Imaging the Messier Objects Remotely from Your Laptop Book Review

This is not a book teaching you how to remotely connect your observatory to your home laptop or PC so you can control your telescope from the warmth of your lounge. I don’t think that topic would fill a book anyway. Instead this book is about renting telescopes around the world for imaging and controlling them from your laptop. Doesn’t have to be your laptop though it could probably be a desktop PC, Apple Mac, tablet or even smart phone.

I am amazed that more people don’t just rent a telescope for a couple of hours which is in a country with cloudless skies. You can probably rent a better telescope and imaging rig than you could ever afford, and you don’t have to maintain it or provide an observatory or garden shed to contain it. Or I wonder if people consider selling all their astronomy equipment and renting time on a remote scope instead or we just love looking at our scopes and we love the hands-on feel.

Anyway, the book, this is a chunky 520 pages book from Springer. Most of the book is filled with individual details on how to image each of the 110 Messier objects using remotely controlled telescopes. The author has used several different scopes and tells you which he used to image a certain M object. With each Messier object you get a constellation chart pinpointing the object, sometimes you get a negative image, but there is always the resulting image that was taken. You also get information like RA and Dec, Field of View, exposure time used, date taken, universal time, moon phase, scale of image and detailed information on what telescope was used this includes the mount used, aperture of scope, the CCD make and model, colour or mono, pixel size and the overall location of the telescope.

Before you get into the main body of the book with the list of Messier objects, the first 50 pages are all about remote telescopes. This section discusses the advantages of renting time and the different telescope sites as well as the individual telescopes and camera equipment (e.g. FOV etc) that were used at each site to take the images shown in the book. There is also information on using RA and Dec and how to use this information for inputting what you want to image on the remote site’s web site.

To be honest this book is more useful than you think, it’s not just for remotely controlled telescopes. This is good for home setups as well. Now you can look at the Messier object you want to image at home and see what the author imaged and what equipment was used and his results. If you have similar equipment at home, you can see what results you should also expect. Alternatively, if the author used a larger telescope on an object and you have a relatively small telescope then you can find out that object is not really going to image well for you.

Chapter 6 holds a quick reference image library for a list of NGC objects which is also great for reference when imaging. Most of the astronomical images are black and white. Images of telescopes are in colour and so are the constellation charts. Don’t forget that the remote telescopes will probably only take the images, it will then still be up to you to process the images and make them look good.

Overall

Some others may just see this book as 50 pages of information about renting telescope time with a big chunk of the book just listing 110 of the Messier objects and details about each image in turn. Overall though I really like this book as I think I would find it useful for my own imaging at home by using the Messier section for reference. I also welcome the first 50 pages of information on remote telescope sites as it could be the way forward for astronomers who don’t want to spend vast amounts of money on equipment or they may not have the space to store it or maintain it. Especially if you don’t have an observatory and you must drag all your equipment out every night and set it up every time you want to use it, that can become tedious – I know first-hand. Another reason I think for using a remote telescope is that astrophotography has become very popular since 2010 and most objects in the sky have been imaged so many times (just Google some!). So, you need to think about imaging with bigger telescopes or in a different way with new colour palettes for example, remote telescopes let you do this with minimal cost.

Where can I buy Imaging the Messier Objects Remotely from Your Laptop?

You can buy Imaging the Messier Objects Remotely from Your Laptop from Amazon UK

EQ8 FTDI EQDIR USB Cable Upgrade

After changing from RS232-to-Serial cables that connect my Lakeside focusers to my PC, I decided it was time to upgrade the EQ8 Dir cable as well. That was an older one from HiTec Astro and ran using the Prolific drivers.

This time I decided to purchase the 5m EQ8 cable from First Light Optics. I went for the Lynx Astro FTDI EQDIR USB Adapter for Sky-Watcher Mounts. The 5m was ideal as it provided me with a nice lot of cable from the mount head down the pillar along the floor to the PC.

I plugged it in to my Windows 10 PC and there were no drivers to install, I checked which COM port it was on and chose that COM port in the EQMod tool program and it found the mount straightaway.

Well worth the £30 I spent on the cable. I recommend you change to the FTDI version if you are still running the Prolific version and are having problems with it.

Mercury Transit 2019 Report

The Mercury transit 2019 for the UK was on Monday 11th November with it hitting the middle of the Sun at about 3pm UK time. Start time was around 12.30. Not the best time to have a transit in the winter when the Sun is so low down all day and it sets really early at about 4pm.

The weather was not kind either a 20mph wind with heavy rain in the morning and lots of cloud. But at one point there was a clear section for about 10 minutes. I did not bother opening up the observatory and imaging properly with a high frame rate camera once I saw the pouring rain and cloud cover. Instead I decided to just get the Coronado PST out on a simple tripod and have a look.

It’s so funny when you first start looking for Mercury on the face of the Sun, you expect it to be bigger than it is. Here I am looking for a big black dot, when in reality it’s a tiny black dot, which seems only a few pixels across.

I tuned out the H-alpha part of the spectrum on the PST in order to get a better contrast and a plain orange Sun. I then tried my Moto G6 phone against the eyepiece (the PST has a really narrow FOV) the phone really over saturated the image, so I grabbed my Canon DSLR with the kit lens and put that up against a 20mm eyepiece in the PST and imaged by hand. Again auto mode on the camera over exposed the images, so I changed to a faster shutter speed.

I took them into my favourite image editor and tweaked them a little to try and bring out the little black dot (Mercury) some more, and here they are:

They are not that great, but I best I could do without a tracking mount and a proper camera attached. I was happy to have something.

Observatory Roof Leaks and Felting

Over the years I have had to fill in and patch the odd part of the pent shed felt roof where leaks have appeared of I think birds beaks have penetrated the roof felt. Some times it was just filling the odd hole or replacing sections of felt. It was now time to replace the whole of the roof felt. Not bad really after about 10 years.

I had been seeing the odd leak in the roof and that was being absorbed by the black carpet. Why did I ever put carpet in the observatory, especially black you can never see anything on the floor if you drop anything. I think I wanted to make it more homely.

Anyway I removed the carpet and decided on trying to locate some good quality felt. The search began on the internet looking for felt at Screwfix (who don’t stock felt!) then onto Jewsons and Travis Perkins, local shed manufacturers, fencing companies and other hardware outlets. You can even buy roof felt on Ebay and Amazon. You just have to pay a few pounds more for delivery. Thing was I didn’t want to wait a week for delivery, I knew the weather was going to be OK for late October for two days so I needed the felt ASAP.

I ended up purchasing some felt from my local Wickes store. I bought the upgraded versions which come in 8m lengths. I paid £30 for the roll and I must admit the quality looks really good and it is quite light in weight, as some can be really heavy and that can’t be good for my roof. I also did make a trip to Screwfix to purchase some felt adhesive, which now comes in a tube as opposed to using a brush and a tin of bitumen. Although it turns out I did use some of the bitumen tin anyway as it was better than the Screwfix felt adhesive. Although that could have been because of the time of year, you really want a warm day in the Summer to do this job to let the tar heat up and bond. I don’t think a 11 degree day really works – why didn’t I do this in Summer?

I started the next wet dewy morning removing the hatch doors and then worked on removing all of the old felt. I was amazed how bad it had actually got as the felt had dried up and shrunk around the shed pin nails leaving quite big holes in the felt.

I proceeded to cut three strips for the pent shed roof. But as I have a raised section in the middle that support the traps doors on the roof I could not work out how to fold the felt or how we’d managed to do fit it over 10 years earlier. I couldn’t see any folds in the old felt I had just removed either. Never mind in the end I just made a couple of cuts and folds and had to perform the odd patch.

It turns out that the 8m roll of felt is not really enough for my 8ft shed with overlaps. So I didn’t have enough felt to cover the trap doors as well, luckily I had some other spare felt, but that was of the heavier type which did not match. So next time, buy 2 rolls!

After day 1, I was far from finished, so I made it watertight put the doors back on the roof and went in. The next day I started again and managed to nearly complete the changeover. That’s the problem with October days you only get to work until about 4pm before it gets too dark or cold. I’m glad I got it finished on the 2nd day as on the 3rd day I was expecting a good test, with heavy rain forecast. Boy did it rain, it poured down and I’m glad to say that evening upon inspection I could find no leaks inside.

Now I look forward to hoovering it out, putting the furniture back in and re-attaching all the cables back into the PC. Hopefully I won’t have to do it again for another 10 years at least. That is if by then at the age of 57 I will be able to lift the heavy doors off of the roof and put them back on, we’ll see. I suppose my son who will be a late teenager by then may be able to help me.

I now look at these lovely observatory sheds with their sliding roofs that run on rails and I think to myself why didn’t I make one of those instead? and the answer has always been the garden is too small to take the external posts and runners.

The Art of Astrophotography Book Review

Not another astrophotography book I hear you say, now it seems that observational astronomy it dwindling and now everyone wants to image. Why wouldn’t you though, it nice to share pretty pictures. Imaging equipment can cost a lot of money though, but there are some reasonably priced high frame rate cameras on the market now. In addition to this a lot of the image capture software is free to use.

The Art of Astrophotography by Ian Morison is a really interesting imaging book mainly because it contains real images you can expect to create on a home astronomy set up with mid-range equipment. I also like it because each section is not too large and a lot of colour images break up the text nicely.

All areas of imaging with various equipment are covered in The Art of Astrophotography. The book begins by teaching you how to image star trails with a digital camera it then moves onto digital camera imaging of constellations. Finally you get told how to image the sky with a digital camera with a tracking mount. This enables you to image for longer with round stars. All that is within the first 30 pages and the full book has over 250 pages so you can already see this book covers a lot about imaging.

Next we have imaging the moon with a smart phone or compact digital camera and then with a DSLR camera.  From there we have imaging the Pleaides with a DSLR and a small refractor telescope.  NExt there is imaging M42 with a modified DSLR camera and of course how to process the image afterwards.

After the initial section on images The Art of Astrophotography  then looks at astrophotography accessories, including telescope types and flatteners.  It then gets slightly more complicated by introducing the science of using a guide camera for imaging and about how to cool a standard DSLR camera.

The author next takes on imaging the North American and Pelican Nebula with a refractor and an DSLR as well as discussing how to cut down on light pollution in your images.

Imaging planets is covered next with either a DSLR or a high frame rate camera. Now we are using Registax for processing and looking at planetary imaging with RGB filters. Whilst still using Registax the book moves on to looking at imaging the moon with a high frame rate camera or DSLR.

Now it’s the turn of the Sun, and that is imaged in white light and Ha using either a standard refractor with filters and specific Ha telescopes.  There is also information on how to best image comets and meteors and processing them using Deep Sky Stacker.

Next the book moves onto covering the more expensive colour and mono cooled cameras and how you can benefit from their use and what to consider if you are going to buy one.

LRGB colour imaging with filters is covered next, useful if you purchase a mono cooled camera. Purchasing good quality colour filters and a USB powered filter wheel can be costly, something to remember if you decide to purchase a mono camera and want to colour image. After this naturally there is then narrow band filters, so Ha, Sulphur II and OII filters. That is the end of the main part of the book, but up next is some large appendices to look at.

Appendix

The first appendix is about telescopes for imaging and which may be the best for you to use and your budget. This can depend on the type of object you want to image. As I have found not one telescope is good at all imaging tasks. After this comes telescope mounts, which are even more important in my mind than the telescope that sits on it. The effects of the atmosphere are also covered in another appendix and then auto guiding and image calibration are also covered. Finally at the rear of the book are some really good website links.

Overall Thoughts

The author has certainly packed a lot into The Art of Astrophotography. This is a great book which covers a lot of different objects you could image with a lot of different equipment. Who is it for? Well I think it is for a beginner coming into astrophotography as it gives you a complete overview of all the different equipment and objects to image or it’s for those astronomers who have the equipment but want to know more about how to process their images and what they can actually image with their equipment.

Where can I buy The Art of Astrophotography book?

You can buy The Art of Astrophotography from Amazon UK