Astro Imaging in the UK

Still having trouble with the brightness of the panes during in the final mosaic.

But I’m quite happy with this, around 20 panes taken between 11:56 and 12:20 BST, today 07/07/2012. Each pane is around 1200 frames stacked from an AVI of around 2200. Standard PST with a DMK21 and a barlow lens cell screwed into the nose peice (giving around a 1.5v magnifying effect). Captured using IC Capture, Y800 codec, gain of 560 and an exposure of 1/1200s. Captured at 60FPS.

Stacked in AVIStack, usually use Registax but it’s been giving me some very strange results lately… wavelets in Registax5, processed in CS5 (including colour), and then merged using IMERGE.

CLICK TO SEE THE FULL SIZE IMAGE.

Managed to get out, with the PST today, took my book with me as I had plenty of time between sun to read 🙂

Taken a huge amount of data and have processed one of the videos. This one was taken with the DMK21/PST with a Televue 2.5x barlow.

The Sun 07-07-2012, DMK21/PST with 2.5x Barlow. 1800 (of 2500) frames at 95% quality. Stacked in AVIStack, wavelets in Registax, processing (incl colour) in CS5.

Only 3 and a half weeks till the evenings start drawing in. Lets hope the autumn will be better than the spring.

It’s too late now for the scope to be setup especially after the week I’ve had. So I thought that I’d have another go at the celestial equator star trails show. Inspired by an awesome APOD image a while back… shame I don;t have something nice in the foreground….

This images is a made up from over 200 x 1 minute exposures. Using the 300D, the standard 50mm lense at 18mm, ISO at 800 and F5.6.

I used a heated dew strap to keep the lens from dewing up.

Images taken from around 23:10 – 02:50, with 10 seconds between each frame to save the data to the card and to let the chip cool a little.

I also looked at one of the frames and did some silly stretching to try and highlight the Milkyay running through Scutum and Sagittarius. It’s a rubbish image but does highlight the Milkyway a little.

Finally I did a little video for youtube.

Pretty much everything rises in the East and sets in the West. The stars in the Northern hemisphere appear to revolve around the North Celestial Pole(NCP) and those in the Southern hemisphere around the the South Celestial Pole(SCP).

Where the Southern hemisphere meets the northern hemisphere you get an odd effect. I’ve still to get a decent image of this, but this’ll give you a good idea of what I’m talking about.

All the stars above the back line revolve around the NCP, all the stars below the line revolve around the SCP.

Might have to try again tonight!

The maximum for this years Lyrids falls at the weekend and also at almost full moon. Fantastic! Shame about the clouds though! This is a 2 minute exposure.

Managed to get some pictures at the beginning of the evening – even got a meteor I think.

And a little video, 10 frames a second.

My spare laptop is all setup an working so the old laptop sit out in the cold while I sit indoors with the new one in the warm :). I managed to get another three panes added to the Makarians Chain area.

These three panes are all 10 x 5minutes through the Vixen 140mm (really must finish writing the review!), with the exception of the final pane (top most image) which is 4 x 5minutes.

Uploading the image to astrometry.net resolves 21 galaxies – but there are many more. I count at least 54 galaxies. Just need to fill in the gaps and get more data.

To give an idea of scale, the mosaic below is 2 degrees 40 minutes high – that about 5 and a half full moons high.

Here is the image 50% it’s original size (once you click on it).

And this is the resolved image from astrometry.net.

Markarians Chain is a group of galaxies on the Virgo / Coma Berenices border. It’s a huge area of sky with hundreds of galaxies in it.

I thought it might be fun to do a multi year project to image to area. To start I’m planning on just taking quick overlapping images and registering them together to give me the final field of view that I’m aiming for. Then I can spend more time capturing better quality data and adding that to the initial file, which will improve the signal to noise ratio and enable better processing and more detail.

I might even add some colour data and Ha.

I counted at least 45 galaxies and that with just 30 minutes of exposure per pane – there are 5 panes in this image, damn the clocks going forward 🙁 It’s quite a large image so click on it!

Had another go at processing the data for M51. Now using Photoshop CS5 but cannot for the life of me work out how to correctly add in the Ha layer to the Red channel. I’ll keep working on it!

But this I do think is better than before!

My first attempt using a mono camera and R G B filters, cloud did cause me quite a lot of trouble throughout the night. Half a dozen times between 9pm and Midnight I lost the guide star. But the result was that I didn’t get as many as I hoped in each channel, and some of the frames that I used weren’t the best quality.

9 x 10m Red, Flats and Bias.
9 x 10m Green, Flats and Bias.
6 x 10m Blue, Flats and Bias.

Captured used the H9, SW FW, SW OAG, Baader RGB filters. Through the Vixen NA 140SSf.

Stacked in DSS, processed in PSCS2. Final alignment in Registar.

Very happy – looking forward to getting better quality subs and keeping the blue channel (stars) under control.

Having a few issues with Maxim , but things are starting to go to plan. Having the lodestar has made a great deal of difference 🙂 It’s great to have a choice of guide stars!!!

Two evenings imaging with few issues really tells me that I’ve made the right choice of guide cam 🙂

I don’t really do Galaxies – so have been hunting round for a nebula to image in the east. Found Abell 21, a very large planetary nebula.

Guiding was spot on for the whole evening. But I have strange stars 🙁

A 200% crop of one of the stars is below. I have a thread running on SGL >>HERE<<. I'm also going to contact Telescope House and see if they can give me some pointers on loosening the cell a little.

This is from a previous imaging run, showing that it isn’t tracking!

Left is 10 seconds, middle is 1 minute and right is 10 minutes all stretched to show the defect!