Swansea Astronomical Society Blog

 A Skywatcher Explorer 130 PDS 130mm, f/5 Newtonian was mounted on a Celestron AVX GOTO mount.

An SVBONY SV305 camera was placed at the Newtonian focus.

Nicola's AstroDMx Capture for the Raspberry Pi running on a Raspberry Pi 4B with the 32 bit Raspberry Pi OS, was used to capture 40 x 30s exposures of the globular cluster M15 as 16 bit Tiff files with matching dark-frames.

The best 36 frames were aligned and stacked in Deep Sky Stacker. The resulting image was post processed in the Gimp 2.10, Affinity photo, and Neat image.

Screenshot of AstroDMx Capture for the Raspberry Pi capturing data on M15

Final image of M15

Steve Wainwright and Nicola Mackin

posted by astroimager  # 5:08 PM 0 Comments

 I used my 152mm refractor at f/5.9 and an Ultrastar camera as an electronic eyepiece.

Click on an image to get a closer view.

Jim Startup

posted by astroimager  # 4:54 PM 1 Comments

Last night members of the SAS had a Zoom meeting hosted by Chris Bowden.

Chris introduced the Zoom method, showed some slides and eventually showed live views of Saturn and Jupiter streamed from his own telescope and camera.

Click on an image to see a closer view.

This Zoom meeting was a preparation for the first talk of the session:

Thursday 24/09/2020

7pm

Rodinia and the Boring Billion

James Fradgley will talk about "Rodinia and the Boring Billion” – a look at Earth’s geological and biological history, what that tells us about looking for life on planets, and a bit about exoplanets.

Thanks Chris for hosting the Zoom meeting to introduce members to this unfamiliar (for many) way of attending meetings.

posted by astroimager  # 4:50 PM 0 Comments

A Celestron 8” SCT was mounted on an AVX GOTO mount. The scope was fitted with a 2x Barlow and an SVBONY SV305 camera was attached.

Mars was imaged using AstroDMx Capture for Windows using a region of interest of 800 x 600. A frame-rate of just under 100fps was used to capture a 5min Time-Limited SER file of 27,000 frames.

SER Player was used to process the file for gamma and gain, and re-save as a SER file. The processed and the unprocessed SER files were stacked in Autostakkert! 3. The best 15% of the frames in the processed SER file were stacked and the best 20% of the frames in the unprocessed SER file were also stacked. The resulting images were wavelet processed in Registax 6, post-processed and combined in the Gimp 2.10.

Screenshot of AstroDMx Capture for Windows capturing a SER file of Mars

The final image of Mars

Steve Wainwright and Nicola Mackin

posted by astroimager  # 9:20 PM 0 Comments

 I've processed the Andromeda Galaxy that I imaged on 9 and 13 September using my SX694 camera and Altair Starwave 70EDT. 

18x180s luminance, 6x180s red, green and blue and 6x600s H-alpha.

Stacked in Maxim DL, H-alpha image combined into RGB stack to bring out ha regions, then luminance added. Colour balanced and noise reduction, then a little unsharp mask applied to finish.

Click on the image to get a closer view.

Anne Startup

posted by astroimager  # 8:00 PM 1 Comments

 I used my 152mm refractor f/5.9 and a ultra star camera as an electronic eyepiece.

Jim Startup

posted by astroimager  # 7:57 PM 0 Comments

I recently set up a 13 metre umbilical to connect my “GOTO” ETX 80 scope placed on my lawn with my Laptop PC located inside the Control Room to allow remote control and image capture. 

Click on an image to see a larger view.

Meade ETX 80 tracking Mars via AudioStar controller on the morning of 14 September 2020 with imaging via QHY5 camera to Laptop (both AudioStar and QHY camera connected to PC in Control Room via 10 metre active USB cables)

The umbilical cable consist of two 10 metre active USB extensions and a mains powered DC power supply which can quickly connect to Laptop, scope and a QHY5 camera, to allow “armchair” operations with both computer equipment and observer being shielded from the outside conditions inside the Control Room. 

Control Room view of Laptop and second monitor selecting scope targets and capturing images. Adjacent iPad connected as a third wireless monitor

The setup works well when using Meade’s “Auto Star Suite Astronomers Edition” software to adjust guiding and selecting targets for the scope and “EZPlanetary” image capture software to record data from the QHY camera.

The shortfall however comes when needing to be able to correctly focus the camera in the absence of a remote controlled focuser. Although I have successfully installed stepper motors on some of my scopes which allow remote control focusing via an infrared remote control, the nature of the Meade ETX 80 focusing system prohibits the use of this particular method of focusing, so focusing has to be done at the telescope itself using the manual focusing knob. In order to be able to “see” what the camera (and the Laptop in the Control Room) is looking at locally at the telescope therefore, I needed a simple way of doing this. 

Whilst its possible to “cast” certain tablets and phones to Laptops using “Airplay” and “Screen Mirroring” techniques, doing this the other way round is not as easy. In exploring how best to do this however, I found a far simpler workaround which allows an iPad to be used as a wireless monitor for my Laptop via an app called “SpaceDesk”. This basically allows the iPad to act as a second or third monitor for your PC, Mac or Laptop, free of any cables, allowing it to be taken anywhere within range of the WiFi signal. It is then possible to clone, duplicate or extend the desktop showing the camera capture image to the iPad which can then be taken to the scope (provided it is in range of the WIFI signal) to allow fine focusing at the telescope itself. The iPad can then be taken anywhere in range of the WiFi to keep an eye on how capturing is going.

Set up of “Space Desk” is very straightforward and is available as a free download. It requires some software to be installed on both computer and tablet to make it work which can be downloaded from https://spacedesk.net/ where further details of how this works can be reviewed. Although I have used this for wireless operation it is also possible to use tethering via USB and it can also exploit LAN as well as wireless internet.

It will be good to be able to demonstrate this set up at future outreach events and even carry out live-streaming via Zoom in the future. With the help of Nik Whitehead I am currently exploring whether this might be possible using an iPad on a 4G connection to stream views from Fairwood’s 12” Meade for special live-streaming events on Zoom.

Montage of complete setup showing iPad in use as a wireless monitor displaying camera output.

Chris Bowden 

posted by astroimager  # 7:53 PM 0 Comments

Celestron 9.25 SCT AVX, 2xTelevue Barlow, ZWO ASI120MC-S camera, 22782 images captured in Firecapture 2.5x64, 25% stacked and aligned in AutoStakkert!3, wavelets in Registax 6, then edited in Adobe Elements 11

Colin Miles

posted by astroimager  # 10:54 AM 0 Comments