Swansea Astronomical Society Blog

Moon taken with my 150mm Maksutov. Settings were 1\25s and ISO 200 using my 4000D DSLR Canon camera. The telescope was mounted on an Eq5 Skywatcher tracking mount. The image was a stack of 100 images using PIPP and Autostackert! with processing in the Gimp.

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Chris Playle

posted by astroimager  # 1:19 PM 0 Comments

Moon taken with my 150mm Maksutov. Settings were 1\25s and ISO 200, using my 4000D DSLR Canon camara the setup was mounted on an Eq5 tracking mount. Location the Brian Stokes Cygnus Observatory. Stack of 3 images.

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Chris Playle

posted by astroimager  # 4:18 PM 0 Comments

Click on the image to get a closer view. Six pane mosaic mosaic of the 80.5% waxing, gibbous Moon. with AstroDMx Capture, a Skymax 127 and a prototype SV705C OSC camera.

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80.5% Waxing, gibbous Moon

Steve Wainwright and Nicola Mackin

posted by astroimager  # 9:32 AM 0 Comments

M42 the Orion nebula. Setting were 25s ISO3200 using a 300mm Canon zoom lens at 300mm, f/6.3, attached to a 4000D DSLR Canon camera. The camera was mounted on a Eq5 Skywatcher tracking mount. The image was a stack of 40 images using Sequator, with processing in the gimp. 

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The Orion nebula

Chris Playle

posted by astroimager  # 9:28 AM 0 Comments

8" SCT with ZWO 224MC and ZWO ADC and x2 Barlows

20000 frames stacked (used 7%) and processed in autostakkert, registax and final touches in GIMP.

posted by astroimager  # 7:18 PM 0 Comments

A Skymax 127 Maksutov telescope was mounted on a Celestron AVX mount. An SV705C camera, fitted with an IR/UV cut filter was used with AstroDMx Capture for capturing SER files. The seeing was dreadful and the Moon was very low in the sky.

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Jupiter and moons

Left to right: Callisto, Io, Jupiter, Europa Ganymede

posted by astroimager  # 3:30 PM 0 Comments

Several members attended the Brian Stokes Cygnus Observatory on the night of the 5th October 2022 for some fine views of the moon, planets Saturn, Jupiter, Mars and Neptune and a host of deep sky objects.The windy conditions produced some challenges with both seeing and imaging, but nonetheless some good results were achieved. The gif of Jupiter was taken with a ZWO ASI462MC camera using a 2.5 x Barlow lens attached to an Altair 115mm Triplet refractor. Some 700 images were taken every three minutes in AstroDMx Capture with 75% of them stacked in Autostakkert!, wavelets processed in Registax, and processed in Adobe CS2. The resultant images were then precisely cropped in AstroCrop and animated in Adobe Image ready to show the partial rotation of the planet over approximately one hour as the great red spot was starting to come into view. Clouds unfortunately called a halt to being able to take any further images to show the great red spot at its best centrally on the disc of the planet

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Chris Bowden

posted by astroimager  # 1:26 PM 0 Comments

A Panasonic Lumix DMCFZ72, 60x optical zoom bridge camera fitted with a Baader solar filter and mounted on a static tripod was used to capture 134 images of the Sun. The images were precisely cropped in Nicola Mackin's AstroCrop before stacking with Siril and post-processing in the Gimp 2.10.

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The Sun in White Light

Steve Wainwright

posted by astroimager  # 4:24 PM 0 Comments

Jupiter and Io from 2/10/22.

8" SCT ZWO ADC and 224MC with a 2x barlow.

Jupiter, Io and the GRS

John Beer

posted by astroimager  # 8:53 PM 0 Comments

Recently we captured images of M33, the Triangulum galaxy using a 130mm, F=650 Newtonian fitted with a coma corrector. These images have been posted previously on this blog on September 25th and October 1st respectively.

On the first occasion we used an SV405CC cooled OSC camera fitted with an UHC filter and on the second occasion we used an SV705C uncooled OSC camera that shows no amp glow, and with no filter.

The two final images were combined in Picture Window Pro and post processed in the Gimp. The images were combined using shift, rotate and scale to get a perfect positional match.

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Merged image of M33

There are various reasons why one might wish to combine images from different cameras. A notable one is to combine colour information from an OSC camera and luminance information from a monochrome camera. In this case it was to combine data from two OSC cameras, one of which had used a UHC filter during capture.

Steve Wainwright and Nicola Mackin

posted by astroimager  # 1:52 PM 0 Comments

A Panasonic Lumix DMCFZ72, 60x optical zoom bridge camera fitted with a Baader solar filter and mounted on a static tripod was used to capture 127 images of the Sun. The images were precisely cropped in Nicola Mackin's AstroCrop before stacking with Siril and post-processing in the Gimp 2.10.

Click on the image to get a closer view

The Sun in White Light

Steve Wainwright

posted by astroimager  # 4:51 PM 0 Comments