Picking the Pickering

 There has been a few clear nights lately. Or at least, semi-clear. So I decided to try to capture Pickering's triangle. I have previously shot the more common Witch's Broom and the Network nebula. But remembering how beautiful the triangle nebula looked through my 21" dobson, I decided I wanted to trythat one as well. 

I had 4 nights of images. With lots of frames having to be dropped due to clouds, or winds causing bad guiding. Or other stuff. But I did get 756 good ones, totalling just over 12.5 hours of exposure. 

I recently started using the "wizards", the Stacking and Astro ones. And so I did here. Making it a lot faster to get to decent results. After stacking and processing through the wizards, I did some final tune-ups in Siril, Gimp and IrfanView. The image below is the result. I am planning to image more of the eastern side of this nebula later, and then I will spend more time processing the image. But I am satisfied with the current result.

Tech details : SharpStar 94PHED w/compressor and flattener giving f/4.4, riding on a Scorpio Astro SA-17 harmonic drive mount. ASI585MC pro, gain 200, -10C temperature. 756x1 minute exposures. Stacked in  StackingWizard. Processed in AstroWizard. Tuned up in Gimp, Siril and IrfanView. 

Almost tuned double stack

 I have worked on double-stacking my h-alpha frankenscope. And it is getting there. I came home late after work, and decided to exploit the clear skies at sundown. I focused on a prominence and took a short timelapse of less than half an hour. It looks ok.

Tech details : Homemade 5" h-alpha, double stacked. ASI678MM camera. Gain 150, 6ms exposure. Best 25% of 1000 frames stacked by AS!4. Sharpened and stabilized in imPPG. Timelapse in PIPP.

High resolution half moon,

 I tried my luck using a ASI678MC with a ProPlanet 807 filter to exploit the IR sensitivity of the camera. IR light has less turbulence, and that is good if you are trying to do high resolution imaging.

I pointed my 200mm Klevztov-Cass towards the moon and shot 12 films of 1000 images. After Autostakkert had done its job on those videos, I had 12 images which I sharpened in imPPG before using Microsoft Image Composite Editor to stitch them all together. Here is the final image, in all of its glory. This image is 7500x5000 pixels. I recommend you click on the image, open it in another tab, and zoom it to the max. Enjoy!

Testing Bortle 4

 I live in bortle 8-9 area of the city. So any photo without a filter is not an option. But this weekend, I went with a couple of friends far into the woods on the border with Sweden. Where it is much darker. Not like Namibia, but better than most places close to the city.

I did my imaging with a SharpStar 94EDPH with a 0.8 reducer giving 414mm focal length. The camera was my new ASI585MC Pro cooled to -10 degrees. Gain 252. I decided on the comet, M33 and M45. The comet was just setting into the forest. But I managed to get 30 minutes. 

Then i shifted to my 200mm Klevtzov for some closesup timelapse of Jupiter. Unfortunately, I didn't have software for guiding on the planet, so I had to manually guide. And at nearly 2 am, I was ready for bed. So I just got a short timelapse, before I packed up and went to bed. It had been a great night.

I used my ASi715MC camera for this. 4500 images per video, 1 minute interval. I used 10% best of the images.

Double the stack, double the fun!

 Not quite finished yet, but I have converted my h alpha scope to double stacking. It definitely needs some tuning of the filters to work properly. And probably something else too. But it definitely looks promising, as the following 2 hour timelapse shows. Click on the GIF to view larger and more detailed. Enjoy!

Sunspot september 6th

 Clear skies = sun timelapse. Same gear as always. But slightly different processing and sharpening. The result was better than usual me thinks.

Loopy loop

I found  loop on the limb of the sun. I took 90 minutes of timelapse videos with my usual gear. It turned out to be nice! Enjoy!