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Bit of a cross post from the amateur astronomy thread in DIY & Hobbies, but I figure some people over here may be interested as well. I spend my spare time and clear nights armed with telescopes and camera doing long exposure astrophotography, I'm very much a beginner at this point, but here is my latest effort, the andromeda galaxy. Click here for the full 1600x995 image.And a moon shot from a few months back.  Click here for the full 1680x1050 image.I've got a lot to learn yet, but it's been good to get results.
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Oct 6, 2009 14:27
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I use the prime focus method for my imaging, where the camera body is directly connected to the telescope, in essence making the telescope a fixed length manually focused lens. The andromeda image is composed of 92 x 2.5 minute exposures, so nearly 4 hours of data all told, which is aligned, stacked and processed afterwards. On top of that you have dark frames to cancel out noise and light frames to remove vignetting and other aberrations. I use a Canon EOS1000D, which I don't think people in here like much, but it has fantastic low light level performance and is loved by budget astrophotographers (remote live view is heaven sent). No DSLR is perfect for this, for various reasons, but it's a good way to get started. The andromeda picture was taken with a William Optics ZS66SD APO refractor, in normal photography terms it works out to a 388mm F5.9 lens. The moon shot, and most of my other photographs, was taken with a 250mm reflector (1200mm F4.7). Jekub fucked around with this message at 16:57 on Oct 6, 2009 |
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Oct 6, 2009 16:48
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torgeaux posted:I assume that with a 2.5 minute exposure, you have it on a tracking system? That's the toughest part for your average astrophotgraphy amateur. I have a Vixen Sphinx computer controlled mount, very accurate tracking but I took that picture on holiday so 2.5 minutes was the most I was happy with. Normally I use two scopes at home where the second one provides an image for software to correct the movement of the mount, exposure times are then only limited by the camera. The information on the lens is correct, though I forgot to mention I used a 0.8 focal reducer / flattener which actually makes it 310mm f4.9. Andromeda is way bigger than people think a galaxy visible from earth would be, having an angular size roughly 6 times that of the moon, it won't even fit on the chip of the 1000D if I tried imaging it with the 250mm reflector. Quick edit, I just found this, demonstrates it better than talking angular size - http://www.noao.edu/image_gallery/html/im0606.html Jekub fucked around with this message at 17:34 on Oct 6, 2009 |
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Oct 6, 2009 17:26
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Touchdown Pope! posted:I have a EOS1000D and its maximum shutter time is 30 seconds, so how did you get the 2.5 minutes? Put it in any manual (creative) mode that allows you to set exposure and set it to bulb, click once to start the exposure and again to stop it. I use the remote control software the camera comes with as you can program multiple exposures with that by clicking on the stop watch.
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Oct 6, 2009 20:50
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Confusion posted:Where did you take the shots though? I imagine somewhere remote and high? With a little air pollution, light pollution and atmosphere getting in the way? I took that picture on holiday in the Italian lakes, sat outside my tent about 2000ft up in the dolomites. Certainly great conditions for it, but you can manage light pollution with filters, this was taken from my roll off roof shed in my back garden in Basingstoke England.  Click here for the full 1000x666 image. Rated PG-34 That is beautiful, where was it taken? It looks like Carcassonne.
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Oct 11, 2009 21:40
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M106 & NGC4217 in the constellation Canes Venatici. A big stack of 10 minute exposures and lots of swearing about light pollution and camera read noise. M42, the Orion Nebula from earlier in the year, stack of 5 minute exposures though I'm looking forward to do a better job of this next year.  (fixed links, thanks for the heads up). Jekub fucked around with this message at 16:21 on Apr 28, 2010 |
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Apr 28, 2010 14:39
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They are both taken with a Canon 1000D at prime focus on a 250mm F4.7 (1200mm) reflector mounted on a Celestron CGEM. Autoguiding is done with a modified webcam on a 70mm refractor. It's quite a widefield setup really for deep space objects, but I'm finding for larger objects and clustered objects like the leo triplet that it is about right. I would like a nice dedicated astro camera at some point though, maybe next year.
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Apr 29, 2010 23:12
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Put this in the amateur astronomy thread, figured I put it over here as well as people may be interested. The North American Nebula,an emission nebula in cygnus and my focus for the last couple of nights, I'm pretty happy with the results.  Imaging Kit : William Optics ZS66SD Refractor / Canon EOS1000D (unmodified) / Astronomik CLS CCD Filter 285 minutes total exposure time (57x5 minutes)
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May 24, 2010 11:54
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I image using a unmodified DSLR so those are basically the natural colours. The only processing I do for colour is correction, as you would for your normal photographs, and a saturation stretch which is needed as by default the image is very grey. As a hydrogen alpha emission nebula it can be a bit of a challenge to image with a stock DSLR, the built in IR cut filter blocks a lot of the light in that wavelength. However we have ways around that, first using a good filter, in my case an Astronomik CLS CCD filter helps enhance the contrast of the object as well as blocking out unwanted light pollution. Then we can do long exposures to capture more of the faint light from the nebula and lots of them to give a good signal to noise ratio. Modifying the camera to remove or replace the IR filter is also popular. After that it's just a lot of time spend in processing, removing things we don't want (sensor noise, vignetting and dust doughnuts etc) and enhancing the things we do want. Images from Hubble, other professional telescopes and images taken by the more advanced amateur tend to be taken with single shot mono cameras. They take several sets of images through different narrowband filters then combine those to create the completed image. Typically this would be red, green, blue and luminance in specific wavelengths. The combination of those images creates the palette, they could be true colour like mine, of combined to show different wavelengths in greater detail. Anyway, it's a huge topic, worthy of it's own thread if there were a few more astrophotography goons.
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Jun 3, 2010 09:34
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subx posted:How much is it for a basic setup? A basic setup for widefield astrophotography would be mount, telescope, camera, guidescope and guide camera (guiding is normally required for exposures of more than a minute depending on focal length and mount quality) and a laptop to run it all, plus a selection of adapters and cables. I'm not sure what the cost of things are in the US but I could put together a basic setup for around £1250 assuming I had a camera and laptop already. That would be an HEQ5 mount, light weight but supporting error correction and autoguiding and a 70mm refractor. If you wanted to do widefield imaging with a standard lens and have the possibility of using a small telescope at a later date then take a look at Astrotrac. There is an amateur astronomy thread in DIY and Hobbies as well with plenty of talk on this subject.
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Jun 7, 2010 14:10
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[quote="Anjin"] Moonrise over our overwater bungalows:  Stunning, especially when I'm sat stuck in a rainy office on a grey, wet morning in London.
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Jun 8, 2010 09:13
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More astrophotography with my little ZS66SD refractor. The Cygnus Loop (Veil complex), a massive super nova remnant, you could fit six full moons in this frame.  The Crescent nebula, also in cygnus.  Working with images from any area where you are looking directly into the milky way makes for some very interesting processing challenges, doubly so in this region where you are also dealing with massive clouds of h-alpha nebulosity. Jekub fucked around with this message at 21:46 on Jul 12, 2010 |
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Jul 6, 2010 12:49
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That's a cracker Octane2, got my get on with modifying my camera the reds you get are stunning. I tend to end up orange and to much of a stretch or adjusting the balance just causes problems elsewhere.
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Jul 7, 2010 12:54
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A small part of the vast IC1318 emission nebula in Cygnus known as the Butterfly, the bright star is Sadr, the central star of the constellation. The small cluster at the top is NGC6910
Jekub fucked around with this message at 21:47 on Jul 12, 2010 |
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Jul 12, 2010 21:44
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The Iris nebula in the constellation Cepheus. This was a harder target than I was expecting it to be, what I wouldn't give not to live in south east England some times.
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Sep 6, 2010 09:57
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Instrumedley posted:How do you eliminate heavy vignetting? I'm using DeepSkyStacker. Great pictures, looks like you have some great skies where you are. Flat frames, images of an evenly illuminated white surface of around one or two seconds that expose to around half the saturation of your sensor. The most important thing is that nothing changes between taking your light frames and your flats, focal length, lens etc need to be exactly as they were, for me it means I cannot take the camera off my scope until I have taken my flats. Basically you are taking an image of the optical path of your imaging system, including any defects like vignetting or dust donuts between your sensor and the last bit of glass. Take a bunch of them and add them into DSS along with your light frames and DSS will do the rest. Now some people build light boxes for this, some use a flat white board with a couple of off centre light sources, some use the twilight sky and some people have controlled light surfaces. Which ever way you do it though it can be tricky to learn but the results are very good. If you are not able to take flats then you need to look into various software methods of removing gradient from your images. There are plugins for photoshop, and most dedicated astrophotography imaging tools will have a method of removing vignetting, Iris is free, very powerful and hugely unintuitive, but what it does it does well. Your other option of course is just to crop out the vignetted part of the picture.
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Sep 13, 2010 11:42
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Comet Hartley 2 (103p/hartley) taken on the 6th of October close to the constellation of Cassiopeia, my first attempt at imaging a comet and I'm quite happy with the result. Click here for the full 1680x1119 image. Obviously comets move pretty quickly so there is some trickery involved in this image so as not to get an image of a elongated blob. First the image stack is processed as normal and aligned on the stars to remove any rotation. Then I created a second set of images from the first by aligning on just the comet, these were stacked using a harsh sigma clip to remove star trails and create the comet image. The background image of the stars was an combination of the first stack, again with quite a harsh clip to remove as much of the comet as possible. Both images were then processed in Pixinsight before being moved into photoshop to put the comet back where it should be. It's just a pity that Hartley2 is currently not the most spectacular of comets. On the upside I do have 70 images which once I have found the time to individually process them all will made a decent animation of the comet in motion against the background stars.
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Oct 14, 2010 09:29
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Another Moon image, this one taken on my 250mm reflector with the Canon 1000D at prime focus, grey scale only as I forgot to take out the light pollution filter which causes lots of headaches for colour correction in my unmodified camera. Click here for the full 1920x1080 image. I always love what a good fit the scope and camera are for Moon shots. This one is a stack of 100 images, aligned, integrated and processed in Pixinsight.
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Oct 21, 2010 23:26
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evil_bunnY posted:Jesus gently caress. How much work is that? Well, taking the shots isn't much work really, set scope to track at lunar rate, tell the camera to take 100 shots, leave it to it. And really again the job of compiling the image is not that hard, just time consuming. I use the dedicated Pixinsight astrophotography platform, and the star alignment tool in that works perfectly on lunar images. So the software does the alignment and stacking. Then is just a matter of playing with the sharpening tools and levels. When I next do an image like this I need to remember to remove the filter I use for deep sky work so I can get a nice colour saturated moon image, which will show up the geography of the surface. Something a bit different :  Jupiter from the 20th, showing Io in transit. I've not done gif's before and wasn't sure of the size for posting so the image quality is a bit poor. Plus I'm very new to planetary imaging, still working out the best settings.
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Oct 26, 2010 23:01
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I modified my Canon 1000D, replacing the built in IR cut filter with a Baader BCF filter to provide better sensitivity to HA emission, amongst other things, here is the first quick test image. Click here for the full 1680x1076 image. I need to locate a good emission nebula to test it on next night out.
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Nov 14, 2010 20:41
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octane2 posted:I've got my FSQ/STL/G11 sitting there doing nothing. Depressing. I just received a box of parts from Orion Optics, so I'm fully expecting a month of miserable weather starting any time now. Still we had another clear night, and for some reason the street lights all stopped working so I did some more testing of the modified camera. This time on something which otherwise would present a significant challenge, the Horse Head and Flame nebulas.  Click here for the full 1680x1117 image. The very bright star is Alnitak, the left hand star of Orions belt as you look at the constellation, and it makes processing this image a pig as I have to desaturate both blue and green channels to reduce the glare from it. Unfortunately the Flame is negatively effected by this as it's a lovely mix of emissions so dropping the blue channel reduces it's impact. I'm not 100% happy with the result, but hopefully I can pull something better out of the data which some different techniques.
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Nov 16, 2010 00:31
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Pleiades star cluster, taken on Sunday night, 31x5 minute exposures on the William Optics ZS66 with my modified canon 1000D.
Jekub fucked around with this message at 13:16 on Jan 12, 2011 |
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Jan 12, 2011 10:14
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I noticed unexpected clear skies on my way home the other night and it felt wrong to waste it, even if I did only get an hour or so before the clouds rolled in. Waxing Moon, 8th February 2011.  Click here for the full 1920x1080 image.
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Feb 12, 2011 19:31
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aliencowboy posted:This is awesome. What focal length is this at? This one is taken with my 250mm f4.8 (1200mm) reflector. It fits the full moon in it's field of view pretty much perfectly. The camera is a canon 1000d.
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Feb 12, 2011 22:06
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Cracking image octane2, very well processed and amazing detail.Phanatic posted:Can you tell us what this stuff *means*? You're chilling your CCD to -20? With what? What does 'self guiding through SBIG STL-11000M' mean? He'll probably be back with some more detailed information at some point, but to fill in some gaps the SBIG STL-11000M is a dedicated large format astrophotography camera. The sensor is cooled, probably a peltier arrangement to minimise noise, and in this case it has set point cooling meaning it can accurately maintain it's temperature both for noise reduction reasons and to aid with taking accurate calibration frames. I'm not going into darks, flats and bias frames here, that's a thread by itself. DSLRs have a bunch of problems for astronomy work, my next purchase will be a dedicated astro camera. The S-Big also has a second sensor which captures an image for guiding purposes, you use a star on the image to act as a guidepoint for the telescope mount, correcting the tracking and ensuring that your images don't have star trailing or other errors caused by mechanical or alignment errors. The camera is mono, shooting through different filters (luminance, HA, RBG etc) provides your base images and individual colour channels which you put together to create the final image, another big topic.
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Feb 28, 2011 12:20
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A quick one from last night, the Monkey Head nebula (ngc2174) in Orion. I'd been meaning to try this one for the last couple of months but weather and technical problems have plagued me. Everything however came together yesterday and though I only managed to grab a couple of hours before it vanished behind the trees I'm quite happy with the result. Maybe I'll be able to get more data later in the week. 18x5 minute exposures Modified Canon 1000D with Astronomik CLS CCD clip filter 250mm F4.7 Reflector Celestron CGEM Mount Piggy back guided with modified webcam Calibrated, stacked and processed with Pixinsight
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Mar 8, 2011 23:07
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An exercise in making my own life difficult, also I hate galaxy season, they are all so annoyingly tiny. NGC4244 The Silver Needle Galaxy An edge-on loose Spiral galaxyin the constellation Canes Venatici. 27 x 5 minutes Modified Canon 1000D with Astronomik CLS CCD clip filter 250mm F4.7 Reflector Celestron CGEM Mount Piggy back guided with modified webcam Calibrated, stacked and processed with Pixinsight
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Mar 12, 2011 14:31
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 The Cocoon Nebula (IC5146) and Barnard 168 Dark Nebula by tmarkuk, on Flickr About 43x5 minute exposures, and my first proper attempt at astrophotography since the beginning of April. I need to see about having my job moved to the Spanish office, sure the wife and kids won't mind to much.
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Jul 28, 2011 13:19
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theHUNGERian posted:Very nice. I like the low noise level. Those are beautiful, I really like your heart and Soul image as well, they are on my target list for some point soon, I'm on holiday in the middle of nowhere in the south of France at the end of the month and taking my portable kit with me so that might be the location to do it justice. On the whole I really need to get out into the country more often for my imaging, the middle of town under bright white street lights is not ideal. As for my image, I'm looking at it now thinking I went a bit harsh on the processing and should have another go. The noise reduction was done using Pixinsights Atrous Wavelet Transform tool. This allows you to tune noise reduction to object scale within the image, normally I use the more blanket ACDNR tool.
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Aug 3, 2011 09:44
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A couple of holiday pictures from the south of France, both taken with my modified Canon 1000D and 50mm EF lens at F3.5 on my Vixen Sphinx mount. Cygnus Central Region by tmarkuk, on Flickr 33 x 5 minutes. The bright central star is Deneb with Sadr to the right.  Cassiopeia by tmarkuk, on Flickr 14 x 4 minutes, a cloudy and annoying night, framing could have been better on this.
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Aug 30, 2011 09:31
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Bread Zeppelin posted:Was that equatorial mount around $300? The Sphinx is a Japanese computerised goto mount and comes in retail at around $1800 I think, though I got mine second have over here for £800 a few years back. It's a capable and portable little mount for observing or imaging with short focal length refractors, completely over kill for just a Camera and lens though. An Astrotrac TT320X-AG would be ideal for these kind of images, but they are around $580. Otherwise for under $300 you are looking at something like an EQ2 clone (Orion Astroview / Celestron CG4) with motor drives.
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Aug 31, 2011 11:05
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Hey, something not astronomy related from me for once, Châteaux de Lastours in the south of France during it's wonderfully cheesy light show. I only had a toy tripod and it was windy, so I was happy at least one came out reasonably well! Châteaux de Lastours by tmarkuk, on Flickr And something very astronomy related, the Elephants Trunk Nebula in Cepheus.  Elephants Trunk (Reprocessed) by tmarkuk, on Flickr Jekub fucked around with this message at 13:45 on Sep 22, 2011 |
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Sep 22, 2011 11:50
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It's been a quiet few months for me, a broken leg plus terrible weather does not make for good astrophotography. I finally got back down the shed on the weekend. The Heart Nebula - IC1805 by tmarkuk, on Flickr Jekub fucked around with this message at 00:01 on Dec 21, 2011 |
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Dec 20, 2011 23:56
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That one was shot with a William Optics ZS66SD Telescope (66mm aperture / f5.9) on a Celestron CGEM mount. I have a couple of scopes mounted permanently, this one serves as a guide scope for my main telescope most of the time but also serves as an excellent widefield instrument in it's own right. You can see it piggybacked onto my 250mm reflector here.  Current Shed Setup by tmarkuk, on Flickr Jekub fucked around with this message at 00:47 on Dec 21, 2011 |
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Dec 21, 2011 00:22
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A quick and dirty Orion Nebula. The Orion Nebula by tmarkuk, on Flickr 25x60 second / 25x120 seconds, Canon 1000D on a William Optics ZS66SD.
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Jan 26, 2012 12:47
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This was taken with a friend's telescope using his very nice S-Big camera and narrowband filters (Sulphur 2, Hydrogen Alpha, Oxygen 3) in the classic Hubble palette. I think around 20 hours total data. sh171 Narrowband by tmarkuk, on Flickr The colour fringe around the bright stars comes from some nasty internal reflections caused by the filters, looks like he needs to send those back. Annoyingly each filter has reflected at slightly different angles, brightness and size hence the colour effects. This is my first attempt at processing narrowband, it makes for a very different challenge than working single shot colour RGB images as I normally do, also makes me want to spend lots of money.
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Feb 10, 2012 10:27
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M81 (Bodes Galaxy) and M82 (Cigar Galaxy) taken on the nights of the 18th and 19th from my back garden with a William Optics ZS66SD refractor and modified Canon 1000D. 44 x 5 minutes total exposures. The imgur link underneath is a higher res, fun for playing 'spot the galaxy', I found seven additional ones in the frame separate from the main targets. Normally this would be a target for my 250mm reflector but that's currently not in use so I was interested to see what I could get with a small scope instead.  Galaxies M81 (Bodes) and M82 (Cigar) by tmarkuk, on Flickr http://i.imgur.com/3yDLR.jpg
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Mar 22, 2012 11:44
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Marvin Meatbat posted:If I can do this with a simple 50mm, I can't wait to buy a nice telescope... Ha! One day you'll regret that, once you have been introduced to the wonderful world of drift alignment, periodic error correction, field rotation, star alignment and deep space image processing. Feel free to pop into the Astronomy thread in DIY and Hobbies if your after advice on that front though! Edit - new page should probably have a picture.  Galaxies M95 and M96 with Supernova 2012aw by tmarkuk, on Flickr Jekub fucked around with this message at 12:14 on Apr 21, 2012 |
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Apr 21, 2012 12:11
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The great globular cluster in Hercules (M13). Globulars are always quite interesting to do, the requirement to bring out the full extent of fainter stars whilst maintaining definition into the core requires a different approach from the normal deep space long exposure imaging I do. In this case I used three stacks of images at different exposure lengths (21x 60, 120 and 180 seconds). Once properly combined that preserved pretty much everything I wanted. M13 Hercules Globular Cluster by tmarkuk, on Flickr
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May 16, 2012 11:41
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theHUNGERian posted:I tried to combine some H-alpha data with OIII data, but clouds rolled in before capturing OIII data. So for now, I am stuck with only half the image, but I am pretty happy so far. That's going to be a stunning image when it's finished, more so than it is already! DSLR long exposure and warm evenings don't mix to well, I need to get on with making my cool box, or finding a couple of grand down the back of the sofa for a proper CCD. Anyway, from the clear, but humid and warm weekend.  NGC6820/NGC6823 by tmarkuk, on Flickr  NGC6946 The Fireworks Galaxy by tmarkuk, on Flickr
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Aug 12, 2012 20:04
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