Ngc7009

[Maurice]

Hello all

Borrowed a friends new ASI224MC OSC planetary camera the other day & was keen to try & image Saturn over this weekend with it.

Unfortunately the clouds didn't clear from Melbourne until Saturn had well crossed the CM which is bad for me because of trees & neighbors - so I had a go at the next best thing - NGC7009 the Saturn Nebula.

Attached is a 100% scale crop from the original frame of approx 800 x 3sec images taken through a C11 + 2x barlow at about 0.2"/pixel.

Looks like a sensitive little cam. A bit of amp glow mostly disappeared with dark frames & I was surprised by the result.

...waiting for the real Saturn to appear .....

regards
Maurice

[Atmos]

It is amazing what can be done with those little cameras :)

[AlexN]

That is outstanding.

I'm blown away by the detail in that. Great to see targets like this. It's pretty rare for anyone to be imaging at 5600mm. Let alone with a small sensor too.

Beautiful. I demand to see more.

[John K]

Nice going Maurice - it will be interesting to see what the cooled version of this camera will also do in deep sky.

[troypiggo]

Lovely little planetary - nice to see something different.

[topheart]

Thanks for sharing this!

Excellent!

Tim

[gregbradley]

Fantastic!

Greg.

[Placidus]

That's just astonishing! Well done!

I'm guessing that the things that make it work include the very short subs that can snatch moments of good seeing, and the extreme brightness of the target. Did you use "lucky imaging" and throw out the not-so-good subs?

Wow!

[Somnium]

wow, that is amazing, you must have had fantastic seeing conditions to pick up that level of detail on such a small object!

[multiweb]

Incredible close up. Really cool. :thumbsup:

[Paul Haese]

Pretty good for 40 minutes of data. Nice detail and colour Maurice. Going to tempt you over to the dark side? ;)

[strongmanmike]

Great change of Saturnian tact there Maurice :thumbsup: some great details revealed too, excellent...funnily enough although clear at the start of the evening here, which allowed me some visual observing of Saturn, I had passing cloud problems last night too so looking for something bright that would take short exposures I considered shooting the Saturn Neb myself...so now I don't have too, thanks :thumbsup:

Mike

[Maurice]

Thanks to everyone for the nice comments..

John: The camera should work OK for deep sky, but I've not taken any long exposures with it. The glow that creeps into the image is fairly significant and its probably there because of the cameras good IR sensitivity. I don't know how intrusive it would be on longer exposures though..

Mike & Trish: Yep, you are correct. I did try a 'lucky imaging' approach. Took a total of about 1200 frames and used about 800. Seems to have helped. It does indeed help having a bright 8.3 mag. planetary nebula to image, but f/20 is still a challenge..

Paul: Never!... although I believe that someone once said that its all dark really..

Mike: I reckon I'd still like to see a Saturn planetary nebula image from you... Can't say I've truly done it justice with the short integration time.

[Peter Ward]

Excellent result Maurice! I explored this technique some years ago, but the lack of sensitivity of the camera I was using at the time gave mediocre results.

Clearly things have changed! ...and you've motivated me to revisit imaging these tiny yet often very beautiful planetaries.

Again, what a great result :thumbsup:

[strongmanmike]

Yeah maybe, I only image at 1120mm FL but at an image scale of 0.83"/pix so on bright things like this and using essentially the lucky imaging technique, I can get reasonable (http://www.pbase.com/strongmanmike2002/image/154904467/original) details I guess but as you have shown using a Barlow would be the way to go.



Meah..I recon you have :shrug: :thumbsup:

Mike

[rustigsmed]

awesome close up Maurice!
camera seems to be really capable!

Russ

[Regulus]

That's a nice image Maurice! Really like it, and you must be happy with it.

Trev

[tilbrook@rbe.ne]

Impressive Maurice!:thumbsup::thumbsup:

The detail is amazing from such a small planetary.

Cheers,

Justin.

[iceman]

Beautiful result. This is now IOTW (http://www.iceinspace.com.au).

[Somnium]

Well deserved

[Maurice]

WOW.. Thanks Mike - quite unexpected. Grateful to all who thought it worthy...

Thanks also to Peter, Russell, Trevor, Justin & Aidan for your comments.

Interesting little camera... The full well depth of the Sony IMX224 is shallow at just over 9Ke-, but the read noise (at optimum gain) is reported by ZWO as being only 0.75e-. This means a dynamic range somewhere around 10,000:1 if the blurb is to be believed.

...all could be damned lies & statistics though...:shrug:

cheers
Maurice

[Domol]

Yes very remarkable on 2 points :eyepop:

0.2"/pixel and you did it from Melbourne!

I never get seeing that good! :sadeyes:

[Regulus]

IOTW deservedly so. It's a great capture.

[Rex]

Great shot Maurice congrats!

[RickS]

Congrats, Maurice!