Swansea Astronomical Society Blog

More Deep-Sky sketches from the field trip to Portugal. I used my 8” Richie Cretian f/8 and ultrastar camera as an electronic eyepiece.

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Jim Startup

Using a 1300D DLSR Canon camera mounted on a Skywatcher 72ED APO refractor telescope.

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Reprocessed Andromeda Galaxy

Chris Playle

AstroDMx Capture with an SV605CC cooled OSC camera and an Altair Starwave ASCENT 60ED doublet refractor with field-flattener and an Optolong LeNhance OSC narrowband filter that passes OIII, H-beta and H-alpha wavelengths was used to capture 10 x 5min FITS exposures of the Rosette nebula.

The equipment was mounted on a Celestron AVX GOTO mount. An SVBONY SV165 guide-scope fitted with a QHY-5II-M guide camera was mounted on the imaging scope. A Raspberry Pi computer running an INDI server was connected to the hand controller and communicated with the indoor imaging computer running AstroDMx Capture via WiFi. The guide camera was connected by USB to the indoors computer running PHD2 autoguiding software. An Altair 2” magnetic filter holder version 2 was placed in the optical train to hold the LeNhance filter.

The imaging SV605CC camera was connected natively to the imaging computer indoors which captured the data.

The Image produced by stacking the data, partly processing the data in Deep Sky Stacker and post processing in the Gimp 2.10.

Remixing the channels in the Gimp can produce a rendering similar to the Hubble Palette

Steve Wainwright

I had another go at processing my Cocoon Nebula from 18 months ago. Imaged using my, ASI533 OSC with an LeNhance filter and my Altair60EDR telescope at it's native 360mm focal length. The mount was my Ioptron IEQ30pro.

70x300s subs restacked and calibrated in Pixinsight's WBPP script which also crops area of lower signal after stacking caused by dithering amongst other things.

StarXterminator was used to remove the stars before deconvolution and noiseXterminator was performed on the starless image. After DBE I permanently stretched the image, adjusted colour levels and added the stars back after stretching, them and adjusting the colour balance. The stars were very red due to the filter.

Reprocessed Cocoon Nebula

This image shows considerably more background Ha information than the original.

Original

Anne Startup

Stack of 99 x 15s FITS exposures of the Orion Nebula With AstroDMx Capture for Windows, a William Optics Zenithstar 81 ED APO doublet refractor with an 0.8 reducer-flattener and an Altair Quadband OSC narrowband filter with an SVBONY SV605CC OSC camera. Testing advanced functionality in AstroDMx Capture for Windows.

 An Altair 60 EDF doublet refractor was fitted with an Altair 2” Herschel Wedge, into which a couple of cameras were fitted in turn, to take white light images of the sun. To avoid damage to the scope optics from the intense solar radiation through improper alignment of the scope with the sun’s rays, the scope was first aligned with the sun with the lens cap in place with the finder scope removed and the guide scope capped and turned away from the sun. A DIY solar pinhole viewfinder was fitted to the finder bracket and the scope slewed to produce a central point of light onto a transparent white tape disc used as a viewport screen. Once the sun was properly aligned through the scope optical train, the scope lens cap was removed and a 26mm eyepiece was fitted with a ND filter which was then inserted into the Herschel Wedge to centre the sun's disc in the FOV visually. After tuning the Wedge’s polarizing filter to achieve suitable brightness for imaging, the eyepiece was removed and replaced first with a ZWO ASI462MC camera which was fitted directly into the 2” wedge to achieve correct focus. Astro DMx Capture was then used to take several SER files of the top and bottom hemispheres of the sun to allow panoramas to be made to produce a full solar disc image. After sufficient imaging runs, the camera was replaced with a QHY5P-IIC camera capable of taking full solar disc images. After the initial run some dust issues on the camera chip required flat fields to be taken using Plexiglass to diffuse the sun’s light with the master flat produced used to cancel out the dust using Astro DMx Capture to capture dust free images. The SER files were stacked using 30% of the frames taken using Autostakkert! With processing completed in Adobe CS2 and Affinity Photo.

NB: DO NOT LOOK AT THE SUN THROUGH ANY OPTICAL EQUIPMENT WITHOUT PROPER FILTERS AND PRECAUTIONS USED

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Solar Images:

ZWO ASI462MC – 30% of 1,982 frames stacked to give a total of 595 frames used to composite north and south hemispheres into a full solar disc image.

ZWO ASI462MC – 30% of 10,452 frames stacked to give a total of 3,136 frames used to composite north and south hemispheres into a full solar disc image.

QHY 5PII-C – 30% of 3,479 frames stacked (1,044 frames total)

QHY 5PII-C – 30% of 2,545 frames stacked (764 frames total) with live flat field correction applied

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 132 images of the Sun. The images were precisely cropped in Nicola Mackin's AstroCrop before stacking and wavelet processing with Siril and post-processing in the Gimp 2.10.

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Steve Wainwright

Following our meeting at the IQ building on 15th December several members went along to the Brian Stokes Cygnus Observatory for some visual observing of Mars and Jupiter using the 115mm triplet and the large Dobsonian. We had some good views using Barlow lenses and 19 & 10mm eyepieces and we also saw several Geminid meteors.

Members used binoculars and naked eye to view several objects in the excellent seeing conditions. The cold night curtailed outside viewing activities fairly quickly however, but some members took shelter in the warm room for some imaging work. Chris Playle and John Beer each brought scopes with Chris Playle using his Skywatcher 72ED APO refactor and his Canon 1300d camera to take images of M31 and John his Celestron C8 and ZWO 662 camera to take M33 images remotely from the warm room using his ASIAir and iPad. Chris Bowden hooked up his ZWO 462MC camera to his laptop in the warm room via the USB 3 wall outlet using an all sky camera attachment to take some time lapse shots of the scope activity on the hard standing and to try to catch some Geminid meteors. The time lapse video can be seen below.

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Several images that I took from home on the 3rd/4th November and the 11th -14th December with my EDF60 mainly using narrowband.

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The Bubble nebula & M52 - a re-edit from 4th November '22 of some 1 hr 40 mins total exposure (50 x 2 mins) using an EDF60 with 0.8 x FR and Atik 320e OSC camera with an Optolong Le-Nhance filter – stacked in DSS, processed in PixInsight with de-noising done with Noise Exterminator and final processing in Adobe CS2.

The Horsehead and Flame nebulae - a re-edit from 4th November '22 – EDF60 with 0.8 x FR and Atik 320e OSC camera - 1 hr 40 mins total exposure (50 x 2 mins) with Optolong Le-Nhance filter – stacked and processed in Affinity Photo with de-noising done with Noise Exterminator and final processing in Adobe CS2.

The Flaming Star nebula - a re-edit from 4th November '22 – EDF60 with 0.8 x FR and Atik 320e OSC camera - 80 mins total exposure (40 x 2 mins) with Optolong Le-Nhance filter – stacked and processed in Affinity Photo with de-noising done with Noise Exterminator and final processing in Adobe CS2.

M74 in Pisces (11 Dec '22) – 1 hr RGB & 40 mins of narrowband – EDF60 with 0.8 x FR and Atik 320e OSC camera. Affinity Photo and NoiseXterminator which selected 12 of the 20 images (1 hours worth).

The Medusa nebula (11 Dec '22) - 2.5 hrs of narrow band only – EDF60 with 0.8 x FR and Atik 320e OSC camera. Stacked and processed with Affinity Photo and NoiseXterminator.

IC443 (Jellyfish nebula) (14 Dec '22) - 6 hours narrow band filter – EDF60 with 0.8 x FR and Atik 320e OSC camera. Stacked and processed with Affinity Photo and NoiseXterminator.

NGC 281 (The Pacman nebula) (14 Dec '22) - 4 hours exposure (4 min subs) – EDF60 with 0.8 x FR and Atik 320e OSC camera. Stacked and processed with Affinity Photo and NoiseXterminator. 

Dec 11

Chris Bowden