Really nice Raymo. Love to have a go at this with my new lens, but too low and its south towards Sydney city and western suburbs for me now.
I like how you got 47tuc and the SMC so clear
That is excellent Raymo...why dont you try 100 frames to stack☺
I bought the intervalometer and the 50mm lens for the nikon d5500I hope to have the dedicated wide field mount sortted soon and I and going to just let the sucker run all night☺ and given thought to building it a cooler box on the basis that surely by keeping the camera cool with long pauses between captures which with my timer purchase I can do ...well I am thinking it would help...I have dragged the peltie out of the cupboard and bought a roll off cool silver / thin foam insulation stuff...I even bought one of those little baby fridges from jar car 2liter ??? But bigger effort to leave the camera to cool it least given how hot everything gets up North...no air-conditioning. .."they" ( a couple of the girls) wont have one ... so even in a cool part of the house on a hot day can warm up the camera...so keeping in the Jcar frigde makes sense to me.
Mmmmmm need to get the camera battery away from the camera some how...that would help a little and batteries like warmer ......how mmm...a little plug for the battery conection. ..
With all my medical stuff diverting my time energy and motivation jobs have pilled up...so much to do but it is great to basically hopefully and will know soon for sure that I have every body part working and maybe just maybe my legs will be better...the astronomy saved me again ...having the astronomy "exercise" has had me active from dawn till dusk...being slowerer things take longer but its important to keep a minimum level of exercise...hard when the legs are on fire but I think I have turned the corner as they are definitely better..I still use the walker at the shops as you have a chair when you need it...good if you need to carry stuff...my point I can walk without out it now...
Sorry a bit chatty lots on my mind.
Alex
Alex. As you may or may not recall from earlier threads, I came into digital
imaging already in my 70s, and almost computer illiterate. As a consequence
I stuck to JPEGS and using in camera noise reduction, and do all my limited
processing in DSS. Because of this my subs take over twice as long as they
would if I took separate darks, and because of indifferent polar alignment accuracy the target would move out of frame if I tried 100 subs. With this
image I managed 70 subs, but part way through I remembered that I hadn't enabled in camera noise reduction, so many subs were useless.
I find it all very galling, as I had 54 yrs AP[film] before digital came along,
and I feel like a dunce. Incidentally, when imaging near a mains power supply
why don't you get a mains powered dummy battery from ebay for around $25.
raymo
Raymo, that's a great shot and round stars at 100mm focal length with 45 second subs means you're getting pretty good polar alignment now. Happy to see you've sorted out those alignment issues.
I pushed my little Nano tracker right out to 2 min subs with a 135mm lens on Monday night and got 14mins (7 subs ) on the Witch Head. The stars are a little eggy and there is plenty of noise at 1600 iso on a warm night but at least you can see something. They're a lot of fun these little trackers once you find a reliable polar alignment method, their motors and gearing are quite accurate, even when nearing their maximum payload.
I've noticed on a couple of your recent shots some stacking artifacts on the outer edges. I get them all the time, a quick crop just finishes the image off. You said you do all of your processing in DSS. If you set up a custom stack frame marginally smaller than the full image, they become negligible. I'm sure you know but for others reading it comes from the offset between the images.
And to Micheal... I'm jealous as, I'm dying to get the witches head !
Hi Michael, Love your Witch, much better than the one I eventually got a while ago. Slowly getting there with the tracker.
Hi Ryan, Thank you. I usually crop off the stacking artifacts; I must have missed a couple. I got the Witch with my little stacker, but as I said, not as nice as Michael's.
raymo
Hi Raymo
The irony for me is I would have be one of the first few buying a computer and I even learnt a little "basic" the programing language but some how drifted away and have not had a computer for a decade up to 18 months ago.
Anyways keep going as you really are producing great work.
As to polar align...
I would get the scope in line with the polar axis switch off the mount and take a long exposure to get star arcs...such that you could see the center of the circle in your capture and then move the polar axis so the center of the star circle iwas in the middle of the photo...it can take a while but if you have the scope and the polar axis in line you can get rather decent polar alignment. With my mounts I would line up an object in the distance in the day and make sure the scope saw what the polar scope viewed...anyways you may get a method from my approach.
I now use pole master...but last time out I could not find sigma oct for some reason and so took star circles thru the polemaster camera to get sigma oct on screen...and strangly☺ I ended up cclose to a decent PA before I went through the polemaster proceedure.
Hi Alex, I've been around the block more times than I can count, being in my 66th yr of AP, and over the years have tried every method of PA known to
man. The reason my PA is inconsistent is that I am using a photographic
tripod without any slow motion controls. The two axes are a bit sticky to
move by hand making accurate PA difficult, so if I am lucky enough to get close I leave it at that. I am getting better with a decent compass[local
deviation is only 1 deg] and a digital inclinometer.
I'll just keep soldiering on.
raymo.
Hi Alex, I've been around the block more times than I can count, being in my 66th yr of AP, and over the years have tried every method of PA known to
man. The reason my PA is inconsistent is that I am using a photographic
tripod without any slow motion controls. The two axes are a bit sticky to
move by hand making accurate PA difficult, so if I am lucky enough to get close I leave it at that. I am getting better with a decent compass[local
deviation is only 1 deg] and a digital inclinometer.
I'll just keep soldiering on.
raymo.
That is impressive Raymo, you do a great job and I reckon you enjoy every moment of it.
Cheers Alex and Leon. I preferred film, which I guess makes me a bit of a dinosaur. My all time favourite image was a magnificent M31 taken by Tony and Daphne Hallas.
raymo
Ray, that's a nice image and I'm glad you didn't crop the edges because it sort of shows how the subs were taken.
Drift between the shots (that you kept) seems to have dithered the image stack nicely with good noise reduction - a smooth flat image and appealing simplicity. Well done.
