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Antares is a busy region, lots going on, including an unexpected appearance by asteroid (895) Helio, annotated image to follow showing it, it's not to had to spot though, look for a dash Antares Region by Tim Powell, on FlickrI may go back and reprocess this one, I was having trouble with noise. Not to mention the halo round Antares.
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Jul 30, 2015 00:29
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 09:27 |
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Finally got around to doing somehting with the asteroid I unexpectedly caught in my antares image : Not very exciting I know but I really enjoy finding things like this, intentionally or by accident. This one is Asteroid 895 Helio, wikipedia tells me that 'it is a large dark outer main-belt asteroid about 150 km in diameter. It was discovered on 11 July 1918 by Max Wolf'. I think the magnitude was around -18 but I'd have to check that.
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Aug 18, 2015 20:06
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A freind has a copy of the The Sky X, which is amazing for that kind of thing, I dont like it for much else but it's hard to beat for planetarium software. And yes, sorry, +18.
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Aug 19, 2015 08:14
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Another La Palma image, Cats Paw and War and Peace nebulas. Needed more frames, which is a thinly vieled excuse to go back next year. ngc6334-6357 by Tim Powell, on Flickr
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Aug 22, 2015 17:27
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IC405 in HA, probably the first thing I've done since getting back from La Palma in June, it's been a long wait for a clear night I could actually use. IC405 HA by Tim Powell, on FlickrNot great, I should have used longer exposures for better contrast (this was 19 x 600), also TGVdenoise and me are having arguements.
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Jan 22, 2016 00:32
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polyfractal posted:I'm jealous that you can hit 10-20 minutes without blinking. Someday, someday... Having a permanent observatory setup helps, but really if you have the mount for it and are willing to spend the time on getting your alignment right at the start of the night it's very achievable. I am very much sold on Sequence Generator Pro and it's framing and mosaic wizard plugin, it's taking a great deal of work out of my imaging process. Set your profile up (camera, filters, mount etc), call up a picture of the object or region you want, click and drag to frame what you want, single shot or mosaic, generate a sequence and off you go. It will plate solve your current location, slew to what you want to image, centre it then take the frames you have requested. I even have it dealing with meridian flips for me, fully automated. It will figure out between which frames it needs to do the flip, then recentre the image and carry on without any input. The sequences can be saved as well, so the next night you can carry on exactly where you left off, no stress. It's completely magic for mosaic shots. If I am away from home then I have a local plate solver installed through SG pro so it all works without needing a network connection. European Astrofest in London next month, lots of good talks, several from the New Horizons team which I'm looking forward to, and I have a budget this year as well for some small bits. A new dew heater controller and possibly some better NB filters if I get carried away.
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Jan 23, 2016 13:20
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Low-Pass Filter posted:Question about mounts: Question one, yes, but normally you would use a wedge with a fork mount which turns it into an EQ, you can then get good long exposure shots with them. I have no idea what the periodic error is like on such mounts, and you need to ensure the mount in question supports operating in EQ mode, and preferably supports autoguiding but they are used for astrophotography. Question 2, no, not in my experience. The important questions when we consider what mount is going to be best suited to you are :
My general advice for anyone looking to get started these days is not to use a telescope, if you have a DSLR and a selection of lenses then that is more than enough to get going. There are a wealth of small mounts on the market which will support a DSLR for long exposure astrophotography and focal lengths up to 200mm. I generally try to steer people away from diving strait into the deep end with large scopes, it's going to be a painful learning curve. Not mine, but a mosaic from one of my astronomy society colleagues from our La Palma trip, taken with a canon DSLR, 50mm lens and an astrotrac :  La Palma Milkyway 2015 by John Murphy, on Flickr
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Jan 25, 2016 09:59
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Low-Pass Filter posted:If I picked up a 6" or so reflector on a EQ with the motor kit, could I use that as a motorized mount for my DSLR with a 135mm or so lens? Sure, as long as your alignment is good, should would be OK for a minute or two. Essentially unguided imaging comes down to alignment and periodic error, how long you can image for will depend on understanding those two factors and some experimentation. The wider your FOV the easier it all becomes. For example, my 8" RC has a focal length of 1625mm, given the pixel size of my camera (5.4um) my arc seconds per pixel is around 0.69. Now my iOptron CEM60 mount has a measured PE (last time I checked it) of around +/- 8 arc seconds, but with guiding I normally run around 0.50ish which just about sneaks me in as safe. I'm actually considering using a telecompressor or flattener to reduce the focal length a bit as I'm cutting it pretty fine right now, about 1"/pixel would be safer.
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Jan 26, 2016 00:56
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The last of my La Palma images, I wasn't really sure I would be doing anything with the data. I tried to sneak it in on the last day, it's way to noisey. NGC6723 Region by Tim Powell, on Flickr
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Jan 28, 2016 22:32
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I'll post some examples later showing what I mean, but essentially it's the speckles across the image, rather than being smooth. The luminance frame by itself is actually nice and clean, which is as expected for LRGB imaging, most of the noise comes in on the colour frames. I need to book some time with a friend who's far better than me at fundamentals of processing to work out the best ways around it.
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Jan 29, 2016 11:54
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We borrowed a 12" truss tube dob (skywatcher) for a night on La Palma and it was the most amazing night of visual observing I've ever had. Not sure I'd want to deal with one on a regular basis though, bit bulky. But up there for one night it was worth the trouble. I'm intending on picking up the dob cradle for my old 10" imaging reflector at some point, it's not being used for anything now and it's a nice scope.
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Feb 3, 2016 22:47
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Back from Day one of Astrofest, where I successfully did not spend a fortune on new kit. I did pick up a dew controller as I don't like running my RC's secondary heater at full power strait off the 12v, and a dew band to go on the Tak FS-60 but that's it.. Highlight of the day was Matt Taylor's Rosetta talk, he's an excellent speaker and well worth seeing if you get the chance. John Spencer on New Horizons also very good.
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Feb 6, 2016 00:09
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Low-Pass Filter posted:Honestly, the hardest part is focusing the dang lens, it doesn't have nearly enough granularity to adjust easily. If you are not doing so already then I highly recommend using the Canon software, which provides a live view to a laptop along with a bahtinov mask. You can use the software to adjust your focus in very fine steps and the bahtinov mask will easily show you when you are at focus. It also provides the ability to zoom in on a portion of the image which helps you view your focus star a bit better if needs be. That Canon provide such good software control of there cameras via a USB cable without additional purchase is one of the primary reasons they have become quite so popular as astrophotography cameras. And if you want to take a step up then programs like BackyardEOS offer much greater functionality.
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Feb 9, 2016 13:23
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If you ever get a chance try some image-stabilized binoculars, amazing. I have unsteady hands and they worked incredibly well for me. I think it was a Canon pair I used.
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Feb 13, 2016 21:29
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Hickson compact group 44 in Leo. I tried doing binned (2x2) RGB on this one which worked really well. My scope has slipped out of collimation somewhere though so I'm going to have to do that again now. Hickson Compact Group 44 - Colour by Tim Powell, on Flickr
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Mar 16, 2016 16:28
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It's been rather a long time since I last posted in here, mostly down to needing to move house and a massive amount of work to get that done, which included dismantling my old roll off shed and most of my kit going into storage where it ended up staying for rather longer than expected. Anyway, I have a new house out of town and a new shed with rather good southern horizons, and we just had three clear, moonless nights in southern England, which no one can quite believe. I couldn't pass it up, so I cobbled everything together in the new shed and got it all just about working so I could take a first light image. I stuck with the little scope for now, my RC is in serious need of collimation.  Horse Head to Orion - Luminance by Tim Powell, on FlickrA four frame mosaic. Luminance only for now, getting the RGB is going to need another few miraculous nights. I also need some short exposures for HDR processing to deal with Orion. The Takahashi FS-60 is a peach of a scope.
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Dec 2, 2016 23:35
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polyfractal posted:That's a mighty pretty mosaic. 21 x 300s per panel, I want to go back and get some shorter subs for HDR combination, see if I can reduce the saturation in Orion. Then I can start looking at RGB. I had a QHY8 for a while, never really got on with it to be honest.
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Dec 3, 2016 18:18
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How long was the integration time for each panel?
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 09:27 |
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It's been forever since I've posted here, and about as long since I've done much photography. However, I picked up a new guide camera at Astrofest (Starlight Xpress Loadstar X2) which fixed all my camera timeout / disconnect issues and had two clear nights while I happened to be off work for a week. On top of that I worked through the collimation issues with my RC (most of them anyway) and spent some time adjusting my CEM60 mount and had my QSI583WS camera fixed so it could actually select filters. Net result was this :  M81 and M82 by Tim Powell, on FlickrA solid uninteruppted night of imaging, with sub arc-second guiding (around 0.5) and no issues. SG Pro managed the slewing, centering and pier flip without complaint. Some complaints with red fringing on the stars, which probably indicates poor focus on the red filter or one of my remaining collimation problems. Hopefully a return to me being more productive, and time to get everything working before I spend a week at the MONS telescope on Tenerife later in the year.
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Feb 19, 2018 16:55
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