Astro Imaging in the UK

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.

Had some nice period of heavy rain today, which seems to have cleared the sky a little. The transparency did seem pretty good tonight, with the sky actually looking dark between the stars.

Not really observed planets enough to know if the seeing was any good or not.

I suddenly remembered that I had a Longpass IR cut filter, which is supposed to block the wavelengths of light that are more prone to seeing issues. Quite happy with the results, so this filter may have helped a little.

This was a 2100 frame (35 seconds) AVI, captured with a DMK21 on a Skymax 127. Using the best 200 frames for the final stack.

Quite pleased with this…

Saw the Moon, Jupiter and another planet that I’m not going to mention.

Took some pictures of each and have finished processing the Jupiter ones.

Generally with planet imaging you take a movie, get as many individual frames as you can inside a minute and then use some specialist software to try and counter atmospheric distortions.

You can use the quality settings to control how many frames you use in the final image. This movie was 3600 frames (1minute at 60fps), during processing I used the quality setting 97 (198), quality setting 85 (1500) and all of them (3600) to produce three different images. With the plan to see which method is best.

All images were processed in exactly the same way in Registax 5 and Photoshop CS5.

It seems that the more isn’t always the merrier…

That big yellow round thing surrounded by blue came out today. Had a little play, it was still a little windy and too cold for jeans and a T shirt.

Our fence came down on Friday night / Saturday morning, so I was huddles under a black sheet in full view – must of looked a prize plonker!

5 pane mosaic for the disc, and 6 panes for the proms.

The Sun 16/02/2014

Its been a while, but we’ve moved again and I’ve finally managed to get out with the scope and I have to admit it did feel good!

Had a blast with the PST – big thanks to Jon for the continued loan – its certainly a little scope that punches well above it weight…

This is a 16 frame mosaic for the ring of proms, and 4 frames for some interesting surface areas. This was never going to be a full disc mosaic as I have real trouble getting the brightness right between frames. But I’m very happy with this.

I managed to capture 27gb of data and have used about half for this image. So have some other data still to look at.

CLICK ON THE IMAGE FOR THE FULL SIZE VERSION.

Managed to see some clear sky on Tuesday, so Jamie and I went up to the fishing lake at the top of the village so we could have a good Eastern horizon.

West / North West is the worst direction from our village as Peterborough is only about 10 miles away and being a big city – it generates a fair amount of Light Pollution. But irrespective of the Light Pollution and the high and low cloud, we did get to see it.

It was Jamie’s first comet 🙂

This image has been resized, the comet can be found almost dead centre. A uncropped close up has been pasted into the corner. Might get to see it again on Thursday evening if I’m lucky.

My favourite image. Over 10 hours of exposure time, over three night. Made up 10, 15, 20 and even 40 minute exposures (subs) with literally hundreds of calibration frames to help process the image correctly. This image took four complete processing sessions from scratch to get it right – and in total took me over 2 weeks to process.

Ionized Sodium light for Red light, Hydrogen Alpha for green light and doubly ionized oxygen for blue – gives this amazing effect – called Hubble palette. Called that because this is the style of the images from Hubble Space Telescope.

The Crab Nebula (M1 NGC 1952) is a supernova remnant and pulsar wind nebula in the constellation of Taurus. The nebula was observed by John Bevis in 1731; it corresponds to a bright supernova recorded by Arab, Chinese and Japanese astronomers in 1054.

At X-ray and gamma-ray energies above 30 keV, the Crab is generally the strongest persistent source in the sky, with measured flux extending to above 1012 eV. Located at a distance of about 6,500 light-years from Earth, the nebula has a diameter of 11 light years and expands at a rate of about 1,500 kilometers per second. It is part of the Perseus Arm of the Milky Way Galaxy.

At the center of the nebula lies the Crab Pulsar, a neutron star (or spinning ball of neutrons), 28–30 km across, which emits pulses of radiation from gamma rays to radio waves with a spin rate of 30.2 times per second. The nebula was the first astronomical object identified with a historical supernova explosion.

This image was again from the first test evening with the loan FLT98 (cracking scope). 18 x 10 minutes through the FLT98, 7nm Ha filter with the H9.