Moonstruck

I originally recorded this image late in the evening of May 5th this year. But I never got around to actually processing the images. I wanted to do a closeup, high resolution image of the moon, using my new ASI178MM camera attached to my 6" RC. I recorded 1000 images of 2ms each of each of the patches of the Moon.
Now I processed them, and stiched it all together. And the resolution was surprisingly good. This is probably the highest resolution image I have ever taken of the Moon. So even if it is a monochrome image only, I am quite satisfied with the result.

Click on the image for original version (>2500 pixels square). 

Technical details : ZWO ASI178MM camera, gain 174, bin 2x2, 2ms exposure. TPO 6" RC. Stacked in AS!3, sticked with Microsoft ICE, enhanced in Gimp 2.9.

After publishing the original image, I tried using wavelets in Registax to sharpen the image. This made a better version, I think. With sharper details and more contrast. And better shadows.

Clean Sun October 7th 2017

The weather hasn't been right for any astronomy so far this season. But today, the Sun was shining, so I had to give it a go. Obviously, it has been some time since the last time I did any solar imaging. The camera wasn't very square in the telescope. Hence the left side of the image is a bit out of focus. Not much going on on the surface, but a nice little proturberance.

Tech det : Lunt 35mm H-alpha telescope, ASI178 camera, Gain 0, exposure 1.5ms, FireCapture for imaging, AS!2 for processing and Registax for wavelet sharpening. Final touchup in Irfanview.

Totalitarianism

August 21st. Madras, Oregon. After a trip across the country, we were ready for the main reason for travelling to the US. The total solar eclipse. My 9th eclipse, and hopefully, the 8th I would actually see. The roads had been packed, and there was a few forest fires around the area. The smoke from these fires were threatening to throw a dark carpet across the skies.
Luckily, the skies where almost clear. There was a thin veil of clouds and smoke across the skies, but nothing that would hamper the view of the solar eclipse. All I had to do, was to increase the ISO of my camera to compensate for the slight decrease in light throughput.
On previous eclipses, I have done all of the exposure settings manually. Not only stressing during totality, but also error-prone and also leaving me with precious little time to enjoy the actual sight. So this time, for the first time, I decided to create an automatic system to control the camera. Since I am using Pentax, there is little or no software available. All available software supports Nikon and/or Canon. But I did find some open source program supporting Pentax. So I just modified that to handle a script I made. This way, I would get a series of exposures before totality and a series of different exposures of the corona during totality.

The following are some of the images taken, and a couple of animations of the eclipse. Both before and during totality.

A combo of 8 images from 1/4000th to 1/2 second

 

Here is a video made from the exposures before totality. The camera program took 3 images per minute at 1/4000th of a second.

And here is one video of the totality itself.

Testing my new ASI178MM

At this years European Astrofest in London, I bought a new camera for my planetary photos. A ZWO ASI178MM. The mono version. I had been looking at several cameras, and this seemed to be the one with the specs I wanted. Relatively large chip. Small pixels, and lots of them. 6 megapixels. Minute, and perfect for planetary photos with shorter focal lengths. Mono version so I could use it for guiding, and for some DSO's. I know it seems a bit weird using a non-cooled camera for DSO, but I had read some good reviews in that regard.
Venus is currently at its highest, but it is not very good either way. At least not from Oslo. But I figured I could use it to test my new camera. I set up my WO 98FLT with a Televue 4x powermate. Giving 2500mm focal length. The planet was literally dancing around in the disturbed air low on the horizon. I recorded 5 minutes, hoping that I would get at least some good frames.
Below is the result after stacking in AS2!. Not too bad. No details on the surface, but then again, Venus isn't known for its many features. Although I have seen others being able to extract some details in the clouds.

I also wanted to try out the capability for DSO. M42 was a natural target. Not very good from Oslo. Both because of the light pollution west of my position, but also because it never flies really high. But it is a forgiving target in that it is fearly bright and easy to capture. Since I hadn't bothered to polar alight the mount properly, I had to restrict the exposure to 10 seconds. I collected 60 frames and stacked them. Did a simple DDP and the image below was the result. Not terribly good, but for just 10 minutes exposure (bin 2x2), it was ok. (Click on image for a larger version).