Swansea Astronomical Society Blog

Friday, March 12, 2021

 

Images with a mobile phone


These images were taken with a Huawei P30 Lite mobile phone either mounted on a tripod or afocally through a scope.

Mars near to the Pleiades


Comet Neowise October 2020


M27


M63


Eskimo nebula NGC 2392


M37


M38






Chris Playle



Thursday, March 11, 2021

 

Astronomical Cycles and Climate Change, Zoom Lecture

Dr Simon Helan (SAS) gave a very informative, interesting and thorough Zoom Lecture.

The presentation kept the audience enthralled for the whole of the lecture.

The lecture generated some challenging and though provoking questions and there is no doubt that the substantial audience learned a lot about the Earth, how the climate has changed over geological time and the implications of this for life on earth.

Howard Davies gave a short presentation covering some aspects of the night sky and the recent Fireball and associated meteorite.


Then Chris Bowden showed a selection of images captured by and sketched by SAS members over the past couple of weeks.






Altogether another very successful Zoom meeting of the Swansea Astronomical Society


Wednesday, March 10, 2021

 

The Sombrero galaxy and some tests on a low cost Barlow

For the Sombrero galaxy, 309 x 13 second exposures were taken with AstroDMx Capture on the morning of the 9th March with aQHY5 mono camera at the prime focus of an Altair EDF60. A good deal of the frames were unusable due to cloud or drive movement, so I used DSS to automatically choose all frames above a score of 200 for stacking which resulted in some 243 frames being selected by DSS (79%) of which 50% were used in the stack. This effectively gave a 53 minute overall exposure.


Click on an image to get a closer view

 

Sombrero galaxy


Barlow lens trials:

I did a comparison of “with” and “without” Barlow lens image captures for a budget Barlow lens bought from the web for just £15 which was advertised as giving 5 times magnification.

 

The Barlow lens comes with good quality protective caps top and bottom and allows the magnifying lens to be removed by unscrewing it to provide a useful extension tube, whilst at the other end an M42 thread allows an SLR to be attached via a suitable “T” adapter. The lens comprises just a single glass unit of reasonable optical quality. The build quality of the housing is good, being made of anodised metal, coated with anti-reflective black paint.


Tests were carried out for images of a planet, a star, a galaxy and a nebula using a QHY5 mono camera and an Altair EDF 60 telescope. Data sets were captured in AstroDMx Capture using the same, or comparative exposure settings for the Barlow/non-Barlow captures, with image size comparisons made on a selection of single frame or stacked images. Where stacking was required this was done in either Autostakkert!3 or DSS with light stretch processing made in the Gimp. The side-by-side views were compiled in Photoshop with no resizing being made of the images to allow like for like image size comparisons to be made.

 

Results tend to suggest that the magnifying capability of this Barlow lens is far less than that advertised; not only with respect to the relative sizes of the captures being compared, but also their relative brightness’s too. To check on this, raw frame data was submitted to Astrometry.net for field of view (FOV) assessment of non-Barlow and Barlow captures. The non-Barlow capture FOV was reported as being 1,579 arcmin, whilst the Barlow came in at around 527 arcmin. This revealed that the Barlow magnified the targets captured by around three times rather than five with the test arrangement used.

 

Whilst this Barlow lenses’ primary role is to be a five times magnifying lens well at best this is questionable, I feel that its versatility for SLR use and its ability to convert to being just a draw tube extension makes it a worthwhile buy however. Just don’t expect huge magnifications!

 

Image tests:

Planet:  Mars



Star:     Procyon



Galaxy: M66




Nebula: M42/43


Chris Bowden


Tuesday, March 9, 2021

 

M37 and the Seagull nebula

Captured with AstroDMx Capture for macOS. Camera an Atik 314L mono CCD camera. When guiding, PHD2 with a Fedora Linux computer, a 50mm guidescope and a QHY 5-II guiding camera were used.

Click on an image to get a closer view

M37 open cluster in Auriga. Stack of 35 x 20s exposures


The Seagull nebula was imaged on two nights. Firstly with 9 x 5min unguided exposures and on the second night with 8 x 10min guided exposures, all with matching dark frames. The images were all saved as FITS images and were stacked in Affinity Photo using flat fields. The two resulting images were stitched together in Affinity Photo and post processed in Affinity Photo, the Gimp 2.10, and Neat Image.

The Seagull nebula mosaic


The equipment used to capture the Seagull nebula


Steve Wainwright and Nicola Mackin


Monday, March 8, 2021

 

Deep Sky images

Using AstroDMx Capture for Windows, a QHY5 mono CMOS camera and an EDF60 refractor.

Arcturus - QHY5 mono camera on an EDF60 - with and without 5 times Barlow comparison (5th & 7th march)

Regulus - QHY5 mono camera on an EDF60 7 March: stack of 200 x 535ms frames stacked in Autostakkert!3 and processed in Gimp


Galaxies:

M65 & M66 - QHY5 mono camera on an EDF60 7 March: 61 x 15 second frames stacked in DSS and processed in the Gimp. Note that the image is flipped horizontally so M66 is on the right (mag 8.92) and M65 on the left (mag 10.25)


Hamburger Galaxy QHY5 mono camera on an EDF60 7 March - best 67 15S Frames stacked in DSS and processed in Gimp


Clusters/nebulae:

Pleiades - central region - 5th March - QHY5 mono camera on an EDF60 - 200 x 13 second exposures stacked and processed in Affinity Photo


M5 Rose Cluster - QHY5 mono camera on an EDF60 7 March: stack of 180 x 14.8S frames stacked in DSS and processed in Gimp


Cone nebula - QHY5 mono camera on an EDF60 7 March: stack of 78 x 14.9S frames stacked in DSS and processed in Gimp


Chris Bowden


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