I mentioned in another post that my dew heater controller had decided to self-combust and not work anymore.
I spent some time tracking down the parts and components that I needed to make a combined power distribution box and dew heater controller. It’s not anything fancy, by any stretch of the imagination. It’s cheap. That’s really it’s only saving grace. There are no fancy custom PCBs or 3D printing here. It’s certainly not a Pegasus AstroPower Box or a Wanderer Astro device…
The new power distribution / dew heater controller box is on back-burner for the moment as I track down some issues I’ve run into. I suspect my larger dew heater band has a short circuit somewhere and I need to track that down before I can safely image again. (Let’s leave out the terrible weather and lack of cloud-free nights we’ve had lately…)
So whilst the rig is out of action (for the most part), I decided to go back and try my hand at reprocessing some old data. I do like the M42 image I captured about 18 months ago, so thought it a good option for re-processing with my updated tools and workflow.
Catalogued as Messier 17 or M17, the Omega Nebula (also known as the Swan Nebula, Checkmark Nebula, Lobster Nebula, and the Horseshoe Nebula) is an H II region in the constellation Sagittarius. It was discovered by Philippe Loys de Chéseaux in 1745. Charles Messier catalogued it in 1764
M17 lies between 5,000 and 6,000 light-years from Earth and it spans some 15 light-years in diameter. The cloud of interstellar matter of which this nebula is a part is roughly 40 light-years in diameter and has a mass of 30,000 solar masses. The total mass of M17 is an estimated 800 solar masses.
Each year Philip Island hosts their Annual Whale Festival. It’s a good excuse to get out of the house for a weekend of cetacean-based learning, fresh air and the opportunity to get some astro images.
Some of the Festival’s lectures are very interesting - this year it was a pair of lectures on whale evolution and one on the (sadly now extinct) Giant Killer Sperm Whales. If you can get along to it, I recommend it.
The weather here has been pretty poor lately - lots of cloudy or very cold nights (with lots of condensation and damp) that don’t really inspire me to get outside and start imaging.
There are a few targets that are only visible to me for a few months of the year, and M16 (Messier 16) is one of them. It goes by a swag of other names, so you may be used to seeing it called something else.
In my last update I mentioned the ‘Egg’ in the bottom right corner of my image of NGC6188 and how it would make a good target for the Megalens. Well, my chance came around a lot sooner than I expected.
I also think it’s fair to say that this image will be the last from the Megalens - it’s just not cut out for astro work. I’ll be saving my pennies from here on for an upgrade / companion to the SW72ED. Right now, I have my eye on the new Apertura CarbonStar 150 reflector.
If you’re a long-term reader of this site you’ll be aware of my standout image from 2023 - NGC6188 (“The Fighting Dragons of Ara”), which can be seen here. I have this image printed at A1 and framed for display.
It’s been a very cloudy year do far, and good nights for imaging have been few and far between. So I though I’d go back and try my hand at reprocessing some of my old data and see what eventuated.
I had another clear night and the opportunity to tweak the Megalens and it’s focus settings.
If you’re struggling with getting focus working with KStars/Ekos, then I recommend the series of videos on YouTube by John Evans. (https://www.youtube.com/@johneevans1) He’s the lead(?) programmer for the KStars/Ekos focus module and he’s been working on it for quite some time to sort out bugs, improve easy-of-use and implement new features.
The target for this image was M83, the Southern Pinwheel Galaxy. It’s quite high in the sky at the moment, with an early meridian of around 11pm. So a bright target that’s out of the light pollution dome. (For the most part - the LP here is not good, and the entire sky is usually a medium grey colour.)
If you’ve been following along, you’ll be aware that I constructed a telescope mount and auto-focus setup for my 1000mm camera lens. (See here for the write-up.)
I finally had some clear skies (well, mostly clear skies!) and jumped at the chance to test it out - and to see just where the focal point was for the lens and my usual camera setup.
It’s been a very slow process getting here. Not helped in the slightest by my procrastination and putting it off for months and months.
When I bought the Megalens, almost a year ago, I intended to use it for astrophotography. I tried it once and discovered that it was almost impossible to focus manually, even during the daytime, and the stars in the corner of the image had massive distortions - they looked more like birds in flight or the letter ‘V’. (Not to mention the insane amount of vignetting!)
Supernova SN2024ggi was detected on April 11th, 2024, in the nearby galaxy NGC3621. This galaxy is part of the group of galaxies nearby to the Milky Way. 22 million light years is (by human standards) a very, very, very big distance. By astronomical standards it’s the equivalent of the house next door.
Contrary to what people think, supernovae are very common - it’s just that the vast majority of them are so far away they are effectively invisible to us.
One thing that happens a lot in astrophotography is the collection of data over multiple nights; particularly with targets that are very faint. These targets require hours of data to achieve a suitable image.
So how do we process data that we capture over multiple nights or where multiple filters were used? The easiest way that I have found to do this is to simply use a Siril front-end called ‘Sirilic’ to all the hard work for me.
Processing of astro images is more an art than a science. Two people can process the same data and end up with two completely different results.
One thing I’ll say is to beware of YouTube videos - those guys make it look stupidly easy to get fantastic results. I’ve found that it’s not easy!
Processing Workflows
When it comes to processing the stacked and pre-processed images, the workflow I use for a star cluster is different to what I use for a nebula. Generally, a star cluster doesn’t have colour gradients and swathes of shadows and highlights to deal with - it’s stars on a dark background. Nebulae are the opposite.
Now that the telescope is all packed away and we have our image data, how do we turn it into an image we can display?
If you’re using a DSLR to take wide-frame night view images, you can pretty much pick the best image, work on it with a suitable image editing program and call it finished.
However, I’m using a dedicated astro camera, have taken dozens or hundreds of images and now need to turn those gigabytes of data into an image. The image collection doesn’t stop with the data images - also called ’lights’. (We also use the term ‘subs’ (short for sub-frames) when referring to these images. I’ll try to be consistent with the terms I use.)
Before we get too far into this section, I’ll point out that I use a Linux laptop with Kubuntu installed to drive my rig. If you’re a Windows user, there are many options out there for you - chief being NINA, Sequence Generator Pro and Astro Photography Tool. I have no knowledge of these programs, so you are going to be on your own if you use them.
About a year ago I gave a presentation on astrophotography to my team at work. It was a “Get to know your co-workers better” session where we explained one of our hobbies over the course of lunch. After working on it for a couple of weeks, I ended up with a presentation of about 35 slides and talked for just under an hour.
When I have a new image (or two) ready, I share them with the team. I don’t think they quite understand just how much work goes on ‘behind the scenes’ to arrive at the final image, and that I merely point the camera at the sky and out comes an image.
Aside from my first trip to the ASV’s Dark Sky site when there was a large number of astro enthusiasts present; I’ve never attended a real ‘Star Party’ where people get together under the night skies and spent a night (or more) imaging and observing.
So I had expectations for a good turn-out to the inaugural ‘Gippsland Star Party’ held over the weekend of March 15th to 17th. The location (Stockman’s Camp, Buchan South) promised very dark skies, far away from the light-dome of the city.
Nights when I’ve been able to get the rig out and imaging have been few and far between recently. Sometimes I have other things on that prevent me from getting out under the stars, but mostly it’s been the weather.
Of course, there have been nights when I’ve checked the cloud forecast and stayed inside, only for there to be pristine skies above me. I’m now getting to the point of (mostly) ignoring the forecasts and using my pair of Mk I eyeballs and seeing for myself what the conditions are like.
I had originally set out to image NGC 3576, “The Statue of Liberty Nebula”, but mixed up the NGC numbers. Thankfully, these two emission nebulae are right beside each other. I ended up capturing my original target, but not without a few tense moments when I realised I had the wrong target.
Wikipedia says:
NGC 3576 is a bright emission nebula in the Sagittarius arm of the galaxy a few thousand light-years away from the Eta Carinae nebula. It is also approximately 100 light years across and 9000 light-years away from Earth. It was discovered by John Frederick William Herschel on 16 March 1834.
NGC 2516 (also known as Caldwell 96) is an open star cluster in the southern sky in the constellation Carina discovered by Abbe Lacaille in 1751-1752. It is also called Southern Beehive or the Sprinter.
This bright cluster itself is easily visible with the naked eye as a hazy patch, but is resolvable into stars using binoculars. It contains two 5th magnitude red giant stars and three main visual double stars: HJ 4027, HJ 4031 and I 29. A small telescope would be required to split the double stars, which are all pairs of 8-9 magnitude and 1-10 arcseconds separation.
I was “wandering” around the sky map in Telescopius, looking for something interesting to image, when I stumbled across something unusual. A large DSO that wasn’t in any of the catalogues I looked at. I had the co-ordinates, but nothing matched it. How unusual. There were plenty of NGC entries all around it, but this one didn’t have an NGC identifier.
I asked the question on IIS - “What is this DSO?” and whilst I waited for people to answer, added the co-ordinates into my custom catalogue in KStars, got the rig outside and running.
The Horsehead Nebula (also known as Barnard 33 or B33) is a small dark nebula in the constellation Orion. The nebula is located just to the south of Alnitak, the easternmost star of Orion’s Belt, and is part of the much larger Orion molecular cloud complex. It appears within the southern region of the dense dust cloud known as Lynds 1630, along the edge of the much larger, active star-forming H II region called IC 434.
The Sculptor Galaxy (also known as the Silver Coin, Silver Dollar Galaxy, NGC 253, or Caldwell 65) is an intermediate spiral galaxy in the constellation Sculptor. The Sculptor Galaxy is a starburst galaxy, which means that it is currently undergoing a period of intense star formation.
As one of the brightest galaxies in the sky, the Sculptor Galaxy can be seen through binoculars and is near the star Beta Ceti. It is considered one of the most easily viewed galaxies in the sky after the Andromeda Galaxy.
The Helix Nebula (also known as NGC 7293) is a planetary nebula located in the constellation Aquarius. This object is one of the closest of all the bright planetary nebulae to Earth. Measured by the Gaia mission, the nebula is roughly 650 light-years away. It is similar in appearance to the Cat’s Eye Nebula and the Ring Nebula. The Helix Nebula has sometimes been referred to as the “Eye of God” as well as the “Eye of Sauron”
I started out wanting to capture the Helix Nebula (NGC7293) as it’s big and bright at the moment. Nope, stopped by guiding issues - my software decided to try and guide on a hot-pixel in the guide camera. Something I’ve never had happen before. So I did the usual things of trying different camera settings before giving up.
Roll forward a few weeks and we (finally) got another clear night. So I tried the Helix again. Nope, still no guiding. Luckily, I had researched a few back-up targets to try, so I moved over to M20.
With all the miserable weather we’ve had lately, I’ve had no chance to get the rig out under the stars to capture more photos of different targets. So I decided to try my hand at processing the Eta Carina mosaic that I did back in March.
I used the same raw images as before, but stacked and processed them in a totally different way.
Using Sirilic, I stacked each set of images individually to create 4 panels which were gently processed (ie, stretching, green noise removal, etc) before being converted into PNGs and then stitched together with AutoPanoGiga (aka APG).
We finally had another clear night here, so I had the rig all outside and ready to capture tonight’s target - IC4628. I’ve seen some interesting images of this emission nebula, and decided it was time to take the plunge and have a go at it.
I spent time making certain I had the camera aligned correctly, so that I had the longest side of the sensor horizontal. Previously, it was at whatever angle it ended up after I assembled the optical train. Which made for some interesting, and potentially odd-looking images; especially if you are used to seeing the target in a particular orientation…
One of the issues I’ve been having with the astro-cam has been framing - getting my intended target the ‘right way up’ in the camera. I’ve also been troubled by having the camera rotated at different angles (relative to the long axis of the telescope). This comes about because all the components are threaded together, and different components have different lengths of thread available.
So taking the filter holder out and installing the 21mm spacer leaves the camera at a different rotation. As you can imagine, stacking and processing data taken over a couple of sessions can be difficult if I’ve changed the components in the optical train.
My latest image is probably one of the most imaged nebulae in the southern skies after the ‘big ones’ of Eta Carina, The Running Chicken and Rho Ophiuchi. I’m not putting the Orion Nebula in this list because that’s primarily a Northern Hemisphere sight, and we’re limited to a couple of months where it’s visible. I think just about every astophotographer will image this one at least once, simply because it’s such a fantastic sight to behold.
If you’ve ever stripped down an HEQ5 mount (either the standard or Pro versions) you’ll know that you need to carefully adjust the backlash in the gear trains. This includes both the motor to worm drive trio of gears and the worm drive to ‘giant brass cylinder’ gear.
It’s a fiddly job and requires a delicate hand to find that perfect balance point between too loose and having backlash, and too tight and finding the gears are binding.
The main aim of our Lake Tyrell trip was to get away from the city for a few days, explore the region a little and for me to get some astro imaging done in a near-perfect dark sky location.
The cloud forecasts were looking a bit dodgy (and they were) for the first two nights of our stay. I did manage to get some landscape shots, though.
One ‘defect’ with the tourist viewing platform / area is the approach road. Anyone coming to the site at night will be pointing their headlights directly at the platform. Any night vision adaptation you have or any image you happen to be taking will be ruined.
We finally got some clear skies here and I took advantage of a few scant hours of good viewing (before the humidity ramped up and mist rolled in) to grab more data of NGC5128 (aka Centaurus A).
You can read about my previous capture of the galaxy here - along with all the interesting information from Wikipedia.
For the first image here, I combined the data from my previous session with the new data to get a composite image. As with all astro work, more data makes for better images.
We finally had some clear nights and I was able to get the rig out and do some imaging. After spending so much time going after nebulae, it was a change of pace to aim for something a bit less dramatic. Not that a stellar cluster is any less dramatic, they’re a lot easier to image and process.
The data for all three images below was collected from my light-polluted back yard, and each image has been stacked and had it’s initial processing carried out in three different programs. Affinity Photo, Astro Pixel Processor and Siril v1.2.0b2. All images had their final post-processing completed with Affinity Photo.
One thing I found when working on the Eta Carina mosaic was the large amount of stacking artefacts around the edges of the frames. For a normal image this is not a problem as you just crop those bits off. When you’re building a mosaic, however, you need all the image and can’t lose any of the borders. Also, the stacking artefacts can cause problems when you come to stitch the panels together. As I found out…
One feature of Kstars that I’ve been curious to try out is the ‘Mosaic’ feature, buried in the ‘Sequencer’ page. I watched a few YouTube videos so that I got an idea of how it worked and then decided to give it a try on the next clear night.
The selected Target? The Eta Carina nebula, of course. It’s big, bright, and easy to find in the night sky.
Just for fun, I took some wide-angle shots with the Star Adventurer and DSLR whilst I was imaging Gum15.
They came out reasonably well, especially the SMC and LMC images. I’m quite impressed that the Tarantula Nebula is easily spotted. There appears to be a large number of potential targets in both of them, so I can see myself digging deeper into them.
The Galactic Core images are (IMHO) reasonable, but it’s very early in the ‘galaxy season’ and better images will be possible towards the middle of the year.
My method of selecting a DSO for imaging is rather relaxed and haphazard - I see what everyone else is doing and look elsewhere because I’m like that. I usually end up wandering through Stellarium or Telescopius looking for things that “look interesting”.
Gum15 is one of them - I saw it in Stellarium, but had no idea what it’s catalogue identifier was. A quick post on IceInSpace and I had my answer from the resident experts there. Thanks guys! Telescopius had a couple of images of it and some useful information - except for one important value: the surface magnitude (aka brightness).
Well, I didn’t expect to be posting this image here.
With all the furore and hubbub surrounding the “Green Comet” in the media I joined pretty much every astronomer in the world in trying to see it.
The media never really made it clear that the comet was faint and hard to see, so I expect there were some very disappointed would-be viewers.
To be totally honest - I didn’t see it either, and I was using a telescope. I did, however, set up the camera and fire off a sequence of images where I thought the comet would be. I got very lucky, as the comet was right on the edge of my field of view. Any further to the left and I would have missed it.
Another clear night, and another chance to take the rig out and capture more photons.
I haven’t been having much luck with imaging nebulae lately, so I thought I’d have a shot at another open star cluster. They’re (relatively) easy to image, and provide good practise in removing a lot of background noise and gunk from the images.
To cut a long story (mostly) short, the night started out with the usual hassles of getting the telescope focussed and then getting the imaging under way after deciding the best exposure time. (By keeping the gain, offset and temperature the same I can concentrate on fiddling with the exposure for the best images. That’s my theory and I’m sticking to it.)
Maybe not as much of a “wall of text” this time… Maybe.
I went up to the LMDSS for Australia Day, as the cloud forecast was for clear skies. It helped that I had taken the next day (a Friday) off work to make a very long weekend. Sadly, I wasn’t able to stay for Friday night - and it was forecast to have clear skies as well.
I had both rigs out that night - the Star Adventurer was taking 50-image series of various parts of the night sky. I don’t know what I’ll do with them yet, but I’m certain they’ll be used for something. Eventually. Maybe another astro-landscape or something.
We had two clear nights in a row here, and although it was the full moon I got very lucky - the moon was so low in the sky that it didn’t rise over the house next door! Talk about “lucky imaging”…
Even then, I had to wait until after midnight before I could start imaging because the roof of my house was in the way. I guess I can’t win them all…
One of the cooler things you can do with an image editing program such as Affinity Photo (or PhotoShop, or GIMP) is to replace parts of an image with another image. This comes in handy if/when you decide that the sky in an image is boring, or not what you wanted.
The two images below show the “before” and “after” of doing just this.
The original image is suitable dramatic, with brightly lit clouds (and perhaps a hint of Aurora Australis hiding in there) but the stars are smothered by the light pollution. The second image uses a shot of a darker sky with the stars far more visible.
The December new moon happened on the 23rd. (Hence why I was outside on Christmas Eve doing some imaging in my backyard.) I had not thought about taking a trip up to the ASV’s dark sky site at all - despite it being an obvious time to get away from the Christmas madness and have some quiet time imaging.
When the Ice Queen suggested it, I was indecisive until she explained her reasons for saying I should go. So I booked a bunk room, packed my car full of gear and headed off on Boxing Day. I won’t bore you with how bad the traffic was, and how the freeways were packed with people heading off on holiday. Nor will I tell you about the heat of the day - 38 degrees Celcius and a sun strong enough to pummel you into the ground. After the winter we’ve just gone through, seeing blue skies and sunshine was a great relief.
Why was I out imaging on Christmas Eve? Well, why not? It was a clear night with dark (for a suburban location) skies and the visibility was as good as it ever gets. I was also keeping an eye out for a fat guy dressed in a red suit and piloting a sleigh across the skies. No, I didn’t see him.
NGC2018 is a supernova remnant - the expanding cloud of highly energised debris ejected when a star reaches the final stage of it’s life and explodes in a massive explosion.
It’s “Orion Season” and everyone seems to be posting images of this iconic DSO. I would have joined the crowd a while ago except for the simple fact that I can’t see Orion above next door’s roof until this time of year.
After capturing a fantastic image of the Tarantula the other night, I was looking for a new target to image. Most of the ones I wanted to try were either blocked by buildings, or were not going to rise above the horizon for a few hours. A couple that I tried were simply too small to properly image from my back yard. From a dark sky site I would have a much better chance of imaging them and capturing all the tiny details. Maybe when I can get away to the LMDSS again, I will have a crack at them.
OK, a bit of a long(er) post here. Then again, maybe not…
As you’re aware, I picked up an Optolong L-Enhance filter for my astro setup a while back. Because of the weather (way too many cloudy and/or rainy nights) I haven’t been able to get any imaging done. However, we’ve had a couple of clear nights (and a couple more are forecast) so I had the rig out last night and imaging away.
One of the battles I’ve been fighting with my astro imaging is light pollution. The higher sensitivity of the astro-cam and the horrible LED streetlights means I can’t take long exposures to capture the faint detail of DSOs, and what images I do capture have a terrible blue colour to them.
In an ideal world, light pollution would be two or three distinct colours (like the old sodium or mercury vapour lamps) that a filter can remove. Sadly, the new LED lights emit a large number of colours (they all blend into what our eyes see as “white”), but have a very strong blue component.
Quite some time ago, Diego Colonnello ran a tutorial on the use of APP (Astro Pixel Processor) during one of the ASV’s Astrophotography section meetings. I didn’t pay much attention as I didn’t (and still don’t) use APP. He did make all his data available for people to process themselves. Thank you, Diego! Your generosity is very much appreciated.
I got bored the other day, and with all the clouds and rain stopping me from capturing my own data, I thought I’d have a go at processing Diego’s work.
It looks like summer is finally arriving here, and with the clear days come the prospect of clear night skies. (When the moon is not out and illuminating everything.)
With some previous images I captured, there were terrible bands of colour within the stacked images - so much so that I was tempted to throw the data away. (Thankfully, Siril has a ‘Remove Banding’ option that works miracles. So the data is recoverable - except that the images are either not very exciting, or don’t have enough data to be worth proceeding with.)
We had a (near miraculous) clear night here, so I had the rig outside to have another crack at imaging with the new camera.
Overall, I was happier with the results. Although I dropped the exposure time down to a mere 10 seconds, the ‘183MC-Pro is still picking up a lot of blue light pollution. In Siril, the blue channel is almost swamped with it, and the RGB image is a vivid blue.
After what has seemed like an eternity of rain and clouds, we finally had a clear night, and I was determined not to waste it. (There had been two almost-but-not-quite nights in the previous week. I had all the gear setup and ready to go, only for all the clouds to roll in and spoil the party.) By about 10pm the clouds had all vanished and even with the full moon I was able to get some good data.
Whilst the skies are filled with clouds and the rain descends by the bucketful, I thought I’d post up an image or three of what the fully assembled astrophotography rig looks like.
As you can deduce from the first two images, my view of the night skies can be quite restricted. I’ve talked about this before, but my location stops me from imaging almost anything under 30 degrees or so when facing North. Which means waiting until December / January before I can see highlights such as Orion and the Pleiades.
As mentioned in an earlier update, I now own a ZWO ASI183MC-Pro astro camera. The recent clear nights here (an unprecedented 4 nights in a row!) gave me the opportunity to get the telescope outside and to begin scaling the learning hill that is the next step in my progression.
It was not an easy first night. Having made two changes to my gear (auto focuser and new camera) I was not aware of how they would interact, nor what would be required to get things working.
Back at the end of July I wrote an update here that described my astro workflow, from setup to finish. Since then, I have been refining the procedure and can now get everything up and running a bit more efficiently.
I’ve made a few purchases and changes since then. The most critical being the purchase of an EQMOD cable, so now the mount is connected directly to my imaging laptop - completely bypassing the hand controller. In Ekos I have created a device profile that only contains the HEQ5 mount. This allows me to drive the mount during Polar Alignment without having to have all my imaging gear connected.
We had some clear nights arrive, although with the full moon, there was a massive amount of light in the sky. The moon was so bright it was casting shadows like the noon-day sun - with dark-adjusted eyes it was painful to look at it directly.
So, what does an aspiring astro-nerd do? They look to targets away from the moon as far as possible. In this case, something like 180 degrees away from it. Of course, the downside is that most of the good targets (Eta Carina, Southern Jewel Box Running Chicken, etc), are below my field of view.
You might recall my last attempt at imaging a not-so-distance galaxy, NGC55 and how I managed to get a passable image with “only” 2 hours worth of data.
After a month of clouds and rain, I finally had the chance to take the imaging rig out and try to capture more data. I ended up with a total of 5 hours of images. 240 imaged of 60 seconds exposure, and 20 images of 180 seconds exposure.
It seems to be whale season here, both in the ocean with the annual migration of humpback and southern right whales along the Australian coasts, but NGC55 is now visible in the early hours of the night.
After sorting out the power problems I was seeing, I purchased the next upgrade - an EQMod cable to finally remove the hand controller from the rig completely. It’s not a big change but makes life a lot easier because there are fewer cables on the mount, and one less piece of equipment to worry about.
After the power problems I faced at the dark sky site, I decided that a ‘proper’ power distribution setup was required. Easy, right?
Nope.
There are plenty of commercial offerings out there - software controlled power distribution boxes with in-built USB hubs and other fancy widgets. Cheap? Oh no, most certainly not.
So I ended up making my own - some DC power sockets, plugs, wire, and a small plastic box to cram it all into. It’s not pretty but it works. I contemplated fitting fuses as a safety measure, and I still think I should, just in case. Maybe they can go into v2 of this thing.
The ASV held a ‘Nightscapes for Beginners’ session at their dark sky site. Initially, I signed up for this to get a better handle on composition - which I have trouble with. After a discussion with the person running the session, I backed out because my skills were a fair way beyond beginner level. A bit disappointing, but pretty understandable.
I offered to help with the session, and whilst I don’t think I offered much value to the people attending, the group did appear to get a lot out of the night’s work.
I had the rig out last night because it was a clear night for once. I decided that rather than trying to image various DSOs, I would experiment with camera settings to see how well Ekos could drive the DSLR.
Everything worked well for shorter exposures, but trouble arrived when I tried to capture exposures longer than 30 seconds.
The shutter would open, wait the desired amount of time before closing, but the image was never transferred to the laptop. Aborting the sequence left both Ekos and the camera in a strange state.
Well, what a difference some patience and a change of tactic makes to astro work.
The weather and cloud forecast last week was looking good (although very cold!) so I decided that I would have a try at fully automating the entire astro setup - no more trying to do a 3-star alignment / polar alignment routine via the mount’s hand controller.
I don’t have any sort of cross-hair markings on my camera screen so had no way of accurately determining when the target star was centred properly and contouring myself into a pretzel to see through the eye-piece (or at the screen) just wasn’t fun any more.
Now that I have a solid workflow happening - see the “It’s working!” blog entry here - with the mount, ‘scope and camera, I was impatient for clear skies to arrive.
A clear (and cold) night finally arrived and I was able to put the mount, scope and camera through their paces. Of course, nothing quite goes to plan and over the course of the night the temperature dropped from a chilly 8 degrees to a cold 4 degrees. The temperature change caused the scope’s focus (never super-sharp at the best of times) to shift and get progressively worse over the course of the night.
The guide scope and camera arrived very quickly. Why is it that I can order something from China and have it arrive in 7 to 10 days, yet AusPost takes over two weeks to move something from Sydney to Melbourne?
Getting it setup was tricky - you need something a long distance away to get the guide scope focused. I ended up using a TV broadcast tower about 15km away. Which is nothing compared to how far away the stars are.
I recently had the chance to take some wide-angle images of the Milky Way core from a site with a small amount of light pollution, and no moon. (Yay for the new moon falling close to a weekend, as well!)
Sadly, there was a lot of fast-moving, high-level cloud that played havoc with most of the sub-frames I took. I was pretty certain that I’d end up throwing most of them out, so ended up taking 50 of each target, just to be safe. However, I was pleasantly surprised to see that my stacking software ignored the clouds and gave me some very good images to work with.
If you’ve been following my blog, then you’ll know a bit about the gear I have. So what’s not correct about the below image?
IC2602, the Southern Pleiades
In case you’re wondering, my telescope is a refractor (ie, a tube with lenses at each end) and cannot make those spikes you see on the stars. A reflector telescope has the secondary mirror suspended by a ‘spider’, and light bouncing off the back of the spider’s legs create the distinctive spikes.
Conditions were almost ideal - clear skies, no moon, and a near-perfect polar alignment. Aside from the light spilling from next door, it was as dark as it gets in my backyard. Of course, we’re now forecast to have a week of rain.
All these images were processed with Siril, then fed into Affinity Photo for final tweaks and editing.
I was at a bit of a loss as to what to image, and then a helpful post on the ASV’s Facebook page mentioned a series of stellar clusters. The first on the list being Omega Centauri. Why not??
I’ve been hearing good things about a software package called ‘Siril’. It’s open-source, under active development and came heavily recommended by other astrophotographers. The only problem is the steep learning curve, and somewhat sluggish response when using it on my macOS machine.
I found a tutorial on YouTube, and decided “Hey, that can’t be too hard to do…” So used the software for processing the telescope’s second set of images.
It wasn’t the total disaster as the weather turned and the forecast was for solid cloud the second night I had booked at the dark sky site. But still, if the skies had been clear, I would have been absolutely kicking myself.
On the “to buy” list is a dummy camera battery that lets me use an AC adaptor instead of batteries. No more running out of power now!
As I have said earlier, being a member of the ASV gives me access to their dark sky site a couple of hours north of home. Last weekend, it was the new moon, and so I booked some time off work (yay for having too much accrued leave) and got myself organised to take advantage of a dark (moonless) sky.
Because it can be pretty cold up there, I was not wanting to sleep in the car (been there, done that, and it wasn’t much fun) I booked myself a room so I could stay in (relative) comfort. The ASV facilities are a bit spartan, but really, you’re not up there to sleep - you’re there to view the night skies.
I’ve just picked up a (new) second-hand laptop to drive all my astro gear.
I am heading out the the Dark Sky site next Saturday, so have spent this evening quickly putting it all together (bye-bye Windows, hello Kubuntu) with Kstars / Ekos and compressing what was a multi-week configuration and test process into a couple of hours. I think it’s all there and ready, so hopefully I can get something out of it all.
Well, I know it would be a learning curve, but I didn’t quite expect it to be like this…
I took the mount out the other night to have another try at imaging a few things. Hmmm. Yes. Well.
Setup was easy, aligning wasn’t, and the mount did not track at all because it wasn’t aligned accurately. So the stars walked about 1/3 of the way across the camera sensor. Thankfully the stacking software did a great job of lining everything up, but still - a better alignment means better tracking and better images.
Buy new gear, the clouds and rain arrive for a couple of weeks. Now I understand why some equipment suppliers put a label on their packaging: “Warning: May contain clouds”.
It’s been a good month - first a telescope, and now a Go-To mount.
I’ve been chasing a mount for ages, and never seemed to find one at the right time. I watched sadly as prices climbed by a good 30% in 3 months. (Thank you CV19 for the shutdowns and supply chain chaos, and thank you Russia for kicking off a war and further screwing things up…)
Anyway, I came into some money and after finding a store with a mount at a good price (ie, not eye-wateringly expensive) was about to hit the buy button when I refreshed the page to discover it had changed. A price hike, and no stock. Damn.
Conditions were much better than last time. Clear skies, no moon, and a near-perfect polar alignment. For once things were going my way.
As before, the subs were stacked in Sequator and tweaked in Affinity Photo.
The first target of the night was Messier 7, also known as Ptolomy’s Cluster. A reasonably prominent star cluster located close to the ’tail’ of Scorpius. It’s visible to the naked eye, and makes a good target.
At last, I have a ‘real’ telescope to use for astrophotography.
It’s a second-hand (but near new) Sky Watcher EvoStar 72ED, with all the necessary bits and bobs to attach the DSLR to it.
I’ve had it out once already (although the sky quality was rather underwhelming) and I can’t wait to get it somewhere really dark and put it through it’s paces.
Since the picture was taken I’ve moved the lower ring closer to the camera / focuser to minimise vibration.
I am a happy Viking - I have a really good telescope now and the basic knowledge of how to use it properly.
Conditions were not good - a thin layer of either high cloud or ground-hugging smoke haze, too much light pollution, and I totally failed to polar align correctly. (I couldn’t see any stars through the Star Adventurer’s polar scope, so it was a best guess effort. It showed, too, as I stepped through all the captured images and watched the stars slowly march across the screen.)
A long overdue update and addition of my latest sets of astro images, along with photos of Hatsune Miku.
I could rave about the quality of the T2M resin figurines. I’ll ask you to take my word for it when I say that they are a joy to work with - the resin cuts and carves like butter, there are no air bubbles or surface defects, and the detail is wonderfully sharp.
Yet another Eta Carinae and the Large Magellanic Cloud
Eta Carina is a totally fascinating object in the night sky. Almost visible to the naked eye, you need a good set of binoculars or a ‘scope to see it, and a camera setup to really get a great view of it. I strongly suggest you read up on what is a mind-boggling piece of space.
Eta Carinae is a cloud of highly energised gas that has been blown off from a pair or close-orbit super-giant stars, The primary star is about 150 solar masses (ie, weighs 150 times as much as our sun) and is 5 million times brighter. It’s companion is “only” 90 solar masses and 4 million times as bright. At their closest approach, they are as far apart as Mars is from our sun. In terms of stellar distances, this is very, very close.
If you recall my previous (and dismal) attempts at capturing meteor trails, you’ll know that I didn’t capture a single one.
This time, I was taking some wide angle shots of the Milky Way, rising vertically from the south. The camera was running on auto-pilot, capturing plenty of frames for stacking and processing, and I was wandering around looking at the night sky and cursing the amount of light pollution.
Given how clear the night skies have been recently (or at least when I did the imaging..) I decided to have another try at the Orion, Flame and Horsehead nebulae.
I’m not totally happy with the results, especially the Horsehead being so dark, but I can’t really complain too much. One day, when I get a proper telescope with a decent focal length I’ll have another go at it.
OK, so I bought myself a PoleMaster camera to help with getting my Star Adventurer polar aligned a bit better.
Good news:
It works well
It works with Windows, macOS and Android (once you find the Android software)
Bad news:
The Android software is a steaming pile of crap. Slow, unresponsive, difficult to use.
I’ll need to buy a laptop to get the most out of it, and for what I am currently doing, that’s really overkill.
So it will sit in the gear case until such time as I get a telescope and a proper go-to mount, and I have all the electronics gear that require the laptop to function.
After weeks of clouds and rain, we finally had a couple of clear nights. I dragged all the gear outside and setup in the near-gloom that passes for darkness within my light polluted suburb.
To the front of my residence are two street lights, to the north are 2-storey townhouses that block out the lower 30 degrees of the sky, my house is to the south-east, and the neighbour is to the south-west. So my visible bit of the sky is a strip running East to West, with a south-facing section that is more light pollution than stars. Let’s just say that trying to shoot anything wide-angle is not going to work at all well.
Well, I found out why the light pollution filter was giving my images a green / blue bias.
The filter chops out pretty much all the yellow / orange spectrum. Which is not good, as that also chops out a lot of the visible star colours.
So what do I do?
Do I remove the filter and swear at all the light pollution (and faff around in post-processing to try and get rid of it) or do I leave it in and have images with a disappointing blue / green cast?
More astro imaging done, this time from the coast. A shame we’re on the wrong side of Melbourne to get good images of Orion and The Pleiades, maybe another trip in a different direction when the weather is good again.
There’s also the December Geminids Meteor Shower coming soon, so we’ll be out for a crack at imaging that! Hopefully the moon will be out of the sky and we have a better night than we did last year!
We’re out of our latest CV19 lockdown (supposedly a “1-week, snap lockdown” that turned into 12 weeks. This has gifted Melbourne with the title of “Longest total CV19 lockdown in the world”. Not something to be proud of, and a sign of our government’s inability to maintain a functioning Public Health Service.)
What better way to celebrate a clear night than a trip to the coast to take some astro images?
I went up to the ASV dark sky site one weekend when there were no clouds. Oddly enough, there weren’t any other people there and until the sky darkened and the 2/3 full moon was casting shadows everywhere, I could not work out why…
However, I put the time to good use and practised getting the star tracker polar aligned. And it worked - about 5 minutes of effort, and I had near perfect alignment! Yay!! I looked at the images and there was zero star drift. That alone made my night.
The ASV held their ‘Deep Sky’ section meeting at the LMDSS on July 10th and I wanted another chance to get more images of the sky, and hopefully at a higher magnification / focal length than my last few efforts. (50mm / 75mm effective is OK, but all the cool Deep Sky Objects (or DSOs) are too small to really see.)
Most of these images were taken with a 90mm (135mm effective) lens. Hopefully I will be able to use a longer focal length next time (although the aperture will be a lot smaller) and get some better ‘close up’ images. The hard part will be getting the camera aimed at the correct location, and having the DSO framed properly.
I have just tried my hand at using a star tracker (to eliminate any star trails caused by the earth’s rotation) and stacking photos with a program called ‘Sequator’. Whilst I’m happy with how this images turned out, I still have a long way to go with post-processing (and getting the tracker properly aligned with the South Celestial Pole) before I’ll be truly happy with my work.
I used ‘AuroraHDR’ to manipulate the colours and to make the stars stand out.
I have joined the ASV (Astronomical Society of Victoria). Wheeee! Nerds in Space!
I’ve had one trip to their dark sky site, about 2 hours north of here for an astrophotography “boot camp”. There wasn’t much in the way of teaching or tutorials, but I did get some excellent shots of the Milky Way (including the Coal-sack Nebula, the Southern Pleiades and what I think is Eta Carina.) and a series of images of the galactic core as it rose above the horizon.
Did I mention that I joined the Astronomical Society of Victoria? No? Well, I did, so I could meet other astro nuts and learn from them.
About a week after I joined (and created a FarceBook profile so I could join their astrophotography group) they announced a “Boot Camp” for astrophotographers. I was hooked, and put my name down for it straight away.
I won’t bore you with details, but I did manage to get one good image from the night’s work. I failed to get the star tracker aligned accurately, so there was a noticeable amount of drift between each frame, but Sequator sorted that out. A bit of fiddling with Affinity Photo and I had this:
On the same day as I took the Jupiter and Saturn image, the moon was a thin crescent in the western sky.
A bit of zooming and cropping of the image gave me this second image. The detail is a bit soft, and there is a good amount of chromatic aberration. These effects are due to the lens I was using. A better quality lens would give a better photo than this.
In late December 2020, the planets Jupiter and Saturn appeared to converge into one object in the night sky. This isn’t exactly true - Saturn ‘disappeared’ behind Jupiter when viewed from Earth on that particular day.
I wasn’t able to get a better photo than this one - the planets were low to the horizon so I was seeing them through a much thicker amount to atmosphere with all the associated dust and light scattering turbulence. I also had a lot of trouble focussing the camera lens to get anything remotely sharp. So I’m not happy with this photo - I feel that I could have done a lot better.
