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The Astro-Imaging Thread

ProtoJeb21

By ProtoJeb21
in Science & Spaceflight

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Astro-Imaging Questions  

72 members have voted

  1. 1. What's Your Favorite Solar System Body to Image?


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kurja

kurja

Posted
Posted

There is no such thing as too many frames. More the merrier, but ofc they have to be good ones, mixing poorer frames with better ones does not help.

I don't use darks at all (dslr). So at night I just try to get some lights, if successful, I leave the camera attached to my lens and make flats & bias frames the next day and that's it.

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_Augustus_

_Augustus_

Posted
Posted (edited)

I was thinking about imaging Jupiter but the seeing caused the Moon to shimmer at 75x with my 8" SCT (it had been cooling for 2 hours, so thermals weren't causing it), so I figured imaging would be a pointless endeavor. Ended up viewing a few bright DSOs, saw M92 for the first time.

Edited by _Augustus_
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Epox75

Epox75

Posted
Posted (edited)

NGC 6946 also known as "Fireworks Galaxy". Today I had to deal with unexpected cirrus clouds that delayed the start of the imaging session of about one hour, interrupted the auto guiding and the imaging once and ended the session at least 30 min before the expected time. So basically I managed to integrate 1 hour and 20 min when I planned to do more than 3 hours. Anyway scope and camera combo are impressive, in these conditions, with no astronomical dusk until the 15 of July because of the northern latitude, almost full moon and here's the result (146x30sec with Lumicon Deepsky filter). This is fast processed with DSS, later today I will process it Pixinsight. 

RWzf7ev.png

ucLisRu.jpg

theU9a0.png

Edited by Epox75
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Green Baron

Green Baron

Posted
Posted

Very nice, and almost no distortions any more and brilliantly sharp.

For comparison, would you be interested in trying like 20*2min, and maybe even 20*4min and see if you can get more detail ? It is my plan when conditions are right next time. I tried this in winter and remember that Pixinsight accounted for the exposure times and combined the brighter parts of the different exposure times correctly.

 

I hope i have to deal with an unexpected open sky at night soon ... :-)

 

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Epox75

Epox75

Posted
Posted

@Green Baron Thank you! Sure I will do it, I'm curious too. I never tried the 30 sec exposures on this scope before last night and since it's "fast" I wanted to see how really fast it is... impressive anyway. Consider that at the moment I also never tried other gain/offset settings besides the Unity Gain (all around) set by ZWO which is 139 gain and 21 offset. The 200/50 combo also has been reported to keep noise low and to permit even shorter exposures while 75/15 is suggested for longer exposures. Lot of things to try out!

I wish you a night without clouds soon, here in the Netherlands we solved the problem this way:

:P

 

 

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Adstri

Adstri

Posted
Posted (edited)

One of my BEST images of Saturn, ever. This was shot a few nights ago. You can see the Cassini Division and faint color bands!

3db2YWr.png

Believe it or not, I took this image with my smartphone, and stacked about 10-15ish frames together.

It also looks like I'm the only person who voted saying that Mercury is my favorite Solar System object to image. I am the 1 (err... 2) %!

Edited by Adstriduum
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Epox75

Epox75

Posted
Posted
5 hours ago, Adstriduum said:

One of my BEST images of Saturn, ever. This was shot a few nights ago. You can see the Cassini Division and faint color bands!

3db2YWr.png

Believe it or not, I took this image with my smartphone, and stacked about 10-15ish frames together.

It also looks like I'm the only person who voted saying that Mercury is my favorite Solar System object to image. I am the 1 (err... 2) %!

Nice one! I miss Saturn, I think I will have to wait until 2021 or 2022 to make a picture of it, unless I move south :)

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-Velocity-

-Velocity-

Posted
Posted
On 6/10/2017 at 11:17 PM, Epox75 said:

NGC 6946 also known as "Fireworks Galaxy". Today I had to deal with unexpected cirrus clouds that delayed the start of the imaging session of about one hour, interrupted the auto guiding and the imaging once and ended the session at least 30 min before the expected time. So basically I managed to integrate 1 hour and 20 min when I planned to do more than 3 hours. Anyway scope and camera combo are impressive, in these conditions, with no astronomical dusk until the 15 of July because of the northern latitude, almost full moon and here's the result (146x30sec with Lumicon Deepsky filter). This is fast processed with DSS, later today I will process it Pixinsight. 

Good shot.  I can't help but wonder how spectacular this galaxy would be if it wasn't so close to the plane of the Milky Way.  Its light must go through a fair amount of dust extinction.  Even with that, it was one of my favorite galaxies (though I had a lot of favorites) back when I was an active visual observer.

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Epox75

Epox75

Posted
Posted
1 hour ago, _Augustus_ said:

If you can get around the trees you have a shot with an ADC.

Now it goes 17' max in Altitude. I have something like a 30 min window when it passes between my house and my neighbor's house. Then there's the heat coming from the roofs... if I take I picture in these conditions, ADC or not, Saturn it's going to look like one of the early Galileo's drawings! :)

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Epox75

Epox75

Posted
Posted
2 minutes ago, -Velocity- said:

Good shot.  I can't help but wonder how spectacular this galaxy would be if it wasn't so close to the plane of the Milky Way.  Its light must go through a fair amount of dust extinction.  Even with that, it was one of my favorite galaxies (though I had a lot of favorites) back when I was an active visual observer.

Thank you! You know what? You just gave me an Idea. I already did another session for color and right now I am processing all the frames. Since tonight is possibly going to be clouds free and this is one of the few targets that goes over 70 degrees in altitude on these short and bright nights, I am going to shoot it in deep infrared and see what comes out if I integrate it with the data I already have. 

7 minutes ago, munlander1 said:

What's this "ads" thingy? @_Augustus_ @Epox75

ADC - Atmospheric Dispersion Corrector

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kurja

kurja

Posted
Posted
3 hours ago, Epox75 said:

WF0k729.jpg

Color version: 4.2 hours on luminance / 3 hours on color. 

Technical card: https://www.astrobin.com/full/299244/E/?nc=user

now I need to sleep! :)

Really nice, I especially like the color you've achieved. Corners are a little stretched but not too badly. What's the full resolution of the image, are you going to have it printed?

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MaxPeck

MaxPeck

Posted
Posted (edited)

You know what would be awesome?  We should set up a collaborative project... pick a mid-latitude target and have people submit their subs to a Dropbox account or something. We could do periodic processing of the data and post the results to see how it changes over time as data is added.  Either that or do a mosaic of a region, that would be cool too  

Think about it... we've got at least a few people here all around the world... if we could each contribute a couple times a month, we'd have a lot of data to use... we'd probably get some really cool pictures.  

Edited by MaxPeck
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