Chasing the Heart nebula

With the next target chosen — the Heart Nebula — it was time to figure out exactly where to point the telescope.

And this is where N.I.N.A.’s Framing Assistant comes in.

You give it your target, camera dimensions and focal length, and it shows exactly how much of the sky will fit onto the camera sensor. That white rectangle in the middle represents my actual field of view, allowing me to position and rotate the frame before spending several hours photographing it.

Which is incredibly useful, because “somewhere around the Heart Nebula” apparently isn’t considered sufficiently accurate.

The nice thing is that I can now carefully compose the image beforehand, decide which parts of the nebula I want inside the frame and even have N.I.N.A. slew the telescope directly to the correct coordinates.

The slightly less reassuring thing is everything else on this screen.

Coordinates. Degrees. Arcminutes. Sensor dimensions. Pixel sizes. Focal lengths. Rotation angles. Transit graphs. Approximately four thousand circles with names I’ve never heard of.

So naturally, I looked at all of this highly sophisticated astronomical information, carefully considered my options and thought:

“Yeah… the white rectangle looks about right there.”

And honestly, that seems to be working surprisingly well. 😅

There is something wonderfully absurd about using star catalogues, precise celestial coordinates, plate solving and computer-controlled telescope positioning just so I can spend the next several hours collecting photons from a cloud roughly 7,500 light-years away…

…only to eventually open the result in Photoshop and start moving sliders from left to right again.