The Astro-Imaging Thread

[Epox75]

Here's the image after some post processing I did with pixinsight following a tutorial. I still have 30x2min UHC exposures, and 15x2min on R,G,B to process and as far as I understood is better to stack them all first and then process the different channels all together with pixinsight, expecially for cropping before combining them into LRGB. I just hope the other exposures will be decent enough to get a nice color image but i doubt because of the full Moon that rose yesterday night. Anyway it's going to be a lot of work.. good for cloudy days!

[Green Baron]

Hehe. You're catching up with me.

It's cloudy here, just stopped raining. So i will have to let you pass ... :-)

Edit: processing. I decided to spend a little something and got me PixInsight. It is sort of a swiss army knife for DSO and has very nice and thorough documentation. I avoid tinkering with 7-9 different programs, and it runs on Linux :-). And there is a very instructive book about the software, i am learning a lot.

Just sayin' ... i get nothing for it :-)

Edited May 11, 2017 by Green Baron

[Epox75]

I've heard of that book. Probably reading some discussion for beginners on CN. So it's a must read, thanks for mentioning it. Lot of rain here too and clouds are gonna last some day for sure. And then there's June and I am at 51' north latitude so very short and bright nights.  I will probably use this time to fill my head with theory

[kurja]

Snowing... Next season, I will make a photo! I got nil this winter.

[Green Baron]

The sun has just set. The showers died down, for a few minutes there was a steel blue sky and the low rays blazed through the windows. Now it's cloudy again. Up on the hill where the observatories are there must be an amazing sky tonight, the clouds don't reach that high. But down here it's closing again. Cloudbase maybe 100m above my level. And it is a full moon anyway.

Patience we must have :-)

 

Edited May 11, 2017 by Green Baron

[Epox75]

This is the best I can take out of the image, after some tip received on CN I did the best I could to avoid the clipping at the galaxy's nucleus but still sacrificing some brightness. Anyway from what I understood I need at least 4 hours of integration with the luminance filter with shorter exposures to minimize the background brightness and then I can start to think about RGB. 

[Green Baron]

Looks good. Stacking will indeed make things much better. Maybe the right distance camera/reducer can make the stars a little more pointy.

But i was of the opinion that fewer long exposures are better than many short ones. The amount of photons from nebulosities is higher over a longer exposure time, there might even none from faint regions in a short time. So there is more information in a longer exposure. Stacking is to get rid of the noise. Noise is a randomly distributed while structures are there in every frame at the same spot, once aligned, and the stacking algorithm accounts for that.

You can also try the L channel with varying exposure time, like 10*30sec and 10*4min per frame. I tried it with PicInsight and in principle it works, my core of M42 is hopelessly over exposed with 2min but i had two exposures with 30sec and they saved it.

 

[_Augustus_]

Didn't do any imaging tonight but I finally got to test the 2080 on some deep-sky objects. M13 was very nice and granular, and the Leo Triplet was somewhat detailed (had never seen it before).

[SuperFastJellyfish]

Here's a shot from my Samsung Note II.  This was taken through a 17mm eyepiece(with a moon filter) a few years ago through my Celestron Nexstar 8SE.  I only have an alt-az mount so pics are rare for me, but this is as decent as I can get. 

Edited May 17, 2017 by SuperFastJellyfish

[munlander1]

@NSEP telescope info?

[_Augustus_]

So, uhh, I wouldn't call this a great picture, but I did get the Galilean moons by taking a separate overexposed capture.

[Green Baron]

My old gaming laptop finally took its place among the ancestors. It served me 6 years in which i didn't always treat it nice.

That one had a windows partition that held the drivers for the ccd and the guiding software. The disks (an SSD and a classic noisy one) from the laptop are still fine, can read them perfectly, but i now need some sort of replacement for that thing. Will go to town tomorrow to search for a second hand laptop ...

 

[Epox75]

22 hours ago, Green Baron said:

My old gaming laptop finally took its place among the ancestors. It served me 6 years in which i didn't always treat it nice.

That one had a windows partition that held the drivers for the ccd and the guiding software. The disks (an SSD and a classic noisy one) from the laptop are still fine, can read them perfectly, but i now need some sort of replacement for that thing. Will go to town tomorrow to search for a second hand laptop ...

 

Good luck! If you plan to do mainly DSO imaging you will not need nothing fancy or expensive/

[Green Baron]

2 hours ago, Epox75 said:

Good luck! If you plan to do mainly DSO imaging you will not need nothing fancy or expensive/

Heeding the advice i now have an old eee pc. Paid nothing for it but gave the promise to buy my next pc there ... :-)

[kurja]

10 hours ago, Green Baron said:

Heeding the advice i now have an old eee pc. Paid nothing for it but gave the promise to buy my next pc there ... :-)

Me too, runs on 12 volts which is great but it halts when ambient is below -20 tricky to keep running in imaging use.

[Green Baron]

I as well halt when ambient is below -20 .... :-)

[_Augustus_]

So the money I was going to use to buy an ASI120MC is now going towards buying a 6" mirror kit. Going to make a 6" f/5 Dob from scratch. 

[Green Baron]

Oh, that's a surprise. So, imaging is postponed ?

Are you not content with the Nexstar or Meade 2080 ? Or just a collector :-) ?

 

[_Augustus_]

28 minutes ago, Green Baron said:

Oh, that's a surprise. So, imaging is postponed ?

Are you not content with the Nexstar or Meade 2080 ? Or just a collector :-) ?

 

I want a rich-field scope for visual. The CATs make me claustrophobic.

Edited May 21, 2017 by _Augustus_

[_Augustus_]

On 5/16/2017 at 11:51 PM, SuperFastJellyfish said:

Here's a shot from my Samsung Note II.  This was taken through a 17mm eyepiece(with a moon filter) a few years ago through my Celestron Nexstar 8SE.  I only have an alt-az mount so pics are rare for me, but this is as decent as I can get. 

You can do planetary and lunar imaging with an alt-az mount. Get a camera like a ZWO ASI120MC or Celestron Neximage 5.

[Epox75]

A test on M 13 at f/6.3 - 72x30s exposures with lumicon deepsky filter. Also the galaxy IC 4617 is visible on the left (15.2 Magnitude and 503 Million Light Years far!) @Green Baron I tried about 5mm more distance from the reducer and the fisheye distortion was still there. Next time i'll try to get closer, I noticed that I was using a T2 - 1.25" T-Mount a bit curved at the base, so it wasn't sliding all the way into the back focus. That should get me 3 or 4 mm closer to reducer. I hope it works otherwise I'll try the 105mm suggested by celestron for their 0.63x reducer, that shouldn't solve the issue but it should give more FOV and possibly the non affected area will be wider. Luckily I learnt how to use the adaptive wide field function on Photoshop and i found a correction that fits decently with the distortion, I'm sure if i'll work on it i'll find the perfect template 

Edit: processed with deep sky stacker. Pixinsight should give me a much more detailed result. 

 

 

Edited May 22, 2017 by Epox75

[munlander1]

That's such a tiny little Galaxy!

[Epox75]

7 minutes ago, munlander1 said:

That's such a tiny little Galaxy!

Yup! It really got my attention, nice active nucleus!

 

 

[munlander1]

It's amazing what flipping the photo did!

[Green Baron]

That looks good me thinks, probably what the seeing permitted. I don't see much distortion in the picture, at least less than before. The blowups from the far edge show only a very slight coma. So maybe a few millimeters more and you are fine ? Yes, try the 105 (or 115mm ?). As usual the "generic" thing might have similar data compared to the original ...

Am a little jealous. Still cloudy here. But i bet the sky skill will be clear when the moon comes out again ...

 

Edited May 23, 2017 by Green Baron