It's supposed to be another rainy weekend here in Tucson, but right now it's just warm and cloudy. I had hoped to do some observing last night and tonight, maybe even to practice for the upcoming Messier Marathon, but no such luck.
So instead I've done some image and spectra processing. One spectrum I took earlier this week was of the Eskimo Nebula. It's interesting to see how the emission lines present in this nebula are different from other nebulae; for example, compared to the Orion Nebula, the Eskimo exhibits much stronger OIII lines in comparison to the strong Hydrogen alpha lines in M42.
I decided to place a little picture in the spectrum, so I went way back to a year ago when I was playing with the camera but didn't really know how to use it yet. At the time my processing skills were almost nonexistent, and I made some mistakes like not taking proper darks and flats. Also my exposure time in total was way too short. But I decided to do a quick reprocess anyway. So the little image of the nebula was taken from the dome, with just 3 x 25 seconds in each filter. This time I knew that the green and blue filters were reversed so that helped to make it a little bit better.
Click here to see a larger version and more detail about this spectrum and image.
Maybe I'll actually get to bed at a normal hour tonight...but first I'd better get out to see if I need to bring the scope in to keep it out of the rain.
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