Astro Imaging in the UK

Its been a while since I’ve mentioned how dangerous view the Sun can be.

***DO NOT LOOK AT THE SUN WITHOUT HAVING THE CORRECT FILTERS TO SAFELY DO IT – YOU WILL GO BLIND, EVEN A QUICK PEEK MAY BE ENOUGH***

There are a couple of lovely active regions all grouped together today.

Should be there for a day or two, so if you get a chance get out and have a look.

This was about 8 panes taken with the DMK21 and PST with the TV 2.5 powermate. Stitched together using Imerge. Usual capture and processing software (Registax5, ICap2.3, PSCS5), gain was a little too high, but didn’t notice that till I was packing away. Exposures were 1/2000. Each frame was around the best 300 of a 2000 frame AVI.

Seriously its a lovely view, if you can have a look go for it.

I wanted to get a whole sequence on the first, started off such a nice day – but once again the weather got in the way! I managed to get three – but it does show quite a bit of change in just a few hours.

Here are a couple of Proms from last Sunday, the 1st of June.

A very hazy day. Really quite dire here, but for a brief moment the sun came out and I managed to capture some solar proms. There was a really nice prom, which was many times bigger than Earth.

I don’t do galaxies, I have a new scope thanks to FLO, an ST102. A 102mm F5 achromat. I usually image in Narrow Band where the type of scope is not important.

Trouble is in spring there are pretty much no narrowband targets… so I went for the Leo triplet.

The transparency was really good when I set up, but quickly turned rather milky, which got worse as the moon rose. The wind also picked up quite a bit, but the ST102 is quite a small scope.

This image in 28 x 3 minutes, with Darks and Bias calibration frames used in processing. I will be going through the lights tomorrow as I’m sure that at least a couple need to be thrown out.

Had some fun with this one. Was a little rushed during the capture but managed to get everything I wanted.

The prom disc is made up of 16 panes. The central panel is 6 panes.

There was a nice detached prom at around 8 oclock (in this orientation), there is a crop close up to the left.

AR1166 is the area on the disc at the top centre, again at this orientation, I took three images one at either end of the tuning scale of the PST and one around the middle.

Came out quite well this one!

Really liked this image, thought it was worth posting up!

I’ve been trying to work out ways of increasing the image scale, for some reason barlows are really working for me – mainly on a quality of image point of view.

Then I remembered eyepiece projection, took me a couple of days to get everything connection with just stuff found in my spares box, but I did get there. it isn’t pretty though 🙂

First off some craters that I thought nice as I was looking around.
Not sure?

Bulliadus

Clavius, Porter and Blancanus

Copernicus

Plato

Then I decided to move onto Jupiter – the difference in image scale is astounding. I have some issues to get around as the image id very dark, maybe a lower power EP or less distance between EP and camera.

One great thing about Jupiter is that it has 4 large moons, combine that with the fact that they are in the same plane as the rest of the solar system means that they regularly go in from of the disc and cast a shadow on Jupiter’s surface.

On the 9th March there was a double shadow transit and a transit AND the GRS.

Jamie and I spent a few hours out side taking AVIs of the event. This is the end result.

This is a single image taken near the start, just to gauge focus / quality etc.

Here is all the kit setup with Jamie holding the game controller that controls the scope.

Saturn wasn’t really worth the effort, and the image that I got confirms that!

It was also the night for the Lunar X, another first for me. Never seen the X before – wasn’t sure that I’d know it if I saw it – but I didn’t really need to worry.

Lastly I’ve just received a new Skyris camera on loan from www.Firstlightoptics.com, cheers Steve :). Installed the new software that came with it for the ICcap and the drivers and noticed that they include Registax 6.7

Having stuck with R5 for sometime I thought I’d install it and give it a go. The following is the same AVI stacked in R5 and R6 using the same saved Wavelets settings.

R6 does indeed appear to be better.

Had some fun outside with the scope and Jamie came out with me as well which was nice.

Using the DMK21 with Longpass IR blocker and the little Skymax 127we took 31 panes to make up the mosaic. Once I started to put it all together in iMerge it dropped down to 28 panes as three were not needed.

Here are all the individual panes lay out ready for the merging. I thought that this looked quite good 🙂

And here is the find result. All panes were around 2200 frames with the best 3-400 used in the stack. A little adjustment to the wavelets in Registax 5, merged in iMerge and then a little tweek in Photoshop.

25GB of data for one little image!! Thee pane top right is particularly poor – but apart from that I’m happy.