Seeing Red October

Artist's conception
of my general mood
during recent
imaging sessions.

For the astronomically afflicted in Arizona, October brings a return to the lower deserts where day time temperatures are mild and night time temperatures can often be enjoyed in just a jacket.  The longer nights mean more time under the stars and I entered the autumn months with intent to take advantage of it. 

After September's ill-fated trip to northern Arizona and nearly freezing to death, I was finally sufficiently motivated to make a long time dream of mine come true.  You see, I love camping.  I love astronomy.  I love the great outdoors and hiking and generally being away from civilization.  There's a sizeable contingent of observers in my astronomy club who bring an RV of one sort or another for weekend (and longer) observing sessions.  Some of the club members have Class A's, some have fifth wheels or travel trailers and some have the ubiquitous pop up camper.  My wife and I have been looking for some time at various trailers and have even rented them on a couple of occasions while trying to decide what was best for our family.  During the first week of October I placed an order for a new travel trailer.  Anxiously, we awaited the notification that it had come off of the production line and we could pick it up for ourselves. 

In the meantime, I was able to get out one weekend to do some imaging and test out the freshly serviced mount.  I had high expectations.  I did manage to shoot a lot of frames that night, but it was a constant fight that evening with the autoguider and it was well past midnight before I started getting what I considered to be acceptable sub-exposures.  I captured a large set of frames for M42 at various exposure lengths.  The one image that I thought was pretty good was my attempt for the first time at the California Nebula (NGC 1499).  Shown below is my processed image.

NGC 1499 - California Nebula
Celestron 11" Edge HD w/Hyperstar 3
6.3 Megapixel QHY8PRO CCD Camera
16 sub-exposures x 3 minutes
Capture & Pre-process in Maxim DL 5.15
Post-Processing in Adobe Photoshop CS5

Once again, the evening seemed more like work than fun when it came to imaging.  The mount seemed to perform okay, but it did make some sounds like it was having to work to slew the telescope in some orientations.  I've really been missing visual observing since taking up astrophotography and I'm hoping to soon get to a state where I can setup the imaging rig and it becomes self managing for several hours at a time so that I can also observe visually.  It's truly a treat now that my wife has taken up visual observing as well.  I did manage to do some observing with her that night as well as a couple of other club members who were in attendance.

Actual normal life got in the way to some extent at this point.  I did double duty on a couple of consulting gigs over the course of three weeks, averaging just over 80 hours of work each week.  Sending my daughter off to her first homecoming dance and then celebrating my 21st wedding anniversary with my stupendously awesome bride chewed up what was left of October.

The Veterans Day holiday weekend of November 11th was used for the most exhausting road trip that we've ever undertaken to go and pick up the travel trailer.  Because the delivery charge from the manufacturer to Phoenix, AZ was somewhere north of $3000, we opted to go and get it ourselves figuring we could do it for less than $1000.  Even my wife was impressed with the stats - 11 states and 3100 miles in 76 hours. 



Somewhere in central Nebraska I was able to snap the first picture of the new travel trailer.

Upon returning home we immediately made plans for a quick "shake-out" trip with the new rig the next weekend during the last quarter moon.  And here's where it all went south again.  While slewing to the first calibration star that night, the RA motor made a horrible whining sound and bound up to a complete stop.  The mount would not slew past the meridian to put the telescope on the west side of the mount for anything.  I had learned my lesson at this point.  I simply shut the mount off, put the cameras away and had a wonderful evening observing visually with my wife.



Setting up the scopes at KOFA over
Thanksgiving weekend. 



With the long Thanksgiving weekend coinciding with new moon this year I desperately wanted to get the mount squared away as we had plans to go to one of my favorite places in the world - the KOFA National Wildlife Refuge.  So I set the mount up on my kitchen counter and prepared to dismantle it in an effort to straighten things out.  Wouldn't you know, it didn't bind up at all.  It worked perfectly as expected.  Of course this was without any equipment or load on the mount but that shouldn't make a difference as a well balanced load places minimal stress on the mount itself.  Fast forward to the next weekend.  We had setup camp on the refuge and anxiously awaited nightfall with six other fellow astronomers.  As soon as I slewed the telescope to Vega the binding noises began again and the telescope simply would not slew to anything even close to its intended targets.  I shut down the telescope and went about visual observing again with my 15" Obsession Classic.  Again I thoroughly enjoyed my evening and I was able to glean considerable knowledge from one of the most accomplished amateur astronomers out there. 





My youngest daughter Emily at
KOFA.  We're standing on a 40º
incline here with the rocks behind
 going 1000 feet (305 m) higher.

 Next morning, I tore apart the mount and attempted to adjust the spacing of the RA worm gear.  I seemed to have some success as the telescope would slew to any part of the sky without making any funny sounds.  Because it was daylight it wasn't possible to know if the slews were truly accurate, but the telescope was slewing to the correct portions of the sky and stopping in the vicinity of the targets.  We left for a hike in some of the most extreme, hostile, unspoiled, untouched and truly beautiful terrain left in North America.  First, we drove 2 miles to the south on one of the few "roads" in the refuge.  Please understand that the word road is a greatly exaggerated term for this particular thoroughfare - but that's one of the reasons that I absolutely adore KOFA.  After our 2 mile drive, it was a two mile hike across the desert to reach the entrance of the canyon that we had decided to explore.  Surrounded by rock walls of volcanic origin that rise out of the desert in nearly vertical unbroken chunks of rock 1100' (335 m) into the air, we began exploring to our hearts content. 

After an afternoon nap and an early dinner we waited for sunset.  I turned on the telescope mount and began to align the CGE again.  It immediately started making cranky noises like the gears were binding up again.  I shut it down and packed it up in the twilight.  I spent the evening instead observing visually with the other astronomers present.  My friend Chris and I made a game of seeing how deep we could go with the Obsession visually.  I don't consider myself an expert visual observer by any means - that's why I got into imaging - but I was able to see galaxies down to about magnitude 15.2 with the 15" Obsession and 13mm Ethos.  Chris was able to see a little deeper even. 

So the moral of my long, sad story is simply that astrophotography is really, really hard.  Things go wrong and it gets frustrating and I wanted to make sure that I illustrate that so that someone else who might read this while they're struggling will know that it's not just them.  It happens to everyone at some point I think.  So I've resolved to just take a step back and start again.  Currently, the mount is in for some service work with a different vendor and I hope to provide a full positive report soon.  Once I get the mount back, I'll start again - one step at a time.  Hopefully that'll be in just a couple of weeks.  And hopefully, the bad mojo is behind me and I'll spend the remainder of the winter cranking out spiffy new images.  

In looking back at the last few months I've pushed it pretty hard.  I changed to a new mount, added a new guidescope, and switched from DSLR to a cooled CCD camera all in about a six week period in mid-summer.  I may now just be feeling the frustrations of all that change at once.  I've resolved to move with a little more deliberation in this next phase.   Thanks for reading.