The Complete Guide to the Herschel Objects Book Review

The Complete Guide to the Herschel Objects

The beginning of the Herschel Objects book gives a brief introduction to the Herschel catalogue and then talks about William Herschel the telescope maker and the various telescopes that he made.
The book is broken down into each of the constellations. Within each constellation chapter are the details in turn on each of the deep sky objects in the Herschel catalogue.

Not all objects are given an image, (sometimes you get a sketch) but you may expect this – seeing that there are sometimes lots and lots of objects in a constellation. Each object is provided with a classification code, a Herschel number, the location, its physical dimensions, the magnitude and a description of the object.

The Complete Guide to the Herschel Objects is a complete guide and it’s a great reference book. It would have been nice to see colour images instead of black and white. It would also have been nice to see full colour images for every Herschel object on its own page, but due to the sheer number of objects that is just not possible. This is a shame as one of my favourite books is the Messier Complete Atlas that Cambridge University Press publish and that is full colour and really well laid out.

The Complete Guide to the Herschel Objects is available at Waterstones

Comet ISON December 2013

(Starting from the bottom) Comet ISON, Panstarrs and Lovejoy (at the top)

Map for 6am Tuesday 10th December 2013

Moon using an OIII filter on an 80mm

This was taken on 14th November 2013. I took it using my Altair Astro triplet 80mm refractor with an Atik 314L+ camera through an Astronomik OIII filter.

I took 20 frames of 1/1000th of a second (the lowest exposure the Atik 314L+ will do). I then stacked it in Maxim DL. I did not remove any darks or take any flats. I then took it into Photoshop and sharpened it and then used a high pass filter on it to sharpen it a bit more.

Not my best lunar image, you can tell the difference between doing this image on a 80mm refractor compared to an image I took using a 120mm refractor. The 120mm just gives you more contrast, light and generally a better image. You can see the 120mm moon image here: https://www.astronomylog.co.uk/2011/09/15/harvest-full-moon/

But if you want really sharp lunar images then a webcam type camera is a better idea, where you can take up to hundreds of frames a second and just take the best frames and stack those all automatically in programs like Registax. Here is an image where I did just that and created a mosaic: https://www.astronomylog.co.uk/2013/03/20/moon-mosaic-with-altair-astro-8-gso-rc/

AstronomyLog Goes Social on Facebook and Twitter

We have now joined the social revolution and created a page on Facebook and an account on Twitter.

We will be posting on Facebook and Twitter as much as we can, so please follow us on Twitter and Like Us on Facebook.

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Control your Observatory PC from your iPhone

Since I wrote the post on controlling your observatory PC remotely (and I had the letter about this published in Astronomy Now).

I have now discovered that you can now control your Windows based observatory PC from your iPhone, iPad or Android device – whether it’s a phone or a tablet device.

Why and How can I do it? Well you can do it as Microsoft have released a Remote Desktop app.

Just make sure your observatory PC is running a Pro, Business or Ultimate version of Windows XP, Vista, 7 or 8.

I have tried the app out on my Nexus 7″ Android tablet, and it works really well, even though the PC desktop does look quite small on a 7″ tablet. I think controlling your PC via a smartphone sized screen would be a bit too small.

You can download the apps on Google Play and from Apple AppStore. Search for ‘Windows Remote Desktop App’

Have a play and see what you think. Tell us how you get on.

Guiding in Maxim DL with a Finderscope Guider

At last my guiding seems to be working, after using a finder guider for a couple of years with mixed results, I think I have it cracked.

I originally used to expose my QHY5 camera on my Skywatcher finderscope every 2 seconds for guiding, and have aggressiveness setting of 4-5. I also used to use my finderguider un-binned with a calibration time of 25 seconds.

This is now my Maxim DL autoguiding set-up:

2x Binned QHY5 camera
5 second exposures
Aggressiveness of 6 and 6.5
Calibration Time: 40 seconds
Waiting time between frames: 65 seconds

These are the settings when imaging through my Altair Astro 80mm Triplet at f4.8 at 3.46 arc seconds per pixel. These settings may change when I image with my 8″ RC scope.

Lessons from the Masters Book

Just received a copy of the ‘Lessons from the Masters’ book by Springer today. I was looking forward to reading this book, and I have just read the Damian Peach chapter about imaging planets and the moon.

I shall be reading it cover to cover, as there is a lot of detailed content in the book, mainly about processing deep sky images in Photoshop. This is an area I definitely need to work on.

A previous book on astronomy Photoshop processing I worked all the way through was ‘Photoshop Astronomy’ by Scott Ireland. It will be fun finding out how these books differ.

Look out for a book review of ‘Lessons from the Masters’ soon.

Purchase your copy from Amazon now.

Maplin Telescopes

Maplin our favourite high street gadget and electronics retailer have just started to sell telescopes.

Maplin currently have a range of Danubia and Celestron reflector and refracting telescopes. The new range starts from £49 up to over £500 for the Danubia 200mm on an EQ5 mount.

They even have a nice looking brass pocket telescope as well for just over £50.

All the Maplin telescopes are available from Maplin and there is free delivery on all of them.

For more information visit the telescope page at Maplin: www.maplin.co.uk/c/gadgets-toys-and-hobbies/optical/telescopes?C=AffilWin19788

Get Your Face in Space

Fancy getting your face in space on the Big Space Balloon? If so, visit https://www.bigspaceballoon.co.uk/

SPA Convention 2013

Don’t forget to book your tickets for the Sir Patrick Moore lecture at the Free SPA Convention at the Cambridge Astronomy Association on 12th October 2013. Visit the SPA website for more details.