My main target for this year’s Okie-Tex was Cygnus X-1. I have never attempted to take a picture of a black hole and thought it might be interesting. It wasn’t really. Most of you probably understand what I failed to grasp before taking the picture - there’s nothing to see! I guess I was hoping to see some type of distorted or bent light phenomenon, but I think that is reserved of black holes of a galactic scale.
In the picture above, the brightest star in the upper right panel is HDE-226868. This is the red supergiant companion of Cyg X-1. Cyg X-1 cannot be seen, but is so close to HDE-226868 that the orbital period is only 5.6 days [1]. The blue light curve is one method of proving the existence of the binary system. I created a blue light curve by bounding the star in a 2300 pixel square box and recording the percentage of blue pixel counts from my aligned and normalized subs over the 6 day period. My blue light curve shows a general cycle, but is poor proof because it shows obvious errors from elevation attenuation, probable errors from normalization, and an apparent periodicity of 8 days.
Since the Tulip Nebula was in the neighborhood, I practiced on it for several days prior to Okie-Tex and continued my observations while I was there. In the end, I collected over 15 hours of data on that target, but most of the data collected in Oklahoma City was given a low weight during the integration.
The setup and image data are:
Camera: ZWO 183 MC Pro
OTA: 1608 mm AT8RC
Mount: Atlas EQ-G
Camera Gain: 111
Camera Temperature: -10C
RGB Image Subs for Tulip Nebula:
Location: South Oklahoma City & Camp Billy Joe
Date: Sept 9 - 12 & Sept 27 - Oct 3, 2024
809 x 60s
14 x 360 s
1 x 1800 s
Total Integration Time: 15.4 hours
RGB Image Subs for Cygnus X-1:
Location: Camp Billy Joe
Date: Sept 27 - Oct 3, 2024
178 x 60s
15 x 360 s
1 x 1800 s
Total Integration Time: 5 hours