Joe; A very nice image of a most interesting object. Thank you for sharing it with us. Keep 'em coming. Ed Lunt --- Joe Bauman <bau@desnews.com> wrote:
Hi All,
Here's a view I took Monday morning from the site I call "Pit 'N Pole West," a few miles from Vernon, Tooele County:
http://www.utahastronomy.com/view_photo.php?set_albumName=Joeb&id=6946_G
It is the first time I was able to get an autoguider to work. It did its job well, and I could watch the screen as the autoguider made adjustments to bring the pointing back to where it should be. Guy (Diveboss to this newsgroup) built a wonderful mount for my refractor, which I used as the guide scope. The guider was a Meade Deep Sky Imager, used just to guide, not take photos. The main telescope was my Meade 12" and I used an SBIG camera to take the views. This is a version of that doesn't have a guiding chip, so I had to use the autoguider or go back to the old days when I did do some hand-guiding.
I took a number of 2-minute exposures with blue, red and green filters. Then I sorted through them and chose the best three of each type. I put those three together, then used the resulting red, green and blue versions to make a color picture.
Perhaps the raw files could be processed better. Tyler is going to give it a try for me, when I am able to send him the files.
Meanwhile, I found it truly uplifting that I could go to a desert area near Vernon, Tooele County, and park between the roads where the dirt routes make a Y, and get a beautiful view that has nothing to do with our world. NGC 6946 is about 10 million light-years away. Because it's seen through the disk of our Milky Way Galaxy, we're looking at two galaxies at the same time. It's a faint object, and you can see dust lanes and nebular-looking regions in NGC 6946. This galaxy has been the site of more supernovas than any other known to humans over the past century or so, but I couldn't find any in this view.
Thanks, Joe
_______________________________________________ Utah-Astronomy mailing list Utah-Astronomy@mailman.xmission.com
http://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/utah-astronomy
Visit the Photo Gallery: http://www.utahastronomy.com
__________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com