an newbie astronomer. This has been doable because of getting mount (Skywatcher AZ-EQ6-Professional) that permits me to do auto-guiding, and utilizing a little bit however very intelligent gadget (it’s a modified Raspberri Pi manufactured by ZWO referred to as “ASIAir”) that permits me to attach mount and cameras (the primary digicam for astrophotography and the auxiliary digicam for auto-guiding) collectively, being every part managed utilizing my son’s iPad (who, with solely 8 years, has been additionally serving to me with all of this). Within the final months I’ve been in a position to get a course of so clean that I solely want 10 minutes for setup (checking polar alignment, guiding, focus) after which the telescope is observing all of the night time (it would routinely transfer to a parked place on the finish of the run).
I need to confess this has been quite a lot of enjoyable for me, additionally for preserving additional busy and awake through the many conferences / workshops in the course of the night time all of us are having these days. I’m getting some good photographs, notably of nebulae, as I’m utilizing some ultra-narrow (3.5nm thickness) H-alpha and [O III] filters. One in every of my favorite photographs is the Cat’s Paw nebula, who would have instructed me just a few few years in the past I will get such a picture with all these particulars utilizing a 80mm refractor telescope in Sydney!
Therefore, when final Could, I used to be beginning to use TAIPAN and observing with this new instrument, I couldn’t assist myself…
Whereas Tayyaba and Anthony helped me to get skilled for TAIPAN observing, I made a decision to examine if the instrument could possibly be used for observing HII areas within the outskirts of the close by spiral galaxy M 83, in addition to observing the dwarf galaxies within the neighbourhood. Sadly this has been exhausting for the 1.2m UKST due to the faintness of the targets, however a minimum of I obtained some check knowledge from the central components of M83 and a few dwarf galaxies, together with stunning starburst NGC 5253.
Nonetheless, I used to be thrilled to be utilizing TAIPAN to watch M83 whereas, on the similar time, in my yard, my small telescope was additionally observing M 83 to get a brand new color-image of this galaxy. It was fairly thrilling and rewarding!
This picture continues to be work in course of, as a result of we have to take normally lots of of frames in every filter to get astronomical picture to mitigate the sunshine air pollution plus decreasing the background noise as a lot as we are able to. And, in fact, dealing later with the processing of the information (it’s not that tough because it sounds, there may be truly some software program already obtainable for newbie astronomers that does this in a short time in a really environment friendly means, even contemplating darks, flats, offsets and median stacking with completely different choices). Additionally, I nonetheless want so as to add the H-alpha knowledge on this picture to stress the star-forming areas within the spiral disk of M 83. Sadly, the climate over Sydney over the past weeks has not being superb for astrophotography, however I hope to get the remainder of the information quickly.
Moreover, on Wednesday twenty sixth Could we loved a complete lunar eclipse. I took nearly 2000 photographs of the occasion whereas I used to be collaborating in a web based reside occasion with many colleges in Spain (8000+ views through the day). The telescope setup on this case was completely different, as I used my CANON 5D Mark III DSLR as predominant digicam hooked up to my telescope. However, despite the fact that the totality of this lunar eclipse was brief (solely round quarter-hour), I obtained a really good picture of the eclipsed moon. For this picture I mixed the identical knowledge independently for getting the celebrities and the moon, and merged them collectively later.
