Wednesday, December 26, 2018

The end of 2018

     Well it"s hard to believe 2018 is coming to an end.  The past few months haven't been favorable for astrophotography at all.  Its been cloudy and rainy.  I missed all the fall targets I was hoping to capture. Maybe next year.   
     In October I did manage a pair of objects new to me, the Fireworks Galaxy along with an open cluster NGC6939.  I was quite happy with my results.  It was published in our clubs 2019 calendar. 

 This image was captured with my Tele Vue NP101 and a Ha modified Canon T3i.  The processing this time was done a bit different.  The 20 frames where converted from the CR2 RAW file to a TIFF using Canon's Digital Photo Pro 4 software. Than stacking the TIFF files using DSS (Deep Sky Stacker) Using DPP4 seems to reduce background noise in the image.  The stacked image was then processed in Photoshop CC.

     In early December we had a few clear nights where I was able to capture Comet 46P Wirtanen. It is a fast moving that passed close to earth in mid December with a brightness of magnitude peaking at +3.8.  

  With the Comet traveling at a fast speed, and direction compared to the stars, a faster shutter speed is required to keep both from streaking. This is a single 90 second exposure @ 3200iso. The Comet has a blue green colour from gasses and ice being expelled from its surface by the heat of the suns warm solar winds. Unfortunately they weren't strong enough  to create a visible tale. 

     With the Telescope tracking the Comet instead of the stars, I captured 3, 300sec. exposures.  Stacking the images the stars become streaks.  This makes it easy to see how fast the Comet 
moved in 15 min.  
     When the skies clear and the brightness of the moon fades, I hope to capture images of the Comet heading away from us.     

Wednesday, September 12, 2018

A Planetary Summer

    Hello everyone.  I can't believe summer is over already.  I spent alot of the summer struggling with tracking issues with my Losmandy G11 mount.  Deep-sky imaging was a struggle therefor I didn't capture anything usable.  I finally after much research on line  I speculated it could be a bad bearing.  So I recruited My cousin (who rebuilds classic cars) to order the best quality bearings he could find.  A total of 7.  Long story short,  What a difference it made.  Now I'm ready for the Fall and Winter imaging season.  Anyway, since deep-sky imaging was out of the question, I turned my telescope and camera on the planets.  I started  with Jupiter, then Saturn, than finished with Mars.  With Mars being  closer than it has been since 2003 I was hoping for great results.  Well, as in 2003, Mars decides to kick up a planet wide dust storm.  My first few attempts just looked like an orange ball.  I did manage to get a few fair images a few weeks past opposition.  

All the planetary images I captured , there done using the same method, and the same equipment.

Tele Vue NP101 4" f5.4 APO Refractor.      
Tele Vue 3X Barlow
Celestron NexImage 5 camera

Celestron iCap 2.4 for camera controll
RegiStax 6.1, and Photoshop CC for image processing

I captured AVI's of 6000 frames.  using the highest shutter speed as possible and frame rate of 50 fps.  Also keeping the gain low to eliminate noise.
 
 

  Some of my Jupiter images.  I am quite happy with them.  On average I was able to get a shutter speed of 1/70th of a second with a gain of 45 @ 50 fps.  The camera resolution was @ 640x480

 This was the best image of Saturn I could get.  Using only a 4" telescope, limits the light I can gather.  On average the shutter speed was 1/15th sec. and the gain was 60.  I need a larger scope to get better results.  This is still my best Saturn image.







I was hoping for better images of Mars, but the dust storms did have an effect.  I was able to get a shutter speed of 1/120th sec. with the gain down to 20. 

Overall I think it was a successful summer season.  I managed to get some reasonable planetary pictures.  My mount is finally been repaired and ready for Deep Sky imaging, and after 7 years I have a new, speedy PC with a 500Gb SSD with a high end video card for running Photoshop CC.  It took allot of research to conclude what it takes to get the best performance out of Photoshop, but it was worth it.  This will make my image processing way faster and more enjoyable.  If your interested in finding more info on what computer I purchased, just leave me a comment.

Till Next Time:  Glen
Thanks


Sunday, May 20, 2018

Springtime is Galaxy Season

 

M82             M81

M81 (right) Messier 81 (also known as NGC 3031 or Bode's Galaxy) is a spiral galaxy


M82 (left)  Messier 82 (also known as NGC 3034, Cigar Galaxy or M82) is a starburst galaxy

Both  Galaxies are about 12 million light-years away in the constellation Ursa Major.


M51 The Whirlpool Galaxy

The Whirlpool Galaxy, also known as Messier 51a, M51a, and NGC 5194, is an interacting grand-design spiral galaxy with a Seyfert 2 active galactic nucleus. It lies in the constellation Canes Venatici, and was the first galaxy to be classified as a spiral galaxy. Its distance is estimated to be between 15 and 35 million light-years.

A Late Winter Target.
M78 


The nebula Messier 78 (also known as M 78 or NGC 2068) is a reflection nebula in the constellation Orion.and is about 1,600 light years distant from Earth.  This was captured in March from my backyard observatory in Sherkston.  I used a Canon T3i on my Tele Vue NP101 @ f5.4 All processing was done using Digital Photo Pro4, Deep Sky Stacker, and PhotoShop CC   

Monday, January 15, 2018

HDR Moon in Colour

     Yes, the Moon does have colour.  This is a HDR processed picture consisting of 3 separate exposures merged in Camera RAW, and processed in PhotoShop.  The colour levels where pushed to reveal the moons subtle hues.
 
 
 
 
 
 
     Here are a few images of the crescent moon captured with my Tele-Vue NP101, and Canon T3i
    This a mosaic image of the crescent moon.  I merged 2 images in PhotoShop to produce this picture. Taken from my Observatory last August a week after the Eclipse.
     This is a colour HDR image of the crescent Moon.  I captured 3 images of different exposures and merged thim into a HDR using PhotoShop. This process produces a very dynamic picture.

     For a while this past summer, we had a very active sun.  I captured this image using my Tele-Vue NP101 with a Baader solar film filter.  I took 20, 1/4000sec exposures with my Canon T3i, then stacked and processed them using PhotoShop CC

     In July I purchased a used iOptron Sky Tracker camera mount to use on my trip to Idaho to capture the eclipse.  It is a great portable tracking mount.  I decided to try it out by Imaging the Milky way.  Using my modded Canon  T3i with a 50mm f1.8 lens.  The first image was taken from my backyard in Sherkston.  The second was taken at Cherry Springs Pennsylvania.


Cherry Springs
By Backyard in Sherkston On.
     This has been the longest gap between updating my Blog.  I have been having issues with my ISP.  I had next to no upload speed.  They blamed my router, and I blamed there Modem.  Well, the problem was on there end but not the Modem. 
     I will be posting images from July, August, and September.  Unfortunately there will not be any Eclipse images from my trip to Idaho.  I got so caught up in viewing the event, I forgot to remove the filters from my camera during totality.  I could tell the camera wasn't taking proper exposures but decided it was more important to view the eclipse than fiddle with my camera.  But Toni came threw. It was spectacular.  I promise to have some images next time.  On April 8th 2024, I will have over 3 minutes of totally right hear in my backyard in Sherkston.

     This is a panoramic view of our eclipse site in the mountains, a few hours north of Boise Idaho.  This great location was found by my Uncle Bill Kozar. We had about 2 minutes of spectacular totally.

 Even tho I didn't get any images of Totally, My Wife Toni, using a hand held Canon XSi with a 50mm lens, managed to capture these images.  I had to do a bit of image processing in PhotoShop CC,   they don't look to shabby. 

The Diamond Ring

Totality Corona