Welcome to Earwig Haven Observatory

Earwig Haven is a personal astronomical observatory located in Ontario, Canada. This web site is the journal of the construction and operation of the observatory, and a record of imaging and other observations produced.

Cold Night; Started B33

Mon, 01/16/2012 - 07:13 — richard

It was clear last night, the first truly clear night in a long time, but very cold.  Ambient temperature was -18c. I opened the dome and started things up, to have a series of mount problems.  Guiding was very ragged, jumping around a lot.

Changed Internet Service Providers

Thu, 01/05/2012 - 08:56 — richard
In my experience, good ISPs seem to stay good for 5-7 years, then go sour. That just happened; after many years of good service, my previous preferred hosting company has become poor (probably not coincidentally, just after their shared-hosting division was sold to another firm). After a string of outages and dead-ends with several sites I used to host with them, enough was enough, so I've moved. So this site is now up on a new provider (http://hostpapa.ca), which seems pretty good so far.

Starting Crescent Nebula - NGC6888

Sat, 10/08/2011 - 08:04 — richard

NGC6888 in Hydrogen-AlphaWith a little imaging time left in the evening, I started on NGC6888, the Crescent Nebula, as it is now well positioned in my limited hole in the sky.

The moon was quite bright - between 1st quarter and full - and washing out the sky a little. However, NGC6888 is an emission nebula, so produces a fair amount of H-Alpha light, and this is much less affected by moonlight.

The first night I managed 70 minutes in 10-minute subs. The next night, 90 minutes more in 15-minute subs. So, for the start of this project, this is 160 minutes of H-Alpha in 10-minute and 15-minute subs.

M51 Aug 26, better blue, better processing

Sat, 08/27/2011 - 15:38 — richard

I re-did the blue channel in 3-minute subs, getting 27 of them before the target sank below my hedge. This larger number of subs reduced the noise in the channel quite a lot (although it is still a bit noisy).

Added some Hydrogen-Alpha to M27

Wed, 07/13/2011 - 06:22 — richard

I had captured an hour of high-res Ha data a month ago, on the same evening as when I captured the Luminance, but hadn't done anything with it.

Here the Ha is mixed in with Luminance, increasing the intensity of the gas envelope in the nebula. The colour balance came out a little different, but I rather like it so I'm leaving it as is.

Now we're getting somewhere

Fri, 07/08/2011 - 17:15 — richard

Backing up and re-focusing on some basics has paid off. I'm quite pleased with this first result on M27. This is 4 hours of data over about 2 weeks, 1 hour each of LRGB, with RGB binned 2x2. QSI 583 camera on an AT8RC, autoguided with a Lodestar, on a G11.

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