Another
clear night ahead! First C11 target that evening were the Antennae
galaxies. My re-alignment and re-polar
alignment was good enough that I decided to try for 7-minute subs, and it
worked! Unfortunately, I didn’t have any
darks to match, so the next day I put my camera in Bob’s refrigerator to get a
close-enough temperature match. I also
took darks on Miqaela’s camera this way.
I also snagged darks in the morning hours each morning when I went to
bed. I think I need some better darks
for this set, though – it didn’t turn out that great. It came out pretty noisy. In addition, the focus got crazy bad by the
end of the set – the mirror must have shifted as it crossed the meridian. I re-focused before the next target. You can see the long tails though, which is
cool! You can’t see them in the subs.
Date: 24 May 2017
Location: Prude Ranch, TX - Texas Star Party
Object: M104 Sombrero Galaxy
Camera: Nikon D5300
Telescope: Celestron C11
Accessories: f/6.3 focal reducer
Mount: Celeston CGE Pro
Guide scope: Orion ST-80
Guide camera: QHY5
Subframes: 7x420s (49m), ISO-1600
Darks: 8
Biases: 20
Flats: 20
Temperature: 45-50F
The
second target of the night was the Bubble Nebula, which I’ve attempted before
from home, but I had some tracking problems and only got a few usable subframes,
so the result was pretty noisy. This one
came out quite nice.
Date: 24 May 2017
Location: Prude Ranch, TX - Texas Star Party
Object: NGC 7635 Bubble Nebula
Camera: Nikon D5300
Telescope: Celestron C11
Accessories: f/6.3 focal reducer
Mount: Celestron CGE Pro
Guide scope: Orion ST-80
Guide camera: QHY5
Subframes: 14?x420s, ISO-1600
Darks: 8
Biases: 20
Flats: 20
Temperature: 43-45F
The noise
issue is helped by the fact that I’m slowly learning more techniques in
Photoshop. I discovered that you can
edit TIFs in Adobe Camera Raw as well, not just raws (although it works better
on raw files), and that includes the denoising and dehazing tools. They work fantastically well. The astronomy toolkit I recently bought has
some denoising tools as well. Someday,
hopefully in the not-too-distant future, I’ll be able to get a cooled camera,
and the noise issue will be mostly behind me…my DSLR is noisy as heck.
After
getting the AVX aligned (I used the Borg to align instead of the C8 this time), I
decided I wanted to try Miqaela’s ZWO ASI120MM camera on Jupiter on the
C8. So I got it all attached, slewed
over to Jupiter, and fired up SharpCap on Melody’s ultrabook and got it
focused. The clear moments through the
atmospheric disturbances looked fantastic.
I couldn’t find the piece I needed to attach the camera to Miqaela’s ZWO
filter wheel, so I used mine instead after taking a luminance video, the ones
Randy gave me with that old SBIG camera that I still need to try this
summer. I didn’t get to process it until
after I got home because I couldn’t get RegiStax to read the AVI files (turned
out I just needed to import them into VirtualDub and re-save them as AVI, which
RegiStax was perfectly happy with), and HOLY SWEET GOODNESS came out
incredible! My excitement was mounting
as I processed each color channel through RegiStax and saw how magnificent they
were coming out. I had to do some
color-rebalancing and used only one of the channels for the moons in a
copy-and-paste job in Photoshop, but here’s the result!
Date: 24 May 2017
Location: Prude Ranch, TX - Texas Star Party
Object: Jupiter
Camera: ZWO ASI120MM (Miqaela's)
Telescope: Celestron C8
Accessories: RGB filters from Randy Thomas
Mount: Celestron AVX
Guide scope: N/A
Guide camera: N/A
Forgot to record numbers of frames...drat!
3x180s videos, RGB (L had to be eliminated because of dust spot)
Look at
that detail! I don’t know why my DSLR can’t capture that,
but this is awesome. And the CCD camera
has a higher dynamic range than my DSLR apparently because I was able to get
the moons and Jupiter with the same settings.
I need to get me one of these!!
After
Jupiter, I put the DSLR on the Borg and got started around 1:30 AM with the
North America Nebula, which I put on my
photographic list over a year ago and attempted once but gave up on because I
saw absolutely nothing in the subframe.
In these subs, you can kind of see a hint of dark nebulosity, but that’s
about it. But of course, stacking is
magical. I should use this as another
one of my examples of “the power of stacking.”
Date: 24 May 2017
Location: Prude Ranch, TX - Texas Star Party
Object: NGC 7000 North America Nebula
Camera: Nikon D3200 (Miqaela's)
Telescope: Borg 76ED
Accessories: N/A
Mount: Celestron Advanced VX
Guide scope: N/A
Guide camera: N/A
Subframes: 27x180s (1h21m), ISO-1600
Darks: 20
Biases: 18
Flats: 20
I
ought to try this one again with a larger FOV – there’s much more of it. I’ll
have to try with my 55-200mm lens piggybacked or something. Or the 70-300mm.
Someone
told me about Baade’s Window after seeing my image of M8 and M20, which is a
region that is relatively free of the interstellar dust that normally obscures
the view of the galactic core. I titled
it “Journey to the Center of the Galaxy” when I posted it online! It’s pretty awesome. Millions of stars. It didn’t stack well in DSS – I don’t think
DSS works well on widefields, and is more meant for DSOs alone with black
backgrounds – so instead, later, I ran a single frame through DSS just to do
dark subtraction and bias correction, and then processed in Photoshop. I like that result better.
Weird result from DeepSkyStacker (I don't think it likes doing widefields with so many stars)
21x180s, ISO-1600
Date: 24 May 2017
Location: Prude Ranch, TX - Texas Star Party
Object: Baade's Window
Camera: Nikon D3200 (Miqaela's)
Telescope: Borg 76ED
Accessories: N/A
Mount: Celestron Advanced VX
Guide scope: N/A
Guide camera: N/A
Single frame, 1x180s, notprocessed through DSS
In the center
is globular cluster NGC 6522, which is quite possibly the oldest globular
cluster in the Milky Way at 12 billion years.
The star in the lower left is Sagittarius star Alnasl, or γ Sgr.
As morning drew near, I saw that
Cassiopeia is rising, and Cassiopeia means the Andromeda Galaxy! The Borg would be perfect for M31. Usually I have to wait till August to image
it, but since I was already awake in the morning hours, I decided to snag a few
subframes before the sun came up. And
boy am I glad I did! After 12 attempts
to image M31, I finally, finally have
one I am mostly happy with. I’d love to
have more data on it to get more detail on those lovely dust lanes, but I’m in
love with how this came out! At long
last!
Date: 24 May 2017
Location: Prude Ranch, TX - Texas Star Party
Object: M31 Andromeda Galaxy
Camera: Nikon D3200
Telescope: Borg 76ED
Accessories: N/A
Mount: Celestron Advanced VX
Guide scope: N/A
Guide camera: N/A
Subframes: 7x180s, ISO-1600
Darks: 20
Biases: 18
Flats: 20
Temperature: 43F
Yeaaaaaahhhhhhhh!!!!! Another all-nighter.
I also did some stuff with my D3100
while the two scopes were going. I
zoomed in on the Milky Way to 60mm on my 55-200mm lens and took 5-second
subframes, but the result didn’t come out very well. Then I also just took more long-exposure of
the Milky Way with some foreground like trees and my telescopes. And me. 😝
Nikon D3100, 18mm @ f/3.5, 30s, ISO-3200
I’ll take
this again next year with fewer warm clothes on and make a nice profile
pictures out of it! It’s a 30-second
exposure at f/3.5 and ISO-3200. You can
see some trails in the stars if you zoom in, but all the way zoomed out like
this, they look fine, and you get some beautiful detail on the Milky Way.
I think Melody and I also went up to
the upper field again, and the big Dob was being used, but they were hunting
down dim open clusters; I took a peak, but there wasn’t much to see with the
bad air and the high magnification they had on it, looking at some dim open
cluster that shone mostly in IR, they said. I don’t remember what it was called.
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