A few good nights

Contrary to common weather patterns, we had a few nights of competely clear skies. Which is quite unusual. I was originally supposed to go to a friend's cabin in a bortle 2 area in the mountains. But due to illness, this was cancelled. So I had to settle for my bortle 8/9 city skies. I did go through a few objects, instead of one the whole night. The reason for this is that I am taking photos from my balcony. The balcony has a roof, blocking most of the sky. And since I my balcony is on the west-side of the building, there is a wall on the east side. And all of these restrictions make it impossible to spend a whole night on one object. I think the max I have managed is around 3.5 hours. But with several nights, I managed to collect a lot of photons nonetheless.

I did M33, M45 and the area around Deer Lick Group (centered on NGC7331). Click on the images to get larger versions. Enjoy!

Tech details : SharpStar 94EDPH @ f/4.4, ASI585MC gain 200 at -10C, off axis guiding, Scorpio Astro AS-17 harmonic drive mount. Stacked with StackingWizard. Processed in AstroWizard. Final touchup in IrfanView and Gimp.

M33, 272x1 min exposures

M45 240x1 min exposures

Deer Lick Group and Stephan's quintet 370x1 min exposures

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.