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!

Solar activity

 Long time since I have done anything here. But yesterday, I managed to film some very nice prominences. One was a giant loop that flung out of the surface of the Sun. And on the other side of the Sun, I found a "waterfall" prominence. I shot all of this with my homemade 5" h-alpha telescope. Using a ASI178MM camera. I used gain 350 and 10ms exposures for the prominences, and gain 200 and 7ms exposures for the surface. Stabilization was a bit tricky, but with a combination of imPPG and PIPP, I managed to get them semi-stable. All timelapses covers about 1 hour. I did them longer, but guiding failed midway, so they started "wandering", cutting the timelapses short.