Okay, so December was terrible for imaging. Let's try a nearby target to compare for January.
Horsehead Nebula. Barnard 33
It might be a dark nebula, you could even say "none more black", but its such a rich area. I've never imaged this myself, but there's so many possibilities !
Have a go in colour, H-alpha, close up, or a wider angle and include the Flame etc.
And keep putting up the Rosette if you manage to get a decent night ...
Always a difficult one here in the tropics with the hot nights, endless clouds and the wet season closing in. I did manage to get a few hours in before xmas for a bit of an astro fix.
This one is 9 x 180 sec exposures at iso 1600, unmodded canon 1100d, 10" f4.8 newt. guided on a Heq5 pro. For 27min I did manage to pick up a bit, but it needs a lot more subs, lower iso and cooler sensor.
Always a difficult one here in the tropics with the hot nights, endless clouds and the wet season closing in. I did manage to get a few hours in before xmas for a bit of an astro fix.
This one is 9 x 180 sec exposures at iso 1600, unmodded canon 1100d, 10" f4.8 newt. guided on a Heq5 pro. For 27min I did manage to pick up a bit, but it needs a lot more subs, lower iso and cooler sensor.
Rick, nicely framed and good result with an unmodded camera. I'm amazed you were able to track so well with a 10inch scope on an Heq5 pro. You must have had it very well balanced, it would be pushing the payload capacity for that mount. Great effort.
Thanks Michael, I know I can do better but clear cloudless nights are few and far between so I tend to push the iso a bit so as to get some result. The 10" is at max payload on the mount but seems to ride well, the only issue is wind but when it's clear here it also tends to be calm as well. I have the mount on a pier next to the shed, I wouldn't feel comfortable with that much weight on a tripod. I have found balancing the scope pretty easy to do and only need to tweak it a little for different areas of the sky.
Taken at Lake Moogerah mid December 2017. Sadly a group of people turned up and sat in their car with their lights on for almost the entire night! Arghhh!! Didn't seem to affect the photo too much. Spent lots of wasted time getting PHD to calibrate, nutting out my own errors with SGP and dealing with my rather poor cable management. What should have taken maybe 30 minutes to setup took 2 hours on and off. Skies were great, but after some time away from the scope I wasn't so great.
I ended up with the image attached. A lens flare ended up around the head itself but tried to minimize it. Got 35 x 2 minute subs (2 minutes to limit Alnitak’s influence). Would have love more time! Taken with a modded Canon 40D through an ED80 on an HEQ5. Processed in Nebulosity (stacking, and callibration) and StarTools.
Nice one Ben, that's turned out really well. That area really benefits from a wider field of view. It's funny how on some nights everything works from go, but on others it takes forever to get everything in sinc.
I captured it but my trial star tools wont let me save it.
Because I did not have much power I ran the mount unguided and set the camera to take 30 second captures again because I could not power the lap top.
It looks ok from the deed sky stacker process but I dont think I will post it yet...if ever.
But so far miles ahead of the last one I did ten years ago.
Alex
Ran it again and played in light room which I have no idea how it works..I need to downsize but the lap top is tied up with a stck of images taken with the 50 to 200 cheap nikon lens..
But I took a photo of the lap top screen earlier to see if I could use a simple phone manipulation.
So I post it to show progress I was happy with the traking and that 30 sec seemed to work.
I think iso was 800.
Alex
Plus I somehow turned on a date stamp on each photo and time but deep sky handle it I cropped out the result.
That may be why it was grinding away for so long.
Alex
I captured it but my trial star tools wont let me save it.
Because I did not have much power I ran the mount unguided and set the camera to take 30 second captures again because I could not power the lap top.
It looks ok from the deed sky stacker process but I dont think I will post it yet...if ever.
But so far miles ahead of the last one I did ten years ago.
Alex
Hi Alex,
there is a bunch of free software out there that you can use (and save!) images.
I would suggest Deep Sky Stacker for stacking and saving as a tiff. You can actually do some image tweaking in there as well (although it is heavy on the pc).
Perhaps something like GIMP will work for photo editing (note that i have not used it but a lot on here have).
