After 50+ years of observing, I have only recently become interested in Astrophotography.
I know next-to-nothing about stacking, stitching, blanks etc. Nevertheless, I am just amazed at what a mirror-less camera can take for a few seconds at prime focus and how well the results are. We are truly living in the future, or so it seems to a retiree like me.
I wanted to try for the Comet last night, but the clouds just would not give me the break I wanted. So I took these instead.
Taken with an 80mm F6 triplet and a contrast booster filter. There was no field flattener and there has been no further processing of the image beyond shedding resolution to meet the 500k per picture requirement.
Images: NGC 3766 in Centaurus, Omega Centauri and M57 (Ring Nebula).
Do yourself a big favour ..download Deep Sky Stacker..it is free and simple to use and all of a sudden 30 second captures seem to be the way to go..take a 100 or more check to make sure each one is near perfect and stack them....the results will surprise you.
alex
I received a Baader 475nm filter today, so I took an image of sunset. The filter is said to be a light blue, but as U probably realise, 475nm is fairly close to green.
So the greenish image is the original and I also ran a 'Slate' filter over it and that give the black & white effect.
Some sunspots are visible.
The images has been cropped and off course, I also used a full aperture solar filter.
Bob,
Those images are excellent
Well done !
Gee observing for over 50 years and only now getting into Astrophotography, you’ve started at a great time in this part of Amateur Astronomy as current technology has enabled imagers to produce mind boggling photos with just basic equipment.
Just a humble 6” Newt , a HEQ5 mount and an old Canon DSLR can produce fantastic images for under $3K ( that’s what I started with )
Looking forward to seeing your future images
Oh and Alex is spot on , Deep Sky Stacker is tremendous free software to stack your frames ( don’t use it for post processing its not really designed for that )
Cheers
Martin
I received a Baader 475nm filter today, so I took an image of sunset. The filter is said to be a light blue, but as U probably realise, 475nm is fairly close to green.
So the greenish image is the original and I also ran a 'Slate' filter over it and that give the black & white effect.
Some sunspots are visible.
The images has been cropped and off course, I also used a full aperture solar filter.
After 50+ years of observing, I have only recently become interested in Astrophotography.
I know next-to-nothing about stacking, stitching, blanks etc. Nevertheless, I am just amazed at what a mirror-less camera can take for a few seconds at prime focus and how well the results are. We are truly living in the future, or so it seems to a retiree like me.
I wanted to try for the Comet last night, but the clouds just would not give me the break I wanted. So I took these instead.
Taken with an 80mm F6 triplet and a contrast booster filter. There was no field flattener and there has been no further processing of the image beyond shedding resolution to meet the 500k per picture requirement.
Images: NGC 3766 in Centaurus, Omega Centauri and M57 (Ring Nebula).
I imaged 9th magnitude Pallas this morning. Pallas is currently near Rigel and is moving close to the Orion Nebula.
I imaged this field a few days previously and found the interloper in this morning image.
I did strike problems with this. Although the image were taken under difficult conditions with clouds and the sky having developed a shade of pink before the clouds cleared enough for my shots; this was not the problem.
When I came to process the images, they were way, way too large for me to reduce the entire image down to an acceptable number of bits for display. I do not understand why. I ended up cropping the image and that now only shows a small part of my original photo.
I now understand why the previous photos were so large: I had the ISO too high and this adds to the noise/grain, which then adds to the size of the image.
..excellent work
