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Swansea Astronomical Society Blog

Wednesday, November 24, 2021

Deep Sky Sketches

I used my f/8, 8" Richie Cretion scope and an ultra star camera as an electronic eyepiece.

Click on an image to get a closer view

Jim Startup

posted by astroimager # 8:42 PM 0 Comments

Sunset at Rhossili

Sunset with the Helvetia shipwrck on Rhossili beach Gower. Settings were 5s, ISO 400 f/5. 6 with an 18-55mm lens on a Canon 4000D DSLR camera.

Chris Playle

posted by astroimager # 1:23 PM 0 Comments

Deep Sky and the Moon

Tricky conditions for imaging on the morning of the 22nd November, with the moon being so bright. These 4 minute subs were taken with a one shot colour Atik320e camera running AstroDMx Capture through an Altair 60 EDF driven with an iOptron CEM26 mount, guided with PHD2. M31 & M42 were exposed for 32 mins, with the Flame & Horsehead nebulae for 92 mins. DSO images were stacked in DSS and finished in Photoshop.

Chris Bowden

posted by astroimager # 10:31 AM 0 Comments

Tuesday, November 23, 2021

H-alpha solar image

A H-alpha PST scope fitted with the lens from a x2 Barlow was mounted on an ETX125 mount. AstroDMx Capture for Windows was used to capture a 30s SER file of a quadrant of the Sun. Exposures were made for the disk and the prominences.

The SER files were stacked in Autostakkert! and post-processed in Photoshop. The disk image and prominence image were combined to produce the final image showing surface detail and prominences.

Chris Bowden

posted by astroimager # 9:26 PM 0 Comments

Wide angle planets

Click on an image to see a closer view

Jupiter and Saturn over Rhossili bay Gower. Settings were 15s, ISO 1600, at f/5. 6 with an 18-55mm lens on a Canon 4000D DSLR.

Venus over the Helvetia ship wreck on Rhossili beach, Gower. Settings were 5s, ISO 800, and f/5. 6 with an 18-55mm lens on a Canon 4000D DSLR.

Chris Playle

posted by astroimager # 8:59 PM 0 Comments

Monday, November 22, 2021

M27 and the Moon

A Skywatcher HEQ5 GOTO mount was fitted with a QHYCCD Polemaster and was polar aligned to within about 30 arc seconds of the NCP

Click on an image to get a closer view

Polemaster in place

An Eklipse EKinox f/5.5, 80mm ED refractor was fitted with an SVBONY SV165 guide scope with an SV305 camera as a guide camera for pulse guiding. A ZWO ASI178MC 14-bit camera was fitted with an Optalong LeNhance tri-narrowband filter and placed at the focus of the scope.

PHD2 running on a Fedora Linux laptop was used to autoguide the system.

AstroDMx Capture for Linux was used to capture 15 x 4min FITS files with matching dark frames and BIAS frames.

The data were stacked in Deep Sky Stacker and post processed in the Gimp 2.10, Photoshop Elements, Topaz sharpen and Neat image.

The object of this test was to look at the quality of the polar alignment for facilitating long exposures.

M27

Some of the nebulosity surrounding the Dumbbell is becoming visible. As this is an uncooled 14 bit camera, the results were quite encouraging.

With the Optalong filter still in place, a 5000 frame SER file was captured of the 93.9% Moon. The best 90% of the frames were stacked in Autostakkert! and the image processed in the Gimp 2.10.

93.9% Moon

This produced an image of the Moon free of the fringing that frequently is present when imaging through a refractor.

Steve Wainwright and Nicola Mackin

posted by astroimager # 9:31 PM 0 Comments

Deep Sky Sketches

I used an 8", f/8 Richie Cretian telescope and an ultra star camera as an electronic eyepiece.

Click on an image to get a closer view

Jim Startup

posted by astroimager # 9:05 PM 0 Comments

Sunday, November 21, 2021

97% Moon

A Celestron 70 Travel Scope was mounted on an ETX125 mount. AstroDMx Capture for Windows was used to capture a SER file of the 97% Moon. Autostakkert! 3 was used to stack the frames and the Gimp was used to post process the image.

Click on the image to get a closer view.

Chris Bowden

posted by astroimager # 8:52 PM 0 Comments

Thursday, November 18, 2021

Reprocessing Soul nebula data

Given the current weather, I've reprocessed data from last month and September 2019, all taken at Kelling Heath star-party.

The older data was taken with my Atik 428 mono ccd camera and narrowband filters, Ha an O3, the newer data with my ZWO ASI533 CMOS camera and the L'Enhance duo-band filter. I've attached the two original images below.

I recreated the mosaic of the 2019 data using Astro Pixel Processor, which I've got a trial of. It is particularly suited to calibrating and stacking subs and combining them into mosaics of large objects. The older version of the Soul nebula was taken on 2x2 binning so was somewhat lacking in resolution. The newer data contained the missing detail.

I then combined the relevant channels in Pixinsight and processed as usual. This time I used Starnet++ to remove the stars so I could process the nebula and stars separately to avoid over stretching the stars.

First image is the combined image, second 2019 and third is last month.

Click on an image to get a closer view

Anne Startup

posted by astroimager # 4:30 PM 0 Comments

Monday, November 8, 2021

Sirius, the brightest star in the sky

Sirius, the brightest star in the sky. Captured with a Canon 4000D DSLR camera. 10s exposure, ISO 1600, F=18.55mm, f/5.6.

Click on the image to get a closer view

The open cluster M41 is just visible below Sirius and to the right of a group of three stars.

Chris Playle

posted by astroimager # 2:10 PM 0 Comments

Sunday, November 7, 2021

Venus and the crescent Moon

Venus and the crescent Moon taken with Canon 4000D DSLR. Setting were 8s exposure f/14 and ISO 800.

Click on the image for a closer view

Chris Playle

posted by astroimager # 8:33 PM 1 Comments

Thursday, November 4, 2021

Using Remote Telescopes. Zoom Talk

Pete Williamson FRAS gave an interesting and informative talk on the Use of Remote telescopes. He explained the various Remote telescopes that are available for amateur, educational and outreach use and the various schemes available to use them. He also talked about obtaining NASA data from sources such as the Hubble Space Telescope as well as image data from the Mars rovers and other spacecraft such as the Juno probe and others that are freely available to download and image-process for yourself. The talk was followed by questions and the usual roundup of society news and images from this blog.

posted by astroimager # 11:00 PM 0 Comments

The Sun in H-alpha light

A H-alpha solar image taken with my Altair Hypercam 178M and the Lunt 50THA

Stack of the best 20% of 2000 frames

Click on the image to get a closer view

Anne Startup

posted by astroimager # 5:47 PM 0 Comments

M15 with AstroDMx Capture for Chrome OS, a Chrombook running a Crouton chroot and a Touptek Toupcam GPCMOS01200KPF camera

An f/5.5, 80mm, ED Ekinox Eklipse refractor was mounted on a Celestron AVX mount and a Touptek Toupcam GPCMOS01200KPF camera was placed at the focus.

A Lenovo Chromebook with an AMD A6 processor was used running a Crouton chroot with Debian Linux. This is a different way of running Linux on a Chromebook that does not involve the Crostini virtualisation system.

AstroDMx Capture for Linux was run natively in the chroot and was used to capture 60 x 15s exposures of M15 using the RGB48, 16-bit format along with matching dark frames.

Click on an image to get a closer view

The Equipment used

Final image of M15

Full details of the test can be found HERE.

Steve Wainwright and Nicola Mackin

posted by astroimager # 10:57 AM 0 Comments

Deep Sky images

The images were captured in AstroDMx Capture using an Atik320e colour camera at the prime focus of an Altair 60EDF doublet refractor and were processed in DSS and the Gimp/CS2. Exposures were:

M2: 18 mins, M42/NGC1977: 90 mins and M33 141 mins

Click on an image to get a closer view

Montage including the Andromeda Galaxy