Dennis Webb's TSP2002 Astronomical Images

Early in May, many amateur astronomers head for West Texas and the week-long Texas Star Party. I am a 9-year veteran and went again in 2002. I imaged on five of seven nights, getting 22 images. I was using a C8 with f/6.3 focal reducer on a Takahashi EM-1, with a Quickcam autoguider through an inexpensive 400mm telephoto lens. I used my Cookbook 245 camera until it failed and was able to borrow Andy Saulietis' Finger Lakes Instruments IMG1300 camera for the last two nights. Thanks again, Andy! Narrative of my experiences at TSP follow the gallery.

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Cookbook 245 images were acquired with CBWINCAM and IMG1300 images were acquired variously with the FLI package and Maxim on a borrowed laptop. All images processed in AIP for Windows and finished in Photoshop 4. I learned to use the AIP Beta capability for smoothing backgrounds, which is useful on the negative images.

Traveling companion Tom Clare and I traveled from Houston to Fort Davis, TX, an 11-hour Sunday trek along scenic Highway 90. This was my ninth TSP and Tom's second. We stopped at Judge Roy Bean's courthouse along the way and arrived late afternoon to meet our JSCAS and TSP friends. We set up my imaging setup and Tom was going to use the 10" splashy Coulter I had brought to my first TSP in '92. Tired, we unloaded the 17.5" dob but would set it up later and share.

My imaging plan was to capture a bunch of Arp galaxies with my relatively new setup -- recently acquired C8 on my veteran Takahashi EM-1, with a recently completed Quickcam autoguider through an Spiratone 400mm telephoto lens. It had all worked at home, but I only got one operational evening before TSP. I had selected 20-odd Arps which I had not imaged before, appropriate to my new image scale. I had 40 Arps already and hoped to add a bunch more.

Sunday night, the first night of imaging, I got everything working and was starting my first image when the EM-1 drive died. I fidgeted exhausted, trying different things, and finally replaced the D-cell batteries -- still did not work. It was clouding up so we retired to the bunkhouse porch for a beverage. It later cleared up and I returned to the field to do the TSP binocular observing list -- I knocked it out in a very pleasant if solitary two hours. After nine TSP's, I earned my first observing pin! Turned out it was the first one awarded at TSP2002. The next morning, I took the voltmeter up on the field and found that I had put one of the replacement D-cells in backwards. With this correction, the drive worked fine. Exhaustion and complex systems are not a good mix. Lesson: change batteries BEFORE the expedition.

On Monday afternoon Tom, Don Halter and I drove into Alpine for things we forgot to bring, in my case a stepladder for the big dob -- Ladder was on the TSP 2001 packing list but not on the 2002 packing list. Lesson: build one correct packing list and reuse it.

Monday night started cloudy but cleared after 1:00AM. Everything was working great! Autoguiding was in the zone and I got two long exposure Arps (305 and 189) at about 45 x 60 seconds each. I was not particularly productive, enjoying company of friends who stuck it out for the clearing, and finished the night with an image of comet Ikeya-Zhang (unguided, 20 x 15 second exposures) and an unguided Arp 102 (dropping to 30 second exposures). The comet was not planned but showed up in the finder on the way to Arp 102 and I could not help myself. We watched the comet naked eye, with binoculars, and telescopes the whole week. Comets really do move around. I finished shooting flats at 6:22AM as the morning twilight and moonlight bloomed.

After not quite enough sleep, we had lunch and I set up the computer, zipdrive and printer in a vacant bunkhouse and happily processed a few images. It is good to bring a cardtable and extra folding chairs for this purpose. I had miscalculated on the printer -- I had verified I had the right driver on the laptop. I forgot that this was a first generation inkjet canon with very poor greyscale so the prints were low contrast and dithered. I lost half an hour trying different property options to no avail. Still, it was nice to have something printed out to post on the bulletin board and give friends -- hey, this is image processing on the frontier. Yet again the lesson: test equipment before the expedition.

Tuesday night was cloudy (good thing as I was hosting afternoon talks the next day) so we socialized and retired early (relatively early, always hoping for clearing).

Wednesday afternoon talks were great. I got to introduce Robert Reeves, Ted Saker, Larry Mitchell, and a couple fellows who talked about robotic observatories (the LAST thing I need is another project but the mind is running...). Larry was presenting his advanced observing list "Interactions" for TSP 2002. Coincidentally, I had imaged one of them the night before (Arp 102). I would image another (Arp 313) Wednesday night, also on my planned list of objects to image.

Wednesday night, from 10:30 until 2:00AM, I imaged Arps 294 and Arp 313 for 40 minutes each, beautifully guided. With the long exposures, I finally got around to assembling my 17.5" dob. The Cookbook 245 camera had done some intermittent odd things at evening startup and at the end of the second image, it was hard failed - the images looked like big readout smears and CBWINCAM reported "blooming detected". Maybe I need to buy a "real" camera. Thinking the problem might be thermal, I power everything down for a while. I try the camera again with no success. I finish the night (into the twilight) observing the TSP Telescopic Observing Program, "Seeing Double". It looked like I was going to be finishing this TSP as a visual observer. I got through the first 13 objects, figuring I could finish the list the next night. Among my new experiences was visually observing spiral structure in NGC 6946 (Arp 29).

Thursday afternoon the JSCAS bunkhouse team snacked on smoked oysters and eels, with various libations, instigated by observing associate Jeff Rowe. It was so good we did it the next day as well.

Thursday night looked promising and I set about visually observing Arp galaxies. Andy Saulietis walks up with his big camera, a Finger Lakes IMG1300 and says "You ready to image?". We worked the mechanical interface to the C8 and methodically found focus. The chip size made finding easy. The particular combination of mechanical attachment prevented the filter wheel from turning so we were going to shoot monochrome. Andy wanted to shoot some big bright things so I operated the telescope and he ran camera -- what fun!. We imaged the Leo Triplet, Omega Centauri, Centaurus A, (two 30 second exposures gave great pictures) and the Hercules Galaxy cluster. I was a little nervous being able to quickly operate the autoguide system so we shot binned 2x2 and unguided for 30 seconds. Andy headed for bed and I finished up with Arps 324 and 330, and (now a TSP imaging tradition for me) the Lagoon Nebula (5 x 30 seconds, later combined with RGB 4:4:8 x 60 seconds from last year's TSP). The first Lagoon shot was beautiful at this scale and I felt I had a winner. I finished the night with flats for this camera and retired happy.

Friday night I was awarded best Deep Sky Astrophotograph for my composite of 36 Arp galaxies presented in the style of Arp's original atlas, imaged over the last 3 years. The same work was selected Best Astrophotograph by popular vote so I took home two of the State-of-Texas-shaped plaques. Fellow JSCAS clubmember Randy Brewer won best CCD Astrophotograph. To cap it off, I also won Best Mixed Media artwork in this the first ever TSP art competition. The work was a small digital composite of film (Len Casady, Fort McKavett Tree and ISS pass over my house) and CCD images (M101 yet again) presented in the form of a Retablo, originally produced for Houston's Lawndale Art and Performance Center's annual Dio de los Muertos fundraiser. Apparently, there are not a lot of mixed media artists among amateur astronomers. Hopefully there will be more next year. Top art prize went to an incredible watercolor of the earth and moon.

After this sweep of prizes, we retired to the observing field and Andy and I imaged more showpieces: M51, M101 (5 x 30 seconds), M83 and the Virgo Markarian Chain (including one Arp). I got out the film camera and made a few unusual film portraits, including Andy and myself imaging -- Andy is the two-headed creature at the left, hugging the laptop, I am to the right looking over his shoulder; the bright light at the far right is the glow from LED's on the IMG1300 -- you can almost see the telescope against the sky. I finished the night with obscure Arps 189, 288, 297, and 261, with Len Casady helping me learn to use Maxim.

Tom earned both the binocular and telescopic observing pins, honing his observing skills to a razor edge, as only a week of observing in prime conditions can. We reluctantly packed our equipment Saturday afternoon, leaving the 10" scope out in case it cleared. At the Saturday evening drawing, I won the grand prize, a Meade ETX105EC. How could a star party be better than this? Saturday night was cloudy, so we visited some and got a good night's sleep for the long drive home. We arrived home without incident to normal life with spouses and work.

It took me nearly four weeks to process all the images. For the IMG1300 images, I found that my flat field box (nested diffusers too close to the front of the C8) works fine for my small chip camera but leaves a terrible hotspot on the giant chip -- I guess that is why they say put the flatfield box out at the end of the dew shield rather than right on the front of the C8. I synthesized a background correction using a minimum filter and, trying various scalings, was able to minimize its effect -- still a lot of work for each image. For some of the IMG1300 images, we did not take enough frames to get a decent signal. Still I got some pleasing images and learned a lot using a very different camera. Now I haunt Astromart, watching for a steal on a megapixel camera.

I had a devil of a time registering the Lagoon RGB's from last year (Cookbook 245 on 440mm f/3.6 newtonian) with the killer luminance from the IMG1300 -- had to use Photoshop skew on top of AIP registering. It would appear that one product of my collimation issues with the 440mm was a nonlinear field - plate reduction anyone?

At the end, I have added 12 Arp images to my 40 and improved 3 I had already imaged. Progress!

I was learning to use the autoguider so only a four of the images were autoguided - I learned a lot and have some improvements to work with my clumsy autoguider pointing mechanism. I bought a little right-angle finder to mount on the guiding optics and afterwards Andy kindly sent a reject plastic gear for comfortably offsetting in RA.

I was able to quickly fix the Cookbook 245 at home afterward - I had inadvertently loosened a couple wires between the parallel connector and the interface card while trying to root out a noise source before the Star Party (better is the enemy of good). I was finally able to minimize the noise pattern effect (and the noise level) by increasing the delays about 30% in CBWINCAM on my Thinkpad 760LD (Pentium 90). I think I am satisfied with my humble Cookbook -- I am over the current bout of megapixel fever.