We had a great clear spell 7/23 through 7/27 with only moderate lunar interference in the early hours of the morning. This is 14 hours of exposure divided equally across Hydrogen-alpha, Oxygen [III], and Sulfur[II] emission lines. Scope was an AP130GTX with Apogee U16 CCD on an AP1200GTO mount. Located outside Clinton, TN. The following are crops from the main image.
Finally, here is the nearly full frame image encompassing the whole area.
Due to a moisture breach of my camera causing frosting issues which caused me to throw out all but 4.5 hours of data out of 18 I figured I might as well post this as it’s not going to get much better. Image scale was 1.31 arcsec/pixel which seems to give fairly decent sampling for the average seeing here in East Tennessee. Imaging location just outside Clinton, TN with average SQM measurements ranging from 20.1 to 20.4 mag/arcsec^2.
I recently replaced the dome control electronics after the Foster Systems controller bit the dust and I replaced with a MaxDome II controller for rotation and shutter operation. It’s working flawlessly so far and I couldn’t be happier. I threw the 5″ refractor back in the observatory with the 16803 chipped camera for a widefield rig at 2.2 arcsec/pixel resolution. Drizzle processing yields better star shapes/sampling than the low resolution would suggest. Both images are cropped from the same image with 20.5 hours of total exposure time in the traditional Hubble Pallet.
I’ve got multiple items across our home, garage, and the observatory which suffered from a local discharge on 7/6. The observatory was the worst hit with the computer, mount, 2 ethernet switches, powerline ethernet adapters, weather monitor, and possibly other items damaged.
Work continues to repair, replace, and rebuild. Unfortunately, I think I’ll be down for a little while as I continue to evaluate the extent of the damage. Hope to be back up in time for some summer nebula imaging but not holding my breath.
The dome isn’t far off now!
I’ve cut a few more trees and have updated the horizon survey accordingly. The local light domes for Clinton and Oak Ridge are easily visible in the East and South.
Site selection will be completed soon when several stumps are removed in the general area where the observatory will be situated.
