The Astro-Imaging Thread

[kurja]

24 minutes ago, munlander1 said:

For autoguiding, is it better to have higher magnification or lower magnification?

Higher or lower than what? Than your imaging scope? If so, lower. Guiders can do sub-pixel sampling anyway and longer is just more difficult to get working.

[Green Baron]

The guiding cam will surely be in the primary focus of your scope/viewfinder/whatever you use, so magnification doesn't apply.

Depending on the tinyness of the chip of the guiding cam you want a focal length that still shows you enough (>=1 :-)) reasonable stars to choose from for guiding, that means not too faint and not too bright.

For the beginning and if you have a mechanism to fix the guiding cam, use your viewfinder. A viewfinder with a 1/4" connection is fine thing :-)

The only thing i would not recommend is an off axis guider.

Edited April 11, 2017 by Green Baron

[Epox75]

I didn't know about this thread. Good reason to upload some of my pictures on Imgur . Here's some pictures of Jupiter and the Moon I've taken the night between 8 and 9 April, the Jupiter opposition night. 

Jupiter and Io with no Barlow:

With a 2x barlow:

With a 2.5x barlow:

 

The Moon, Southwestern Oceanus Procellarum:

Crater Tycho area:

Crater Copernicus:

my setup in action:

 

And last the link to my outdated gallery on Astrobin: http://www.astrobin.com/users/Epox/

 

Edited April 11, 2017 by Epox75

[ProtoJeb21]

24 minutes ago, Epox75 said:

I didn't know about this thread. Good reason to upload some of my pictures on Imgur . Here's some pictures of Jupiter and the Moon I've taken the night between 8 and 9 April, the Jupiter opposition night. 

Jupiter and Io with no Barlow:

With a 2x barlow:

With a 2.5x barlow:

 

The Moon, Southwestern Oceanus Procellarum:

Crater Tycho area:

Crater Copernicus:

my setup in action:

 

And last the link to my outdated gallery on Astrobin: http://www.astrobin.com/users/Epox/

 

O_o

*begins to grovel and bow before thee*

[_Augustus_]

15 minutes ago, ProtoJeb21 said:

O_o

*begins to grovel and bow before thee*

Jeb, you'll see me doing nearly as well in the next few weeks/months once my 2080 is up and running and I can get a real camera. A C11 has only 1.375x the angular resolution of my 2080.

You're free to come down here and look through it and my other scopes, just PM me!

Edited April 12, 2017 by _Augustus_

[NSEP]

Some more moon stuff!

I dont know how to zoom with a telescope. I just aim my telescope to the Moon and look at it, while taking some pictures with my iphone camera. Really messy and amateur lol.

[AccidentsHappen]

Did a sketchy long exposure on my phone:

I've also photographed the moon a few times with a DSLR although none of them are too great. I'm itching to get my hands on a telescope so I can take close up shots in higher resolution. Another problem is there's a fair amount of light pollution where I live, and to get out to where there is little to none I have to drive a fair few hours, so none of my pictures of the Orion nebula are any good .

Edited April 12, 2017 by AccidentsHappen

[Epox75]

10 hours ago, ProtoJeb21 said:

O_o

*begins to grovel and bow before thee*

O_o 

I am the one who should grovel and bow for your research on exoplanets 

[_Augustus_]

3 hours ago, NSEP said:

Some more moon stuff!

I dont know how to zoom with a telescope.

Switch eyepieces.

[munlander1]

13 hours ago, NSEP said:

I dont know how to zoom with a telescope

Here is a nice article on eyepieces. What telescope do you have?

[NSEP]

10 hours ago, _Augustus_ said:

Switch eyepieces.

Gottatrythatout. Thanks for the simple awnser!

1 minute ago, munlander1 said:

Here is a nice article on eyepieces. What telescope do you have?

I dont have time to check wich telescope now since im supposed to be sleeping. But i will have a look at the article.

[munlander1]

3 minutes ago, NSEP said:

I dont have time to check wich telescope now since im supposed to be sleeping. But i will have a look at the article.

What time is it? 

It should be on the side of your telescope.

it is gonna have something like

d=

fl=

Edited April 12, 2017 by munlander1

[NSEP]

2 minutes ago, munlander1 said:

What time is it? 

It should be on the side of your telescope.

it is gonna have something like

d=

fl=

Its 10 mins before midnight. So gotta sleep real quick. Thanks for the help, i will check later.

[munlander1]

13 hours ago, AccidentsHappen said:

I'm itching to get my hands on a telescope so I can take close up shots in higher resolution.

Don't buy crappy scopes. One sign is lots of attachments and other stuff. Most crap scopes will have 3 eyepieces and one 3x Barlow. Another thing, scopes that boost high "power" on it. Also, don't expect ANYTHING when you first get it. I expected to get 500x out of my cheap 4.5in 500mm reflector.  I thought Saturn was gonna fill up most of the field of view. It did not.

[AccidentsHappen]

1 hour ago, munlander1 said:

Don't buy crappy scopes. One sign is lots of attachments and other stuff. Most crap scopes will have 3 eyepieces and one 3x Barlow. Another thing, scopes that boost high "power" on it. Also, don't expect ANYTHING when you first get it. I expected to get 500x out of my cheap 4.5in 500mm reflector.  I thought Saturn was gonna fill up most of the field of view. It did not.

Thanks for the advice . I don't really know much about telescopes, do you have any good websites or articles explaining the different types or where to buy a decent one?

[_Augustus_]

9 minutes ago, AccidentsHappen said:

Thanks for the advice . I don't really know much about telescopes, do you have any good websites or articles explaining the different types or where to buy a decent one?

6" or larger Dobsonian like the Orion XT series.

[_Augustus_]

14 hours ago, AccidentsHappen said:

Did a sketchy long exposure on my phone:

I've also photographed the moon a few times with a DSLR although none of them are too great. I'm itching to get my hands on a telescope so I can take close up shots in higher resolution. Another problem is there's a fair amount of light pollution where I live, and to get out to where there is little to none I have to drive a fair few hours, so none of my pictures of the Orion nebula are any good .

How do you do a long exposure on your phone, and what phone do you have? That may not be useful for astrophotography but it is interesting, nonetheless.

[Epox75]

22 hours ago, _Augustus_ said:

A C11 has only 1.375x the angular resolution of my 2080.

The angular resolution is just an indicative number. A Telescope may have the angular resolution lower than 1 arcsecond but unless you are in places like the Atacama Desert in Chile is almost impossible to reach that resolution because of the atmosphere.

What matters in my opinion is the seeing, the optics quality, the camera (monochrome CCD cameras like the DMK21AU04.as that I own and the ASI120mm are in my opinion the best you can find at a relatively low price) , the recording phase and the post processing. I personally don't like registax, which I use only for its RGB alignment function and I use a process which is  called deconvolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deconvolution through DStation Deconvolution Software. When I process an Image I take into account many things, like the wavelenght of the filters I've used, the focal length, focal length reducers or multipliers, the camera pixel size and the atmospheric distortion at the time of the recording. 

[_Augustus_]

4 minutes ago, Epox75 said:

The angular resolution is just an indicative number. A Telescope may have the angular resolution lower than 1 arcsecond but unless you are in places like the Atacama Desert in Chile is almost impossible to reach that resolution because of the atmosphere.

What matters in my opinion is the seeing, the optics quality, the camera (monochrome CCD cameras like the DMK21AU04.as that I own and the ASI120mm are in my opinion the best you can find at a relatively low price) , the recording phase and the post processing. I personally don't like registax, which I use only for its RGB alignment function and I use a process which is  called deconvolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deconvolution through DStation Deconvolution Software. When I process an Image I take into account many things, like the wavelenght of the filters I've used, the focal length, focal length reducers or multipliers, the camera pixel size and the atmospheric distortion at the time of the recording. 

Yep. My 90mm Mak, 4" Mak and 6" Newtonian all have fantastic optics. Not sure about the 2080 as I haven't tested it, but opinions seem to be that it will be good.

[AccidentsHappen]

2 hours ago, _Augustus_ said:

How do you do a long exposure on your phone, and what phone do you have? That may not be useful for astrophotography but it is interesting, nonetheless.

My phone is the Huawei P9 Lite, which was purchased off of eBay for around $200-$300AUS. It has a star track mode, which I'm pretty sure just layers multiple exposures together. I think the overall exposure time was about 45 minutes or so, with each image of about 3-5 seconds of exposure to the sky. Its a cheaty way of getting an image, but after manually taking and layering images myself, I stuck for the easier method .

Edited April 13, 2017 by AccidentsHappen

[munlander1]

On April 12, 2017 at 7:05 PM, AccidentsHappen said:

I don't really know much about telescopes, do you have any good websites or articles explaining the different types or where to buy a decent one?

Googling stuff is great, YouTube is not a bad resource either. Here are some videos explaining the different types of telescopes. They really tie into Astrophotography more then regular observing though.

Telescopes

Mounts

And this one is about guiding  and it is more into Astrophotography

Edited April 14, 2017 by munlander1
That he

[_Augustus_]

Jupiter, now with more detail and noise! Same shot from 3/19/17, but used "Drizzle" setting in AutoStakkert and some sharpening in paint.net

[Green Baron]

Seems like the software forgot to de-bayer, hence the squares ?

[_Augustus_]

5 hours ago, Green Baron said:

Seems like the software forgot to de-bayer, hence the squares ?

Perhaps.

[munlander1]

So to get long exposures, I have to have an hdmi cable. My camera does not have a hdmi port. I think the longest I can do currently is 45 seconds. Currently though I have been using an usb 2 to mini usb b.