Last night the objective was to take a picture of comet Ison on it’s way into the inner solar system later this year. Using the 20″ I took 3 sequences of images spaced over 35 minutes. I’ve animated the sequence using Maxim DL.
(Repeat mode recommended)
We’ve had a few clear intervals over the past couple of weeks and I took some pictures of Orion with my Sigma 10-20mm f/3.5 lens during one of them. I managed an hours worth of 10 minute frames and rejected one for an airplane in the image. After stacking, a simple stretch showed the light pollution that’s in my southern sky from the local town. Limiting magnitude was about 4.8.
Both automatic and dynamic background removal tools were run in Pixinsight. Despite this, some glow remains in the bottom left corner where the gradient was most severe. A star reduction procedure reduced the intensity of the field stars and then the large scale structures were isolated and increased in saturation and lightness to emphasize Barnard’s Loop.
This is another reprocess of old data, this time of IC405 and IC420 along with the bright stars 16, 17, 18 & 19 Auriga between the nebulae.
The original post was here. Using Pixinsight, with final levels and saturation boost in Photoshop this is the new result.
Halfway between Perseus and Cassiopia and embedded in the Milky Way is this double nebula. This is the result of 4.5 hours of exposure gathered over two nights on my Astrotrac. Individual exposures are 10 minutes each through a Canon 75-300 lens at 135mm.
Processing was done in Maxim DL and Pixinsight. The image suffers quite badly from chromatic aberration and the stars have red halos that I’ve not been able to fully supress.
On Friday night the skies were actually clear for a while so I set the Astrotrac up for some images to test my Baader IR block filter under a sky with no Moon. The session was cut short by cloud but I did manage some images, pictures to follow.
Looking at the Society website I noticed that I’d imaged M83 using a Global-Rent-A-Scope system (now iTelescope) some time ago. A quick search of my hard disk turned up the original frames so I restacked then in Maxim DL and processed the L & RGB images in PixInsight.
Telescope: RCOS RC-10
Camera: SBIG ST-10
Luminance: 20x 2 minutes
RGB: 6x 2 minutes binned 2×2 (each colour)
I came across a folder on my computer hard disk called ‘Pending’. This contained 16 images (each of 5 minutes) I’d acquired in November 2011 of M33 and never got around to processing past the initial stacking. Several attempts at trying out some PixInsight processes later and this is the final result. I’m particularly pleased as the Ha regions (NGC 604 & NGC 595) are well defined even with just the OSC camera frames.
Telescope: WO Zenithstar 70
Camera: QHY9-C
Mount: Astrotrac
All the poor weather has given me a chance to look again at some of my older data to see if it’s presentation can be improved. As always, the answer is yes. There’s always something new to learn and I’m grateful to those individuals out there who are not only prepared to learn how to do this stuff, but also to share those techniques with others.
I’ve now removed the misaligned frames from my M31 image, there were also some 3 minute frames in the mix as well which have also been removed. I’ve probably pushed this data as far as I can take it and further improvements will require a few more hours worth of exposure to push the noise levels down.
Telescope: Zenithstar 70 with WO 0.8x focal reducer
Camera: QHY9C
Mount: Astrotrac
Exposures: 14x 5 minutes
Capturing meteor showers on camera is always a bit of a hit or miss affair. One of the main reasons I bought the Sigma 10-20mm zoom lens was for this type of photography as, set to 10mm it covers a large area of sky and it’s suitably fast at f/3.5 across its zoom range.
Wednesday night I spent 3 hours taking 30 second exposures along with several longer exposures to stack for the background. I packed up at 2am having taken 230 pictures with the air temperature at -5C; in a word, freezing.
While I saw quite a few meteors they were far from the radiant point in Geminii and inspecting the frames initially I only identified one meteor.
If you’re having trouble spotting it, it’s top left in the frame. Click on the image for a larger version.
A closer inspection of the pictures revealed one more diving into the Watton light pollution (bottom left).
In the first image I’ve cut the meteor and superimposed it onto the background picture. The second is a single 30 second frame. A plate solved version is here although interestingly it hasn’t identified the open cluster M35, just above centre right.
It’s always interesting revisiting old data to see if you’ve learnt anything about image processing in the intervening period. Different techniques produce different results and this time I’ve added PixInsight into the mix. PixInsight has a reputation for being impenetrable but there are some good video tutorials out there to help and I’ve started to climb the curve. The good news is; it’s worth the effort.
My previous attempt at processing some M31 images from the 70mm Zenithstar was here:http://andrewluck.me.uk/?p=14 and was one of the first images I took with the QHY9C.
Reprocessed using PixInsight (and a little Photoshop to finish):
This is still a work in progress. It looks like a misaligned frame has made it into the image stack so I’ll have to go back to the beginning and remove it.
While waiting for Orion to rise last week I took a few images of Cygnus which was setting in the west. As with M42, the moon was rather a problem being almost full. Car headlights are a particular problem when looking in this direction and the road is busier than ever. 33 of the 30 second frames (bin 2×2) were useable and I stacked them in Maxim and then processed in PixInsight with a final curves adjustment and sharpen in Photoshop.
Monochrome only I’m afraid. A colour version may well have to wait until next year as Cygnus is getting rather low in the sky after sunset.
