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Hi thread. I was looking into new hobbies to get me outside (but social distance) and I've always had an interest in astronomy. Finally got a Zhumell Z114 Dobsonian Reflector and have been doing a lot of reading on collimation, ect. It looks like a laser is best? Anyway, I took it out last night for a test drive and, some some fiddling, manage to See Jupiter and its 4 moons, and Saturn and its rings. Which wowed my wife. Couldn't see much detail on Jupiter, and the rings on Saturn were hard to see. I think I just need to get more powerful eyepieces though. Apparently a barlow lens will help? Skies the last few nights have been hazy, and I live in the DC area so light pollution is awful. Still, I'm hoping for a clearer night as fall approaches and maybe see some Nebula? Also I've been using the Skyview app to find night options, but it's a little cumbersome.
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Aug 12, 2020 19:13
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Solaris 2.0 posted:Hi thread. I find a lot of issues viewing planets is the cooling turbulence in the atmosphere. It’s something you cannot throw money at to solve. Allow the dob to equalize in temp with the air and attempt viewing later at night. If you DO throw money at better lenses, be sure to get ones that you will be able to use when you outgrow the dob and get a refractor. A barlow is generally just going to enlarge what image your lens is already capable of, and without a motorized mount you will be frustrated as heck trying to keep objects in view at any given time. The two lenses with that scope are likely lens-shaped-objects. If you can get a wider field option, with longer eye relief in 20-30mm your viewing will be a lot more pleasant. Higher power will just lead to frustration this early on. I’d recommend this 26mm https://www.amazon.com/Explore-Scie...259&sr=8-4&th=1 I’d also look to find a rotating polarizing filter. Cannot recall where I even ibtained mine from, but it really helps with viewing bright stuff like the moon. Nebula will be rough near DC, and even a decent viewing through a decent scope on a really dark sky, is not going to look as good as pictures. That said, the 26mm above will allow you to view with averted vision. I cannot see squat looking at faint stuff dead on, and I am in stupidly dark bortle skies. Hasselblad fucked around with this message at 22:29 on Aug 12, 2020 |
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Aug 12, 2020 22:25
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Jupiter put on a good show a couple nights ago. Double shadow transit with the "red" spot visible. I woke the kids up at 11pm and they were pretty impressed, stayed out for almost an hour, watching the shadows move. SkySafari Simulation  The Equipment is an '02 Argonaut (Intes MK-67) with a Pentax XW7 (for 257x) on a motorized CG5. 
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Aug 18, 2020 19:51
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Intes scopes of that vintage are quite loving excellent indeed.
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Aug 19, 2020 03:24
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I found it on Craigslist for a fair $600 and just paid the man. Coatings are perfect, focuser doesn't slip (but it is weaker than I'd like), and collimation has been perfect every time I've checked. I'd like to get a nice mak-newt at some point for a wide, flat field. I rarely to never get out to dark skies though.
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Aug 19, 2020 15:09
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Man, I really need to do more planetary observations. No matter how much I get into this hobby, Jupiter is still breathtaking through any scope. I need to gut my Mak-Cass and fix the focuser, but I also don't know what I'm doing so I keep putting it off. Anyway, it's been a while but I finally got out to shoot the East Veil Nebula with my Esprit80. I've been wanting to get out for weeks and it's been nothing but cloudy and rainy.  Pretty happy with it given that it's humid as poo poo, the seeing was crap, low clouds kept blowing through early on, and the moon's at 80% or so. Plus, Bortle-8 skies, which doesn't help. I'm seriously looking forward to getting out of town this fall to shoot some DSOs away from the lights......
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Aug 29, 2020 10:01
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Besides astrophotography, what advantages does an refracting telescope have over a reflecting telescope?
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Aug 29, 2020 12:48
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(please correct me if I'm wrong) Positives are that refractors are very simple to use. They very rarely require collimation (precise aligning of the optical elements), and when they do need collimation, the process is simple and forgiving compared to more complex telescope designs. They usually don't require much, if any, temperature acclimation time for maximum performance. Refractors are also often said to have a magical quality to them, stars seem like tighter points and the sky seems blacker behind them, like diamonds on black velvet. Refractors are said to punch above their weight, in the sense that a nice/expensive 4" can seem to put up images as good as an average 6" reflector/cat. Small refractors (80ED) can be light and easy to carry outside on an Alt/Az mount, making for easy viewing at a moments notice. Downsides are that aperture in refractors comes at a significant cost, both physically and financially. Above 4" they get long, heavy, and expensive very quickly. Mounting a refractor is much more expensive than the equivalent aperture in a Newt, a Mak or an SCT. The longer your OTA, the more mount you need to keep it steady, and mounts get expensive very quickly. Sitting on the ground to look at objects near the zenith isn't the best viewing experience. Small aperture at high magnification yield small exit pupils which make viewing difficult sometimes if you have eyeball floaters like me. A well collimated 8" newt/dob with a decent mirror, $300 or so on craigslist, will cool down and show you more detail on Jupiter than any refractor 4 times its price (not including price of the refractor's mount). What do you guys think is the cheapest refractor that might compete with an average clean/collimated/cooled 8" dob? The Sky Watcher 120ED? Sheesh, I just saw that they want almost $2k for that thing these days. I'd just save up a bit more for a Tak FC-100DC.
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Aug 29, 2020 14:56
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The secondary mirror present in most reflecting telescopes has some negative effects. It blocks light, and the diffraction of light around it (and its supporting vanes) makes the image slightly blurrier. In many situations, these effects are more than offset by having a much larger aperture that is practical with a refractor, but this is not always so. Low magnification is such a scenario. There is a concept of the “lowest useful magnification” for each telescope. I won’t bore you with the details, but magnifications less than that, you might as well be using a telescope with a smaller aperture. The large aperture is squandered. The disc of light coming out of the eyepiece doesn’t fit in your pupil. With Newtonian reflectors and anything else with a central obstruction, it’s even worse: a large reflector, when used under its minimum useful magnification, will perform not equal to, but worse worse than a smaller telescope at that same magnification. This is because the shadow of the secondary mirror on the large reflector takes a large bite out of the disc of light presented to the eye. At twenty magnification, a four‐inch refractor can outperform an eight‐inch reflector. This is all to say that refractors make better rich‐field telescopes, but of course saying that isn’t very useful to someone who doesn’t already have an understanding of what a rich‐field telescope is.
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Aug 29, 2020 15:49
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Rolabi Wizenard posted:The wife just bought a pop up trailer for dog show purposes, and I think I'm going to take it out to do some dark sky tourism with the kids. . How's that going? I've seen a decent deal on a telescope on Facebook Marketplace and was going to buy it to compliment this year's tent trailer purchase. We we're out in BC last weekend and had a spectacularly clear night and used SkyMap for a bit... We realised we liked this stuff. Also, what's the usual lowest age kids get into this? Guessing my toddler is too small
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Sep 1, 2020 04:34
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Heners_UK posted:How's that going? I think my earliest window is going to be winter break. I hope to take the kids to Big Bend Natl Park (very dark place in west Texas), but I don't have any concrete plans yet. My son was relatively interested at 6yo, but now at 10yo he's happy to sit on an eyepiece, study an object, and comment. I cant imagine a toddler being interested, though.
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Sep 2, 2020 01:54
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Solaris 2.0 posted:Hi thread. Hey fellow DC area sky viewer, welcome to the club. As mentioned, deep sky objects are hard to do close-in to DC, but if you really want to see things, you can go a couple of hours out of town and get to dark enough skies to see more. Shenandoah Natl Park and the Eastern Shore are good candidates. I know up past Columbia at star parties we've had people looking at various open star clusters - they sort of look like fuzzy spots. Not to go straight to buying more stuff (I mean, welcome to the hobby) but at some point you might consider looking at larger Dobs - they're easy to handle, not terribly expensive and will provide better planetary viewing (8" is a good number to go with). Once we get further into winter you'll have neat stuff like the Pleiades and the Orion Nebula to look at. And there's always the Moon, of course. Fortunately Jupiter and Saturn are great targets right now.
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Sep 2, 2020 06:23
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I want to get a pair of binocs for learning the night sky and basic stargazing. My day-to-day viewing will be from a rooftop in a brightly lit city (Bortle infinity basically) but I will occasionally have access to darker skies. When my company reopens I will have a good window view from a high-rise, so good terrestrial viewing would be nice as well. I'm willing to spend up to $200 but I'm happy to spend less. 7x50 or 10x50 is the big question I think. Pentax has a nice looking 10x50 but the lower power version is only 8x40. At 7x50 there are more options ranging from a $35 Celestron on up. I'm sure the more dedicated folks here have entire closets full of binocs so I'm curious what you actually reach for the most.
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Sep 3, 2020 15:44
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Discussion Quorum posted:I want to get a pair of binocs for learning the night sky and basic stargazing. My day-to-day viewing will be from a rooftop in a brightly lit city (Bortle infinity basically) but I will occasionally have access to darker skies. When my company reopens I will have a good window view from a high-rise, so good terrestrial viewing would be nice as well. I'm willing to spend up to $200 but I'm happy to spend less. Are these types of binos specific to stargazing? I've been mean to get some decent image stabilization binos for a while now
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Sep 3, 2020 17:05
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Harry Potter on Ice posted:Are these types of binos specific to stargazing? I've been mean to get some decent image stabilization binos for a while now I can confirm that Canon’s image‐stabilised 15×50 are great. Mine are old enough to drive and they’re still delivering. As for specificity to stargazing, Canon’s stabilisation works great for steadying the hand, but from a moving platform like a boat or a helicopter, the greater stabilisation range of binoculars like Fujifilm’s 14×40s is preferable. For astronomy, the larger aperture of the Canon model is nice. Discussion Quorum posted:I want to get a pair of binocs for learning the night sky and basic stargazing. My day-to-day viewing will be from a rooftop in a brightly lit city (Bortle infinity basically) but I will occasionally have access to darker skies. When my company reopens I will have a good window view from a high-rise, so good terrestrial viewing would be nice as well. I'm willing to spend up to $200 but I'm happy to spend less. This is kind of specific to my situation, but because I have those IS binoculars, when I reach for something wider, I really want something wider. My 7×50s are vintage ultrawides. They literally do not make them like they used to; eleven degrees true field of view hasn’t been available in 7×50s for forty years. One good reason for that is that they have a mightily curved focal plane, but my eyes have enough range of their own that it’s not a problem yet. Vintage binoculars lack things like weather sealing and modern lens coatings as well, but those are less of an issue for astronomy. Mine happen to be branded “Jason Statesman № 151”, but they’re from an era when a lot of binoculars were coming out of the same Japanese factories. Tasco models 124 and 420 are very similar and there are more like them. I’m getting way into the weeds here, but this is some obscure knowledge I had to find for myself and I may as well share. Someone in that thread I linked says that the Statesman uses inferior prism glass than the Tascos, BaK7 vs. BaK4, but it turns out that the 151 model used both types of glass at different times in its production history. The best way to tell them apart is the eyecups.  These with the wide, grooved eyecups use Bak4, the good stuff.  These with the narrower, crenellated eyecups use BaK7, not as good. The right side is missing a piece. Figuring this out was worth my time, because the Tascos go for easily twice the price.
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Sep 3, 2020 18:01
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E: ^ this was a response to the post above but good info, thanks! I had kind of assumed that modern optics would basically override any advantages of older gear, which is silly because vintage camera lenses are perfectly usable in many circumstances No, they're just general purpose binoculars. 7x50 is the accepted marine standard, apparently, so a lot of those seem targeted at boaters. The ones I see targeted at astronomy are bigger in general, like 12x60 or 15x70. While I do have a decent camera tripod, I want my first pair to be handheld, and 7x50 and 10x50 seem to be the most recommended for astronomy. Discussion Quorum fucked around with this message at 18:08 on Sep 3, 2020 |
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Sep 3, 2020 18:03
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I have some 2.1x42 binocs that are awesome both by function, and by how weird they look. Good fun.
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Sep 3, 2020 18:17
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Bad Munki posted:I have some 2.1x42 binocs that are awesome both by function, and by how weird they look. Good fun. I REALLY want to get some of those constellation binoculars to round out my observing setup. Hopefully I'll be able to get some later this year. They sound really amazing. I've decided in the next couple years I'm going to replace my 8" dob with a 16" AstroSystems TeleKit with a Servocat system. I'll keep my 6" dob that I will NEVER part with (it was my first serious scope and it has a magic mirror). If I can afford to, I'll put an Ostahowski mirror in the TeleKit because he made the mirror in that incredible 6" scope, and it'll be cool to have that kinship and continuity between my first "serious" telescope to the telescope that will go into my eventual rolling-roof observatory near Walsenburg. The AstroSystems dobs are amazing scopes. They're kit builds with no guesswork, have a lot of great bells and whistles STANDARD like cooling fans, switch-operated filter slide, shroud , wheelbarrow handles for transport, 2-speed Moonlite focuser, etc, but WAY cheaper than companies like Obsession or Teeters because you do all the labor and finishing yourself, but everything you need except finishing supplies and clamps is included and it's easy to modify it on the fly and build it around DSC and Servocat systems as you do your initial assembly for better cable management. Also I used to be in an astronomy club with the guy who makes them and they're in state so I could probably pick it up instead of having it shipped and save even more that way. It's been my dream scope for a while now, and since I've kinda accidentally lucked into having my own Bortle 2 site where I can build an observatory, I've decided it's time to get into big (but still easily manageable, at least for me) telescope territory. I want to be able to see that color in the Orion nebula, motherfuckers.
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Sep 3, 2020 20:28
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AstroZamboni posted:I REALLY want to get some of those constellation binoculars to round out my observing setup. Hopefully I'll be able to get some later this year. They sound really amazing. These are the ones I have, if you're curious: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01NGTGBWN/ At least as far as I can tell, they're quality. They certainly seem to have the nicest glass of anything I own, and the construction is very solid. Aside from looking at the sky, they're also great for looking around the surrounding hills at night.
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Sep 3, 2020 20:51
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There is a particular Nikon digicam teleconverter, model TC-E2, that is ideal for DIY constellation binoculars. Here’s the thread about them on Cloudy Nights. It’s excessively long for a simple subject. All you need is the teleconverters and some way to hold them pointing in the same direction the same distance apart. A piece of plywood cut with a jigsaw works. I sent these shapefiles to a commercial 3D printhouse to make housings for mine. TC-E2s used to be like five bucks apiece, but by the time I heard about them, the price had been driven up to thirty each, and I paid thirty for the print job. That’s still a good savings over the commercial options. People who have some of the commercial pairs say the teleconverters are sharper, but I can’t comment on that personally.  There are two anatomical caveats. The telecons have a diameter of sixty‐five millimetres, so anyone with eyes set further apart than that has to grind them down to get the centres of the two lenses closer together than that. The other is that being designed to go in front of a camera lens, they have no provision for focus and don’t have enough eye relief to permit glasses. If your eyes can’t focus at infinity, you’re out of luck.
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Sep 4, 2020 05:38
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I picked up a pair of Celestron 12x70 CometTron binoculars at NEAF about three or four years ago for a good price, what I didn't know was that they were being discontinued by the manufacturer. But that's okay, the 70mm aperture is great at pulling in light. It cleanly separates the two components of Epsilon Lyrae (go east of Vega and there it is.) It has a 4.6 degree FOV, printed right on the binocs. It's just light enough for me to hold steady but not more for than a minute or so. Through this pair, Venus and Jupiter can only barely be resolved as a disk; Saturn is a bulgy star. It is good enough to see star fields.. it widely separates Alcor and Mizar. You'd really want the model they replaced it with, the 20x80 SkyMaster, and a good steady tripod if you want to see Saturn's rings or the Galilean moons. 12 power will not get you any planetary detail. Edit: The ISS is also a bright moving star, just as it appears through unaided eyes with these binoculars. I think they named it the CometTron because it's just barely good enough to resolve comets. Edit 2: The Pleiades all fit within the FOV and render quite nicely; and if all you ever did was stare at them I would recommend these binoculars. If not, skip em. Binary Badger fucked around with this message at 22:55 on Sep 20, 2020 |
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Sep 17, 2020 02:54
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Hello astronomers! DIY Secret Santa is now open! Please remember that the postal service can not ship entire planets. https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3941260
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Sep 22, 2020 19:34
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Hi thread! tl;dr - Is my hand-me-down telescope worth spending money for accessories on? My mom recently got into, and quickly lost interest in, astronomy and gave me her telescope. It's an Orion SpaceProbe 130ST Equatorial Reflector f/5 job and I've used it to basically look at the moon from our backyard every now and then. About a month ago I took it out in an aborted attempt to see the Perseid meteor shower, but my son and I didn't see any so instead we pointed the telescope at the moon which was good fun. On a whim I pulled out my phone and tried taking pictures of the moon by matching up the telescope eyepiece with the camera aperture on the phone and some of the pictures turned out clear enough to see impact craters on the moon (hosting mine). It was such fun to see this pictures turn out I now want to get more into stellar photography and am not sure where to start. I was originally thinking about one of those fancy bluetooth tripods that sync to phone apps like SkyView or SkyPortal to make finding objects easier for my twelve year old son, as well as some kind of aperture for a DSLR, but I'm not sure if this is the telescope to do it with. I'm also wondering how feasible this hobby even is, considering I live just outside of Seattle so it's either raining all the time and/or overcast in the winter, or getting fully dark really late in the summer. It also seems like every time I'm out with the scope at night, all of the planets are below the horizon, and it seems like this scope is designed more for wide-angle near-sky viewing so looking at distant galaxies is out.
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Sep 24, 2020 19:52
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Agrikk posted:tl;dr - Is my hand-me-down telescope worth spending money for accessories on? Hopefully one of the thread experts can chime in, but in a nutshell it depends what you'll be shooting. You've got large deep sky objects (andromeda, north america nebula, big stuff), small deep sky objects (dumbbell nebula, ring nebula), and planets. The equipment and techniques to image the first two is very much different than the last one. I've not done any planetary stuff myself. To get an idea what your scope is capable of, check out AstroBin. https://www.astrobin.com/search/?q=130st You can see one dude is doing some pretty impressive small DSO images. But he's using a $1500 tracking mount, $350 CMOS camera, $120 guide scope, $150 guide camera, and polishing it all in Photoshop. The other issue is focus, they are designed for visual astronomy and may require a barlow tube or moving the mirror. The barlow is easier but makes imaging even more challenging. A phone mount on this will probably take some really cool planetary photos, but again, I'd get the thread experts to chime in. Some places to check out for the entry level stuff, https://www.astropix.com/html/i_astrop/scopes.html. This is a decent list of starter AP equipment, https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1oSCZpEtoTJl2Kpa2hLkixQUqUA32f9rwhKMUKk7fGJ8/edit#gid=0 from the Reddit /r/AskAstrophotography. As far as weather, it seems that whenever I feel like imaging and have the time, the weather is bad. When I'm swamped at work, tired, or whatever, the weather is great. I think you'll still get some great imaging nights, just not as great as a person in Colorado or Arizona. My setup is a Canon DSLR coupled to a Japanese 200mm lens, (Takumar), all on top of a Sky Tracker. I use APT to control the camera. One of my biggest improvements was plate solving in APT and making sure I was actually imaging what I thought I was. Beyond that it's just collecting lots of frames. edit : Here's what I use to check my forecast - https://www.astrospheric.com/?Latitude=47.60323&Longitude=-122.33028 Next week looks pretty good for you! Yooper fucked around with this message at 13:22 on Sep 25, 2020 |
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Sep 25, 2020 12:43
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You could do much worse in hand‐down scopes than a 130ST. It’s not a good base for astrophotography, but you can definitely put a higher power eyepiece on it and get a good look at Saturn and Jupiter. Hundreds of deep‐sky objects are viewable. Larger telescopes will show them more clearly, but the fact is that for most of the history of the telescope since Galileo, astronomers would have killed for a telescope like yours. Everything in Charles Messier’s catalogue was discovered with lesser instruments, albeit it in purer skies.
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Sep 25, 2020 14:24
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Telescopes don't help with meteor showers - you want to see more of the sky, not less, so you can catch more of them. Just use your eyes and go somewhere relatively dark. As Yooper mentioned check out reddit r/astrophotography and r/telescopes. And cloudynights.com. And/or ask more questions here. Don't go up the tech/gear ladder too quickly, stay simple at first. Since you have the scope already, that's nice, but a lot of people start with binoculars.
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Sep 26, 2020 04:36
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Just to confirm, what are the main factors that limit detail on planets? I just pulled my telescope back out after a long time of it being purely decorative, and was pretty disappointed the other night looking at all the planets visible right now. I'm trying to figure out if my setup is poo poo, or if I just had bad viewing conditions the other night. For Mars, just a blurry red dot. Didn't spend much time on it as it hid behind some trees. For Jupiter, you could kind of sort of believe that there were color bands if you used averted vision. For Saturn, rings were clear, as was the gap between the rings and the planet. But couldn't make out any other details. This was all with an Omni XLT 150 newtonian, and a 4mm lens on a 2x barlow. Only thing is I don't remember the last time I collimated it, so that may be an issue? I can't remember what exactly clear dark sky said about viewing, but "seeing" was listed as "poor" I think, and "transparency" was average maybe?
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Oct 5, 2020 16:52
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You're asking too much of that scope, imo. It has a focal length of 750mm, so with a 4mm eyepiece and a 2x barlow you're getting 375x magnification. The maximum you could hope to get out of that scope is probably around 300x (2 times the aperture, rule of thumb), and even that is asking more than is ideal. I usually try to keep it at 80% of that number which would be about 240x. If you use just the 4mm eyepiece without the barlow and just stare for awhile things might get better, albeit smaller. A 3mm eyepiece (or 6mm w/ 2x) would likely be ideal, but a good eyepiece at that focal length with a decent FoV and eye relief is pretty expensive ($200-$300). Also maybe using some planetary filters could help as well.
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Oct 5, 2020 18:15
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simble's advice is good, but please check the collimation on that thing. It's an f/5 newt and it needs pretty good collimation to work well at high magnifications.
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Oct 5, 2020 19:30
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simble posted:You're asking too much of that scope, imo. Part of the reason I used the barlow was because I wasn't getting the detail I was hoping for, so I thought that getting closer would help. I don't usually pull out the barlow at all, just work my way up to the 4mm and stop there. Though that's a habit from before I had tracking. I do have a 6mm so I'll try to remember that that + barlow is about the limit. I do have some filters, I'll give those a shot next time. Regarding eyepiece quality, years ago I got the Celestron 1.25" kit with filters from amazon here. When I got it, it had a 32, 15, 9, 6, 4, and 2x barlow (current version has different sizes). I also have a 25 that came with the scope. Are these suspect at all? I understand they're probably not the best quality, but if I'm looking to see decent detail on planets are these going to limit me? Rolabi Wizenard posted:simble's advice is good, but please check the collimation on that thing. It's an f/5 newt and it needs pretty good collimation to work well at high magnifications. OK that's good to know. I thought collimation was mainly important for stars/etc., but after I posted that I googled a bit and discovered that it has a huge impact on planetary viewing, so whoops.
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Oct 5, 2020 19:37
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If the seeing doesn’t cooperate, it doesn’t matter how good your optics are. But yeah, get it collimated and use less magnification next time.
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Oct 5, 2020 19:41
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I'm looking to get either PixInsight or AstroPixelProcessor, anyone have any insights to lean me one way or the other? Current workflow is either Photoshop or Lightroom.
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Oct 5, 2020 20:04
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Platystemon posted:If the seeing doesn’t cooperate, it doesn’t matter how good your optics are. Yup, I get that, which is why I'm trying to figure out what's driving things in my case. It's been so long since I was last out that I can't remember if things were better or worse, let alone how that correlated with viewing conditions.
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Oct 5, 2020 20:21
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Yooper posted:I'm looking to get either PixInsight or AstroPixelProcessor, anyone have any insights to lean me one way or the other? Current workflow is either Photoshop or Lightroom. They both have trials, I'd do that and see what you like better. Maybe process the same set of data in both tools. I've used PI a lot, it has a lot of options and extra modules and you can go really deep on post-processing with it. It didn't really click with me until I bought a book about it. (Keller) That said there are a lot of tutorials, extensive forum posts, workshops, etc. about PI. I haven't used APP but it looks like it does a lot of the same basic use cases that most people are using in PI (registering, calibration, stacking, different types of noise reduction). I don't know if it's extensible or not - PI is extensible with JavaScript so there are lots of third-party modules out there.
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Oct 5, 2020 22:47
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hannibal posted:They both have trials, I'd do that and see what you like better. Maybe process the same set of data in both tools. I'll check out the book. I get fairly equally crappy outputs on either one and need to get a base to work from. Granted my setup isn't ideal, nor was the night the best. I'm not sure what's up with the weird colored stripies, they only appeared in one of my test sets in PI. The other vertical noise I was told is walking noise because I'm not dithering. The setup is a DSLR to a SMC Takumar lens, riding on a Star Adventurer.  Below is what my normal workflow in Lightroom would give, so I definitely got some more detail out of PI. 
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Oct 6, 2020 02:28
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I'm guessing those lines are some weirdness from your stacking, what are your integration settings? If you want to throw your data up on Dropbox or something I can take a look at it in PI.
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Oct 8, 2020 00:21
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hannibal posted:I'm guessing those lines are some weirdness from your stacking, what are your integration settings? I went through the PI tutorials and also read through some of Kellers book and redid the whole thing. The method was much more meticulous but I was able to make masters for everything and finally integrate it as the tutorial called out. That one turned out much better. The focus still needs work so tonight I've got a Bahtinov mask in place and will dial it in for sharper stars. The raw data takes up about 2GB. As far as settings, I just did what the tutorial said so I don't have a good accounting of all the settings.  Here is NGC7789 on the same evening.  Tonight I'm aiming for some clusters and another stab at Andromeda. Should be a bit better weather condition.
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Oct 8, 2020 00:32
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I had some okay seeing earlier this week so I decided to take some pictures of the moon and Mars. The moon stack is the best 10% of ~400 frames, and mars is the best 10% of ~3000 frames.  
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Oct 10, 2020 01:52
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Had my first dark sky night and was fairly well blown away. Normally I'm in a Bortle 6-7 zone and really struggle with cleaning everything up. So I drove about 40 minutes to a Bortle 1-2. Arrived just before dark to some low clouds so I set up and waited for it to clear. About 10PM the low clouds broke and it was gloriously inky black. I started on M31, then went to M33, Heart Nebula, and lastly Pleiades. My goal was for 1 hours worth of images on each at 90 second exposures. The frost really caught me off guard. I have a dew heater for the camera but the 4" refractor and binoculars turned into crunchy frost within about an hour. But in that hour it was pretty awesome to scroll about and take it all in. I used SharpCap for my polar alignment and the flimsiness of my imaging assembly on grass really came to light. I ended up propping some big rocks on the tripod but the whole works just isn't rigid enough for what I want to do. Scrolling through my photos it almost looks like I'm dithering but I think it's a mix of the gear train in the star tracker and the slight squish of the ground. Sharpcap was really cool to use though, I'm looking forward to aligning with that instead of squinting up into my tiny star tracker scope and matching it up to my phone. Here's M31 in Bortle 6-7, 1 hour of integration. SMC Takumar 200mm lens on a Canon T3i. Here's M31 in Bortle 1-2, 1 hour of integration. Everything else is the same.  M33, 90 second subs, 40 subs.  Pleiades.  I'd really like to image in my own backyard but the level of photos I am getting just blows me away. I've got an intermediate spot I can use that's a Bortle 4 so will try that next time. But that deep sky blackness is just awesome. Trying to fight all that light pollution, adding filters, trying all sorts of imagery tricks, just doesn't compare with just driving 40 miles. So the frost, just add more dew heaters? One for the scope, another for the eyepiece?
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Oct 11, 2020 17:11
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| # ? May 28, 2024 14:38 |
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Hello DIYers! We have a new forum/mod feedback thread and would love to hear your thoughts! https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3944213 Get ready to read this message 15 more times in every thread you read! Kaiser Schnitzel fucked around with this message at 14:10 on Oct 16, 2020 |
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Oct 16, 2020 01:35
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