PIER-1 Target suggestions

Sh2-86 cud be a nice target for narrowband....its a emission nebula and bet time is now till sep - a good 20hrs on it wud be needed...

Good evening and welcome to the new syndicate Vikas. Great to have someone else on board.

It's after midnight here so I'm just about to logout, so if you have any questions I'll read them later. Steve has I see made a few suggestions based on his knowledge of the Northern hemisphere, and I hope will be of help. Remember though submit anything of your choosing.

Cheers,

Ray

Hi all
i m in !!!!

Ray has gone from "Billy no mates" to almost a group in a day

While I have you all, we have a trip planned to Spain for the 22nd August

Vikas has run rough shod over me all day while field testing the pier, he has pointed a couple of needed tweaks out LOL

1 - We are fitting some insulation to the floor to help with the localised seeing
2 - Potential light leak in the OAG which is messing with the longer flats

We will sort both these issues out while in Spain

Have fun in the meantime all of you and get some interesting objects into the pier

Steve

I ve submitted the following target :

Galaxy NGC 6384 , in LRGB , nice little spiral galaxy
Elephant trunk detail on the central part , in SHO
NGC5982- Draco Triplet , 3 types of galaxy in a single image , in LRGB ,


i didnt check the moon position from these target, i think the algo will shoot them at the right time


I want to shoot also the cats eye nebula , c6, but i wondering the lenght of the sub. It seems to be a diffucult target to catch the detail of central core . Maybe a run of 240s in H, O , S and a run with 45s in Ha to catch the center ?
What do you think of this target ?

I ve submitted the following target :

Galaxy NGC 6384 , in LRGB , nice little spiral galaxy
Elephant trunk detail on the central part , in SHO
NGC5982- Draco Triplet , 3 types of galaxy in a single image , in LRGB ,


i didnt check the moon position from these target, i think the algo will shoot them at the right time


I want to shoot also the cats eye nebula , c6, but i wondering the lenght of the sub. It seems to be a diffucult target to catch the detail of central core . Maybe a run of 240s in H, O , S and a run with 45s in Ha to catch the center ?
What do you think of this target ?

Go full fat 300s subs for that and plenty of them then decide later if you need shorter core shots

I like this object and it was in my list of targets I shared with you all

Steve

Hi Florent,

Welcome, it's really great to have you here as well. I'm hoping that we'll soon have another joint-syndicate member, bringing with it more target suggestions and more helpful advice to assist one another. Thanks for those submissions you have put in, I can now leave it to you and Vikas to submit several more to keep the scope busy.

Cheers,

Ray

Hi Guys,

Nothing serious, just a bit of humour.

For those of you not resident here in the UK, we are currently experiencing a 'heat wave'! If you knew the temperatures we were experiencing, circa 30 c you'd fall about laughing, but that's actually hot for us in the UK. So why am I mentioning this? As a possible reason that Steve has included at least one 'slightly' ambitious target on his list, namely M2-9 aka Minkowski's butterfly. I think maybe the heat had got to him as from what I'm reading this target is Magnitude 14.7 and is a minuscule 115" x 18". Those measurements are arc seconds! Having looked for this on the Astrobin site, I wasn't particularly impressed either. Maybe we should give this one a miss, what do you think? Not wishing to rain on your parade Steve (good old british saying you might want to look up), but I believe pier 8 with the camera unbinned might be a slightly better choice. Brilliant object if you have access to a professional observatory setup.

Cheers,

Ray

I thought you liked a challenge Ray

I think you're mistaking me for someone else Steve. I gave up challenges the day after I retired.

Hi guys,

Just a suggestion, I wonder what you think.

This scope whilst perhaps being more suited to galaxies does enable us to capture more detailed close ups of areas that form part of larger narrowband objects, such as Steve referred to earlier. Unfortunately I'm going to digress before returning to some of those suggestions Steve made.

When I was still imaging several years ago, old school, I'd use the binning option for narrowband images to make best use of the limited time we have here. So for a typical 3 filter target I'd usually capture the O3 and S2 data binned 2x2, with the ha unbinned. This gave me a lot more time to capture the ha data and resulted in slightly more detail.

Those who are on piers 1 and 14 have the opportunity to do something similar. Images captured on pier 14 may contain more than one object of interest. Within one or more of those objects there may be a particular area which would benefit from a higher resolution. I'm sure you can think of many examples. Data from pier 14 would give us our binned 2 or 3 filter colour data, at 2 arc seconds per pixel, while we could just concentrate on a small part using pier 1 at just under 1 arc second per pixel. For many we'd just need to capture the luminance, ha, data on pier 1. We could collect far more of that data in a much shorter time overall. Should the area we are interested in be just too large for pier 1, we can do a small mosaic.

Going back to Steve's list, things like the Bubble nebula, close up of the nape of the Pelican, Mexico region, bok globules in the Heart nebula, gas jets in the Rosette etc, etc. could all be done on this basis using data from both piers, allowing us to make better use of the time here on pier 1. We would need to take into account anyone just on pier 1 and not go overboard with this.

Just a suggestion, please let me know what you think.

Cheers,

Ray

Hi ray
Your idea of combining some target is good.
Personally , I think that pier1 is good for small target, too small for the large field of view of pier14.
If we shoot the RGB or sho with pier14 and L data with pier1, image of pier14 will be full of empty section , comparing the field of 9000x6000 vs 2500x1700 pixels

Myself I prefer to shoot more different target than the same.in two pier .
Also as you see I don't submit very long imaging session. I prefer to have the full data as soon as possible and eventually to reschedule another session to get more data.

But it may worth to try a.few time on target that are already done in pier14. With the actual queue on pier14 we are going to wait the completion of jobs

What target do you want a test ?


With pier1 I intended to target galaxy and planetary nebula .


Do you know how the algorithm is working to select the target to shoot at night ? Would be more benefit to reduce the pier queue to get target imaging more quicky ? On pier 14 , some target process only a few percent per day

Hi ray
Your idea of combining some target is good.
Personally , I think that pier1 is good for small target, too small for the large field of view of pier14.
If we shoot the RGB or sho with pier14 and L data with pier1, image of pier14 will be full of empty section , comparing the field of 9000x6000 vs 2500x1700 pixels

Myself I prefer to shoot more different target than the same.in two pier .
Also as you see I don't submit very long imaging session. I prefer to have the full data as soon as possible and eventually to reschedule another session to get more data.

But it may worth to try a.few time on target that are already done in pier14. With the actual queue on pier14 we are going to wait the completion of jobs

What target do you want a test ?


With pier1 I intended to target galaxy and planetary nebula .


Do you know how the algorithm is working to select the target to shoot at night ? Would be more benefit to reduce the pier queue to get target imaging more quicky ? On pier 14 , some target process only a few percent per day

Morning

I Hope you don't mind me jumping in and answering one section for you Ray

The imaging algorithms are automated, they use a combination of horizon limits, moon avoidance parameters and meridian. It images in 1 hour blocks and at times may move around imaging quite a few objects in one night. Other nights it may concentrate on one. It just depends where it is in the sky and what the algorithm decides Honestly, just place your jobs and let the system work it out, it is far more productive than the human brain which is far from logical LOL

PS, our moon avoidance calculations I have added below for you, as you mentioned moon avoidance the other day. Including a couple of example tables below which are 120-7 LUM & 95-5 HA

Lum - 120 & 7
G,B & OSC 120 & 5
Red - 110 & 5
OIII - 110 & 5
SII - 100 & 5
HA - 95 & 5

Thanks Steve for moon data
I understand better now, you have very strict moon avoidance during full moon . As I m new in the hobby I m not so picky for my own rig

I will put this in my target selection. I use the software sky tools at home.

Florent

Yep, very strict LOL

I have spent 3 years tweaking it on and off, you can never get it perfect but this seems to be the best compromise overall in real world conditions

As you can see we do very little imaging except in maybe HA around full moon as its simply pointless delivering washed out data

Working from home you can be a little less judicious than us but we have to deliver data to a minimum standard every time so the only way we can do this is automate our parameters

Steve

I agree
And this why it is better to get z good number of target in the queue to prevent the pier to not be used

I will add some planetary neb to pier 1 as it is full moon now

Good idea

I couldn't see everyone else piling into the combined Pier 1/Pier 14 subscription and not get involved, so I am in too.

You will have to put up with my crazy suggestions, but I promise no vast mosaics! On this pier, I want to get in close. Both to some well-known nebulae and galaxies - NGC6888 and M81 - but also some of the Higson Compact Groups. No definite ideas yet, but I will be consulting my Bracken "Astrophotography Sky Atlas".

Hi Richard,

Very pleased to read that you've joined. I'd initially submitted a few random targets to keep it busy and it wasn't long until Florent joined up and added a few more. I'm pleased that you did so too, now I won't need to make any more submissions for a little while. Definitely like the idea of the Crescent and Steve suggested another, the Dumbell. I'm sure you've many suitable and interesting ones.

Bit disappointed by the lack of enthusiasm for mosaics!

You'd just about be able to squeeze in M31 in 4 x 6 panels, the Veil might require a bit more.

Seriously, there may be one or two suitable small ones. These ones would be tight fits.

Pacman, Tadpoles and Flaming Star :- 1 x 2 panels
M33 2 x 2 panels

I'm sure there are a few more.

Given that at present we are all subscribed to pier 14 as well, I'd like to repeat an earlier suggestion of combining data from both piers. Colour from an image of the same part of the sky taken using pier 14. That would allow us to go overboard with the amount of luminance data captured on pier 1 and hopefully create an epic image much quicker. Just the odd one now and again and only if the object is of a reasonable size. M81 would be a good choice as might one of the small mosaics shown above. Just a thought.

Welcome,

Ray