Acquiring Thor’s Helmet

February 18th was my first night out where I began gathering image data of Thor’s Helmet. Around this time I had a fairly dominant moon high in the sky that was 74% full, but with this challenge I decided to undertake a new method of getting my detailed data, rather than waiting for moonless nights which would have been at least a 2 week wait.

On this night I used my dual narrowband filter, the Optolong L-Extreme. While this filter is primarily designed for one shot color cameras, I figure I could use this data as my detail layer of the overall image. On the first night I shot for 3hrs, and managed to get about 2hrs 30min usable data. The second clear night the weather gave to me wasn’t until the 27th and by this time the moon was full. My dark site was so lit up, it felt like there was a street light on.

While this may look like a sun rise, this is actually a full moon rising!

The second night I was shooting for a goal of 2hrs when I ran into trouble. At some point during the night I believe the mirrors in my telescope shifted, and despite seeing good guide tracking stats from my equipment, everything in every photo was streaked at least a quarter inch as if the telescope was tracking too slowly. I had to cut the night short and managed only 1hr 30min instead, of which not all of it was usable.

After that night we had several days of clouds, several days of poor seeing conditions and we even had snow complicate things for a day. However finally the weekend of March 9th cleared up for a really amazing night with great conditions. I set out to get 3hrs of work done, giving me 1hr of each color so that I could attempt a final image of Thor’s Helmet.

The final night of imaging, collecting RGB of Thor’s helmet.

As far as equipment performance goes, everything about this night went right, the mirrors were aligned very well and maintained this for the entire night. Once I had finished, I felt guilty breaking down all the equipment for the night because of how well it was all performing, which doesn’t happen too often for me.

Thank you for reading my latest blog, and feel free to check out my latest image, Thor’s Helmet!