Een verslag van mijn poging om de samenstand van de Komeet 41P/T-G-K met M108 en de uil nevel (Nog geen foto, daar wordt hard aan gewerkt :-))
Sometimes you are just lucky
Yesterday it was such a day. The weather had been clouded and moist for more than a week or so. If there was a little window to shoot between the clouds, the moon was interfering quit a lot.
But yesterday, all pieces of the puzzle fitted nicely together. We had a low-pressure area with a constant rain sweeping over the Netherlands the day before yesterday producing about 15mm of rain during the day and wind gusts up to 80km/h.
Luckily it passed by and left behind nice cloudless and clean air. Winds settled and there was no moon until 3am. And above all, it happened on the evening that the conjunction of Comet 41P/Tuttle-Giacobini-Kresak occurred…..OOoooh Boy I was so happy.
I put up the Star Adventurer equipped with the SonyA6000+Nikon300mmf4 combo and as a counter weight I put the 50mm mini guide-scope with the LVI-Smartguider2.
The conjunction happened right overhead at the moment I wanted to shoot it (23:40pm), so it was a bit though to get a good composition lying on my back on the cold terras trying not to kick the tripod legs so I could start over the alignment again.
After a while I managed to get good alignment and wanted to start the guiding. However, the guide-scope didn’t want to lock on a star…I tried several different stars, but each and every time I got the message from the LVI that a good guidestar couldn’t be found.
Not trying to waste any more precious time, I decided to push ISO to 800 instead of 400 and go for 30sec subs unguided instead of the 60sec guided I was planning to shoot. It turned out that the single sub of 30sec showed nice round stars, but a little purple fringing around brighter stars. Therefore, I just closed diaphragm 1 stop to f5.6 and stars looked perfect.
Then, I started my sequence of collecting data, which was 3h19min. in totall (399 subs of 30sec) Currently I’m running the “Star-stack” on my PC and will blend this stack with a “Comet-stack” using PSCC.
So currently I do not have an image to show to you yet, but I’m working on it
Keep you posted, and I invite you to post your conjunction images here as well off course.