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Received my Atik 383L+ with EFW2 Filter Wheel and Baader 1.25" LRGBSHO filter set today  Quite an upgrade to my setup! (Pictured is my small widefield scope) 
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Nov 4, 2017 20:40
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QuarkMartial posted:I want to do some basic astronomy, mainly looking at the Moon and getting a closer look at the planets. My students are really interested, too, so having a telescope that can travel okay enough might be helpful (though not necessary). Amazon recommends this one: It’s hard to get something that isn’t painfully bad or just a department store toy for down at $100. First of all, I hope whatever you get doesn’t discourage you from further pursuing astronomy. For $100 (new), you’ll get the cheapest mirror or lens that can be made bundled with some painfully bad eyepieces, darkarchon’s suggestion is about as good as it gets down there, unless you go used. I have spent several thousands of dollars on gear at this point, but if I were to start over and wanted the best planetary views I could get with $100, I would troll Craigslist for a deal on an old Japanese 3” refractor and then get a #11 yellow filter and an X-Cel LX (an eyepiece that doesn’t suck, and doesn’t break the bank) at a focal length that’ll put me at about 150x. That would be easy on the optics and largely doable on the skies in most parts of the country. Going cheap-as-can-be-but-not-painfully-bad I would spend $150 on a used 6” Orion XT6 (or equivalent) and probably something like an X-Cel LX at a focal length that’d get me to 200x. A cheap wide field eyepiece too for sweeping the Pleiades and such. edit: it occurs to me, I keep mentioning the X-Cel LX series because it has decent eye relief for glasses wearers. I have enough astigmatism that I need to wear my glasses at all magnifications and exit pupils, so having the space to wear them comfortably between my eyes and the eyepiece glass is a good thing. If you DON’T have ruthless astigmatism like me, you can focus out your myopia with the telescope and eye relief isn’t as much of a problem. Still, you want to budget in an upgrade from the lovely poo poo plossls that ship with cheap telescopes. edit2: oh, if you’re a planet observer, you have time to save money. Jupiter doesn’t reach opposition until May so your best observations won’t happen until a couple months from now at the earliest. duodenum fucked around with this message at 04:11 on Nov 16, 2017 |
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Nov 16, 2017 03:52
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Guys I want to share with you my first experiment in H-Alpha narrowband photography. Barely 2 hours of integration of Westerhout 5 (Soul Nebula) yielded me this beautiful result, shot on my small 420mm refractor:
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Nov 17, 2017 20:20
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Hot drat. Please keep posting; it is motivating me to get my own telescope.
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Nov 18, 2017 05:21
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That's pretty awesome. Which h-alpha filter do you have? I was thinking about looking into filtered photography to work around the usual light pollution issues. (on top of everything else I want to do)
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Nov 18, 2017 06:15
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Thanks guys, I hope to get a few more hours on that target at some point (looking at another 3h of H-Alpha and 5h of OIII). Filter used was the Baader 1.25" 7nm H-Alpha interference filter on the Atik 383L+.
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Nov 18, 2017 14:24
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Had a few comments that my contrast was too strong and it looked overcooked. Changed it up a bit and am liking the new result actually more:
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Nov 18, 2017 17:12
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duodenum posted:It’s hard to get something that isn’t painfully bad or just a department store toy for down at $100. First of all, I hope whatever you get doesn’t discourage you from further pursuing astronomy. Quoting this so I can find this info later. I always appreciate advice from people that have been doing it a while and tell me what they'd do if they started over. As it is, I added the other one to my Amazon wish list for Christmas. If I dont get one, then I'll do the save + troll on CL for better equip. As long as it's at least moderately serviceable, then I'll be happy enough to stay in the hobby. If it's a frustrating POS, then, well, I'll return it. At the least, I teach middle school and any sort of closeup look at the Moon is enough to make my students happy and keep them excited about space.
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Nov 18, 2017 23:41
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There are about as many astronomy gear opinions as there are amateur astronomers! One thing I learned quickly at the beginning was that trying to show my son anything resulted in watching him work on getting his head and eye placed properly on the eyepiece while the object slid through and out of the field of view. When you're viewing Jupiter at 200x or more, you'll definitely see it march on by. So you'll experience pushing the scope, finding Jupiter, and saying quick climb these steps and - DON'T TOUCH - oh crap - now get down - let me find it again. Ok now climb up again and look - try - try - hmmm - uh, ok now Jupiter is gone. Climb down and let me push the scope again. Tracking is definitely valuable when you intend to show kids an object. A whole line of kids like your middle school class? You definitely want tracking. https://agenaastro.com/sky-watcher-virtuoso-mount-90mm-mak-cass-telescope-s11750.html Thats a simple table top tracking mount with a small maksutov cassegrain. Great for planets and the moon. You will want to put it on a very stable table and have a nice observing chair. On uneven ground, three legs are more stable than four. Just make sure it's as level as can be for decent tracking. https://www.amazon.com/Celestron-NexStar-90SLT-Computerized-Telescope/dp/B0038LX8WU/ This one has its own (barely sufficient) tripod, but the mount is capable of locating and tracking objects, instead of just tracking. A lot of marketing materials tout computerized telescopes having a database of several tens of thousands of objects, but at 90mm of aperture, you won't be able to appreciate any of them except for the absolute brightest. So, it'd be for planets, the moon, the pleiades, the orion nebula, just bright things. Bright things that you can locate yourself with a minimum of knowledge (iOS app) and a little patience. So, the "go-to" is almost superfluous, but the tracking is not. The simplicity of the Sky Watcher Virtuoso set up in the first link appeals to me more, especially because it leaves room in the budget for an eyepiece that doesn't suck. Which you *will* need. The 90mm Mak in either set up has a focal length of 1250mm. Divide that by the eyepiece's focal length for the magnification factor. https://agenaastro.com/celestron-7mm-x-cel-lx-eyepiece-93422.html 1250/7 = 178x, which is about what this scope should top out at, realistically. 178x isn't too ridiculous for most peoples' skies, either. Warning: skimping on an eyepiece will make sure your whole telescope experience sucks. Getting a "kit" of plossls from Celestron or Meade is just getting a kit of minimally useful and poorly made pieces of crap. A quality eyepiece makes a HUGE difference. The X-Cel LX series or Meade HD-60 series is about as cheap as I'd go.
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Nov 21, 2017 19:02
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A new attempt at M45 - Pleiades: Atik 383L+ | TS Optics Photoline 420mm f/6 | SkyWatcher EQ6-R | 12×300 L, 15×120 R/G/B Had very bad flats (aka no flats at all) and had to crop the image by a large margin. Also desperately screams for more integration time overall.
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Nov 25, 2017 13:42
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Looks nice! Did you use the newtonian on this one?
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Nov 25, 2017 14:31
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No, it was also shot with my 420mm refractor. The FOV was actually larger but due to missing flats and strong vignetting and halos all around I had to crop out quite a bit of the image. The newton would have very strong spikes on the large stars, which are not present here.
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Nov 25, 2017 15:52
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Right, I was seeing spikes in these stars and assuming spider vanes. Apparently refractors can artifact like that because of spacer clips or collimation screws or pinched optics or something. Googling Pleiades photos shows HUGE diffraction spikes where obviously a newt was used, definitely more pronounced than yours. Nice photo though, not trying to be overly critical. I have really *no* experience with astrophotography.
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Nov 25, 2017 18:08
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 Had to re-edit it. Now with even more visible nebula and colors!
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Nov 25, 2017 22:34
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That is incredible.
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Nov 26, 2017 00:27
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Hello friends, another shot in H-Alpha and my 420mm scope: M42  Clear skies!
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Dec 7, 2017 17:41
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drat for a second i thought t he 420mm was the objective size, was going to ask how much a 16" refractor costs, lol looks great! going to add any OIII or other color to it? How many frames, etc? With CCD can you get away with a dark library instead of taking darks in situ?
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Dec 7, 2017 19:05
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It's 27×30s, 24×180s and 8×300s. I totally get away with a dark library - to be more exact, I have one dark at -15C I've taken that is 300s which I use to calibrate everything. Since CCDs don't suffer from amp glow you can use the same dark for various exposure times, I also calibrated 15min frames with those darks, as well. When I get clear skies I'll add OIII for sure… so far, nothing 
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Dec 8, 2017 15:30
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I don't reply much in this thread, but keep posting your stuff darkarchon. It's awesome, and definitely motivating me to save up for some cool gear.
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Dec 8, 2017 15:35
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I finally broke down and bought an h-alpha filter because of this thread.
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Dec 8, 2017 21:15
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Added a small MiniPC to the mix:  More images here: https://imgur.com/a/BQB7g Current full loadout as follows: quote:#Primary Imager darkarchon fucked around with this message at 22:25 on Dec 11, 2017 |
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Dec 11, 2017 21:24
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Hello friends, I managed to capture M42 in OIII. So, a HOO Bicolor palette was a must. Enjoy:  Clear skies
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Dec 14, 2017 00:15
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Looks fantastic man. I had never heard of HOO palette. Yet another rabbit hole to go down, hah. Link to that MiniPC? that thing looks awesome.
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Dec 14, 2017 17:39
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I had been dipping my toes in imaging with a 6" reflector, but I finally followed everyone's advice and got a Orion 80ED wide field refractor. It makes life so much easier already, and moving to a crayford from the rack and pinon is like holy poo poo. First light! 2 hours on M33 from my backyard. Still waiting on a LP filter, as it's fairly polluted where I am. Amateur hour next to Darkarchon, but hell yeah this is fun as poo poo 
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Dec 14, 2017 17:46
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For those goons who want to further discuss astro-photography, we have a channel open at the main SA Discord at https://discord.gg/AkcVFAX - The channel is visible once you auth with your account... To auth, simply type !authme and enter your SA login name like this: !authme tempus thales or !authme kimsemus Hope to see you all there.
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Dec 14, 2017 18:59
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Low-Pass Filter posted:Looks fantastic man. I had never heard of HOO palette. Yet another rabbit hole to go down, hah. The MiniPC is an Orbsmart AW-08 (Celeron Quadcore, 4GB RAM, 32GB eMMC) The HOO Palette I utilized for that image is as follows: R = H-Alpha G = 0.65*OIII + 0.35*H-Alpha B = 0.8*OIII + 0.2*H-Alpha I also tried HOO as in R=H,G=O,B=O but I didn't like the colors too much. As always with narrowband, color is a question of interpretation. Your M33 looks pretty solid! You black clipped it quite a bit. Would you mind providing the raw integration as 32bit tif? M33 is a difficult target despite its size. Very faint.
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Dec 14, 2017 19:16
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Here's a link to the 32 bit output from DSS. https://drive.google.com/open?id=1sSFowb-Y2imDXOwlvBuuUTTnJ-Yilzw3 I'm new at this, so I'd love any obvious feedback! I see some dust spots, and thats part of why i crushed the blacks so much. Flats will help a lot, but I don't get home during the week until it's dark already, so it's hard to do without a lightbox.
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Dec 15, 2017 05:35
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Flats can be easily taken by shooting against a white wall, just see that you use the same rotation as you had before. No need to focus, either. I'll take a look at your data! It's difficult to properly postprocess without using PixInsight…
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Dec 15, 2017 08:35
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I've got Startools, which I think is good? It was easier to stomach the $50 instead of the $300 or so for PI. Thanks for taking a look! I thought for flats you needed to have the EXACT same focus?
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Dec 15, 2017 13:46
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Nah, go PI all the way… while expensive, absolutely worth it. It increased the quality of my images immensely - check out the free 45 day trial, I tell you you will like it. Also, focus does only matter for lenses really that much. The M33 looks like shot from a scope and not a lens, and even if - a close enough focus is good enough.
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Dec 15, 2017 14:17
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goddammit stop convincing me to spend money
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Dec 15, 2017 15:42
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I will process your M33 in PixInsight and show you, maybe that will convince you
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Dec 15, 2017 16:06
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Super quote post!darkarchon posted:The MiniPC is an Orbsmart AW-08 (Celeron Quadcore, 4GB RAM, 32GB eMMC) I looked this up and it looks like it's only sold in Germany, but I was already looking at similar products from Deep Space Products (Cloudy Nights thread). I currently just use a Lenovo X230 laptop to drive my stuff, but if I build an observatory in my backyard (maybe next year) I'll probably do a more permanent setup with something like that. Low-Pass Filter posted:I had been dipping my toes in imaging with a 6" reflector, but I finally followed everyone's advice and got a Orion 80ED wide field refractor. It makes life so much easier already, and moving to a crayford from the rack and pinon is like holy poo poo. I started with an 8" SCT but I actually like my Sky-watcher Pro 80ED a lot better. Now I'm wondering what I should get as a third scope. Bigger refractor, Newt, ? Tempus Thales posted:For those goons who want to further discuss astro-photography, we have a channel open at the main SA Discord at https://discord.gg/AkcVFAX - The channel is visible once you auth with your account... Cool, I will hang out in another Discord. darkarchon posted:Nah, go PI all the way… while expensive, absolutely worth it. It increased the quality of my images immensely - check out the free 45 day trial, I tell you you will like it. Also, focus does only matter for lenses really that much. The M33 looks like shot from a scope and not a lens, and even if - a close enough focus is good enough. Agree with this, I have had the same results. Although it does irk me that so much functionality is locked up inside a fairly expensive tool - for absolute beginners, I feel like the current landscape of software is not great. It's not until you seriously settle into astroimaging as a hobby that it is worth it for most people to spend $300 on PixInsight (even though, yes, you probably spent $1k+ on hardware) I would love to see an open source post-processing toolchain.
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Dec 16, 2017 00:01
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For anyone interested, here's the quickly reprocessed M33 from Low-Pass Filter:
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Dec 16, 2017 16:53
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darkarchon posted:Hello friends, What the gently caress. You talk about a a color palette- was the color added digitally afterwords? My cursing is in appreciation btw.
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Dec 17, 2017 01:11
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na it's rl cool, the camera they use has a monochrome sensor, so they use passband filters to capture some VERY NARROW slices of light (here, a Hydrogen Alpha filter at 656nm, and Doubly Ionized Oxygen filter at about 500nm). This produces two separate images, both in monochrome, but their data came from different wavelengths of light. To produce these color images, you can assign each "band" to either red, green, or blue to be reproduced by the computer screen. Very often you'll see "bi-color" images, where the hydrogen alpha data is assigned to the red channel, the Oxygen data is assigned to blue, and there is nothing assigned to green. An example of a bi-color image:  In DarkArchons case, the red channel is the data from Hydrogen Alpha, and the blue and green are combinations of Ha and Oiii in these proportions Green = 0.65*OIII + 0.35*H-Alpha Blue = 0.8*OIII + 0.2*H-Alpha Heres a link with some good descriptions of popular color palettes: https://starizona.com/acb/ccd/advimnarrow2.aspx Its real cool poo poo Low-Pass Filter fucked around with this message at 21:04 on Dec 17, 2017 |
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Dec 17, 2017 21:00
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Count Roland posted:What the gently caress. Thank you, cursing appreciated . The color palette is basically what low pass filter said, except that a normal bicolor palette would have h-alpha in red and OIII in green and blue. But that looked weird and I wanted to get a more SHO looking palette. SHO requires 3 channels usually and maps SII to R, h-alpha to G and oiii to B. It's what's typical of the hubble images since they all apply SHO palettes most of the time.
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Dec 18, 2017 07:43
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Finally managed to get a good, clear night with no plans so got to use my new setup (autoguiding with a Lacerta MGEN 2 now, so I can dither!) and despite a couple of frustrations I got 1.5 hours on the nebulae in Orion. There's so much going on in that constellation. Click for full-res 45 x 120" at ISO 200 I think my new tactic of trying to reduce noise by shooting at ISO 200 is causing me to have to do some really aggressive stretching, so next time I might try upping the ISO a bit and see where it ends up. Still, when I saw the first results in PI I was blown away. Never thought I could take a picture of stuff like this! The raw integration is available here if anyone wants to play.
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Dec 19, 2017 21:54
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Great shot! Sadly can't look at it in high resolution now but will do so tomorrow. ISO 200 is just fine depending on the camera (Nikon good, Canon bad) Lots of stretching is actually normal and you want images to be in a very linear state. I'll poke around with your image tomorrow and see what I can do there as well, from the thumbnail I've seen a few areas of possible improvement. Use scnr green!
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Dec 19, 2017 22:49
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| # ? May 28, 2024 18:45 |
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 Tried a new workflow based on "Inside Pixinsight". Turned out a bit noisier than my usual images, will need lots of refining, but isn't that bad.
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Dec 20, 2017 21:27
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