"A comet's tale"

A brief outline of my project methodology for observing comets.

Link to comet astrometry material published in Minor Planet Electronic Circulars

Correcting the Catalogues - Deep imaging in Hydrogen Alpha

By working in a small team I reduced the cost of using world-class equipment right down to under $6.00 per hour! The project taught me about the dangers of sub-dividing large areas of nebulosity into smaller named sections. In many cases longer exposures proved that the named sections were just somewhat brighter sections of a larger whole.

On the other hand team member Carl was correct when he said soon after the project started "I would never have believed that we could have have taken images of this quality at such a low price. It is brilliant to be able to show that the standard catalogues - including those in Simbad and Vizier - misrepresent the complexity of the Hydrogen Alpha regions of the sky."

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Using Exotic Filters - Hydrogen Alpha, SII and OIII

IC 1848 in Cassiopeia

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The Moon

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M27

Exotic Filters

A short exposure, 5 minutes per filter on AREO2 with RGB = SII, Halpha, OIII (Hubble palette). You can see at a glance that the Halpha and the OIII are concentrated in different regions of the planetary nebula and that there is very little SII present.

Standard Filters

A short exposure, 5 minutes per filter on AREO2 with RGB filters. These filters transmit a far higher percentage of light that the exotic filters so for any given length of exposure you will get a less noisy image.

A bit of detective work!

A short exposure, 5 minutes per filter on AREO2 with RGB =IR R G filters. It is worth studying this image and the one above it closely. Can you see one star that is not present at all in "ordinary" light but is quite bright in the IR part of the spectrum. Have a look towards the top right-hand corner!

The scope for an interesting project is clear.

Favourite Images

I have nothing but admiration for astronomical imagers. Some of them have a level of skill and patience that I just know I will never have. Having said that even I can create reasonable images using the RASO facilities. Click here to see what I mean.

This was a short project I did on globular clusters, open clusters and diffuse and planetary nebulae.

When the magazine Astronomy Now ran their Messier Challenge I was surprised to see how long it took for all the celestial highlights to be imaged at a suitable quality and I was stunned to see that I had had more images accepted than any other competitor.

Lots to see in a short time

What can I image in 60 seconds on RASO Equipment?

Some interesting imaging experiments done when I was near the bottom of the learning curve.

Presentations

Powerpoint presentation on filters and exposure times