The Astro-Imaging Thread

[_Augustus_]

Taken with this:

[Guest]

Same setup as the last photo, but on the next night:

[Epox75]

On 5/10/2018 at 3:02 PM, _Augustus_ said:

Taken with this:

Nice! That's the one made by you?

[Dooz]

All taken with a 6 inch Schmidt cassegrain and a really crappy plastic  3x barlow lens, and processed in registax.

Jupiter

Saturn (with cassini division and cloudbands!)

Mars 

Recently got a 5x glass barlow, hope I can get better pictures once the clouds go away.

 

 

Edited May 14, 2018 by Dooz

[Epox75]

The Mu.. ehm Moon! (Watch it in full screen!) 

Edited May 27, 2018 by Epox75

[SuperFastJellyfish]

8 minutes ago, Epox75 said:

The Mu.. ehm Moon! (Watch it in full screen!) 

That is quite sexy, sir.  Fine work.  :) 

[Epox75]

15 hours ago, SuperFastJellyfish said:

That is quite sexy, sir.  Fine work. 

Thank you!

[Dooz]

 

Jupiter and the GRS

 

Atmospheric conditions were very good.

Edited May 28, 2018 by Dooz

[Wjolcz]

3 hours ago, Dooz said:

 

Jupiter and the GRS

 

Atmospheric conditions were very good.

GRS?

[Dooz]

GRS = great red spot

[_Augustus_]

On 5/28/2018 at 4:25 PM, Dooz said:

 

Jupiter and the GRS

 

Atmospheric conditions were very good.

What equipment are you using?

Moon the other night with my new Orange Tube C8 (1981 version, on a CG-5 mount). Afocal shot with a Windows Phone and 17mm Plossl. Stacked video.

Compared to my old Meade 2080:

[_Augustus_]

Jupiter tonight

[Wjolcz]

No Venus? It's really bright this time of the year and it's getting closer and closer so I would expect somebody is taking pictures of it. I'm planning to in about a month or so.

[_Augustus_]

1 hour ago, Wjolcz said:

No Venus? It's really bright this time of the year and it's getting closer and closer so I would expect somebody is taking pictures of it. I'm planning to in about a month or so.

It's boring and rather low in the sky.......

[Dooz]

16 hours ago, _Augustus_ said:

What equipment are you using?

The OTA was a celestron C6-A-XLT Schmidt cassegrain

The camera was an unmodded canon rebel t5 with a t ring to 1.25 inch 

the mount I used was an Ioptron smartEQ pro.

Whole setup is lightweight also, I can carry it outside with 1 hand.

 

 

 

 

Edited May 30, 2018 by Dooz

[_Augustus_]

12 hours ago, Dooz said:

The OTA was a celestron C6-A-XLT Schmidt cassegrain

The camera was an unmodded canon rebel t5 with a t ring to 1.25 inch 

the mount I used was an Ioptron smartEQ pro.

Whole setup is lightweight also, I can carry it outside with 1 hand.

 

 

 

 

I'm not sure what's most impressive:

• The fact that you got this shot with a 6"
• The fact that you got this shot with a T5
• The fact that you can use a C6 on a SmartEQ pro

Nice work!

Edited May 31, 2018 by _Augustus_

[MaxPeck]

I have a smarteq pro. It’s a really underappreciated little mount. Still, that’s a lot of scope for it to push around!

[cubinator]

@_Augustus_ What stacking software do you use for phone video? 

[Dooz]

5 hours ago, _Augustus_ said:

I'm not sure what's most impressive:

• The fact that you got this shot with a 6"
• The fact that you got this shot with a T5
• The fact that you got this shot without a Barlow
• The fact that you can use a C6 on a SmartEQ pro

Nice work!

Actually I forgot to mention, I did use a 5x barlow, thats why there is some minor chromatic aberration visible.

The whole payload weighs about 10ish pounds (Including camera and barlow), Just barely under the limit of the mount, once balanced, It doesn't have any trouble slewing the scope around. 

I also haven't noticed any star trailing at a 30 second exposure, it seems to handle the C6 and camera just fine.

Edited May 31, 2018 by Dooz

[_Augustus_]

3 hours ago, cubinator said:

@_Augustus_ What stacking software do you use for phone video? 

Registax

2 hours ago, Dooz said:

Actually I forgot to mention, I did use a 5x barlow, thats why there is some minor chromatic aberration visible.

Wow, not bad!

[Dooz]

Io's shadow on jupiter.

[_Augustus_]

Reprocessed that last pic:

Edited June 1, 2018 by _Augustus_

[munlander1]

Haven’t been out since March 2nd.

 

Was thinking about imaging the Leo triplet or m8. Which ones better for this time of year?

[LaydeeDem]

Hey all! It's been a hectic couple of months since I Iast posted. I'm back though, and I thought I'd share some images I've taken/processed during that time. I don't have an equatorial mount, so expect some noise and streaking on my images. I'm mostly just happy with how much I can capture w/o a mount. Even though it's definitely on my wishlist haha. Anyways without further ado:

 

To start off I took this image of the Hubble Space Telescope passing near Mars and Saturn and occulting a star back in April. (April 18, 2018 at UTC 11:12 for the nerds) The globular cluster M22 is also visible:

 

And a GIF version:

Spoiler

 

I did get some more data over April, including M81/M82, Ceres, and Vesta, but M81/M82 was unimpressive and I haven't touched my Ceres or Vesta pictures yet.

 

Flash forward to May and I move in with my girlfriend, who happens to live under Bortle scale 4 skies! (It's dark enough to see the Lagoon Nebula clearly with the naked eye given some time to adapt to the dark!) Of course, I leapt at the opportunity and did some imaging before the Moon came back.

 

This was my first light:

22x14" lights, 9 darks, no flats, bias, etc. Taken on my Canon EOS 350D at 35mm f/4.0 and ISO 1600.

Some clouds were in the way, the raw converter clipped my data and the image has a lot of strange camera artifacts but it is my very first decent MW shot so it's my baby.

The bright yellow "star" is Saturn. I believe the asteroid Vesta is also in there somewhere.

 

We're far enough from any city that light pollution is more of something you can ignore than a hindrance (if there's no clouds to bounce light around). The most intrusive source is by far the city of Albuquerque, which can still look pretty if you wait for an Iridium satellite to flare over it! 

 

 

I also got Omega Centauri:

Omega Centauri is a fun target because it doesn't get very high here where I live. Only ~5.5 degrees at culmination! It's also big in the night sky so it's very forgiving for wide lenses. Perfect for a newb astrophotographer like me.

(75mm f/4 lens, 2x crop, 45x6" lights, no darks, flats, bias , 4.5 mins total integration)

 

Rho Ophuichi:

Rho Ophuichi is an even wider target, spanning nearly 13 full moon widths on the celestial sphere. I'm not very happy at all with the background colors and the smearing DSS created combining data from two nights, but at least the stars look the rightish color thanks to Roger Clark's lovely stretching algorithm.

(35mm f/4.5 lens. 2x crop, 167x14" lights, no darks, flats, bias, 40 mins total integration) 

 

This is becoming a long post, so I'll finish off with the HST data I was talking about. One of my favorite visual targets is NGC 6818, The Little Gem Nebula. So for fun I dove into the Hubble archives and processed some raw FITS images of the Gem from 1997. I've already posted a lot of images and I'm not sure if it counts as "astro imaging" so I'll post my version of the Little Gem in spoiler tags. Enjoy and clear skies everyone! 

Spoiler

Quote

Made using 1997 imagery from Wide Planetary Camera 2 on Hubble.

Hα, O-III, and Hβ data has been combined to create a psuedo-"true color"* image of this planetary nebula. Hβ has been boosted to make up for a shorter exposure and the relative faintness of Hβ emissions.

R: WFPC2 F656N
G: WFPC2 F502N
B: WFPC2 F487N 

Credit: NASA/Demeter Alexandria  <--- That's me 

*"True color" in the sense that the "red" channel data is a "red" wavelength, the "green" channel is a "green" wavelength and so on. The Little Gem is a blue-green color in reality, despite appearing yellow here.

https://www.astrobin.com/349075/?nc=user

 

 

Edited June 5, 2018 by Nutt007

[ProtoJeb21]

A few months ago I got a new Canon PowerShot SX530 HS camera, and with the nice weather recently, I decided to finally try it out. It turns out this camera not only takes very high-res photos (4k quality it looks like), but it also has an extremely powerful zoom of up to 200x. For comparison, my original camera could only go up to 30x, and the quality of the image quickly diminished the more I zoomed in. With this camera, the quality remains good until it's zoomed in too much, like if I zoom in 150x to a tree 20 feet away. After doing some distance testing over the weekend, I decided to take it up a notch: Image the Moon with just the camera and tripod with NO telescope whatsoever. The results?

It worked better than I expected. At max zoom, it was as good as looking through a telescope with an aperture of 8 to 10 inches. However, I quickly ran into a problem. At higher zoom levels, the image is very sensitive to even tiny movements. Just pressing the button to take the image can shake the camera enough to cause significant blurring, which can be seen a bit in the first two images. I was hoping the camera would have a setting where there's a several second delay between when I press the capture button and when the image is taken. Thankfully, there was. With a delay of 10 seconds the camera had time to stop moving, which meant my images of the Moon and other distant targets could come out clearer.

The three photos above were taken last night at about 7 pm EST. At the time, there were clouds rolling in from an oncoming storm, and some very thin clouds had already partially covered the Moon. Today I was able to take some pretty good shots about half an hour ago, around 3 pm EST. Since tonight will be perfectly clear, I'm going to try some more with the Moon and also some with Jupiter and Venus as well (maybe Mars, if I can find it). The images so far from today, and my only image of Venus, are below.

Edited June 20, 2018 by ProtoJeb21