Swansea Astronomical Society Blog

IC 5146 the Cocoon Nebula taken with my 1300D DLSR Canon camera attached to an 80ED APO Skywatcher refactor telescope with a field flattener and an Optolong L-Enhance 2 inch filter. I used a Bahtinov mask for focusing and an intervalometer to control the camera. Settings were 2min and 3200ISO. The image is a stack of 200 images 30 Flat frames 30 Dark frames and 30 Bias frames all stacked in DSS and processed in gimp 2.10 and Adobe Photoshop 2023 and Free Photo Noise reduction. 

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The cocoon nebula

Chris Playle

posted by astroimager  # 11:56 PM 0 Comments

Three renderings of a HOO image of the Lion nebula (Sharpless 2-132) Using AstroDMx Capture; 30 min worth of 3 min exposures in H-alpha and the same in OIII. Using a William Optics 81 mm APO doublet and an SV605MC mono, CMOS camera.

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Basic HOO image

Steve Wainwright and Nicola Mackin

posted by astroimager  # 9:31 PM 0 Comments

A Panasonic Lumix DMCFZ72, 60x optical zoom bridge camera fitted with an ICE ND100000 solar filter and mounted on a static tripod was used to capture 338 images of the Sun at ISO 100 and 1/2000s. The images were precisely cropped in Nicola Mackin's AstroCrop before being Stacked in Siril, wavelet processed in waveSharp and post processed in Image Magick and Gimp 2.10.

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Steve Wainwright

posted by astroimager  # 9:01 PM 0 Comments

The Pleiades was 2.75 hrs of RGB data and the Lion 4.3hrs of SHO data. The seeing was so much better than the last two imaging nights! All data was captured in NINA using an ASI 533MM Pro camera attached to an Altair EDF60 doublet refractor fitted with a 0.8 x FR. Data was stacked and integrated/processed in Pixinsight with final adjustments made in Adobe CS2.

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The Pleiades

The Lion Nebula SHO

Chris Bowden

posted by astroimager  # 3:05 PM 0 Comments

A Panasonic Lumix DMCFZ72, 60x optical zoom bridge camera fitted with an ICE ND100000 solar filter and mounted on a static tripod was used to capture 57 images of the Sun on Friday 13 October through high clouds at ISO 100 and 1/500s exposure before the sun started to set behind the mountain. The images were precisely cropped in Nicola Mackin's AstroCrop before being Stacked in Siril, wavelet processed in waveSharp and post processed in the Gimp 2.10.

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Steve Wainwright

posted by astroimager  # 1:47 AM 0 Comments

In this example, 94 images of the Lagoon/Trifid nebulae region were used. 34 of them were captured before a meridian flip and 60 of them after the flip.

Equipment used: The equipment comprised a Stella Mira 66 ED APO refractor with a field flattener and Altair magnetic 2" filter holder with a SkyTech LPRO MAX broadband filter; a ZWO EAF and a SV405CC OSC 14 bit CMOS camera.

 

AstroDMx Capture was used to control the mount and EAF via an INDI server running on the imaging computer indoors. AstroDMx Capture was used to send the scope/mount to NGC 6526, an insignificant patch of nebulosity almost midway between the Trifid nebula and the Lagoon nebula. This object was chosen to facilitate the composition of the image. AstroDMx Capture used plate-solving to centre the chosen location in the field of view. 1 minute exposures were captured until a meridian flip was required. After the meridian flip was carried out, plate solving was used to re-centre the same coordinates in the field of view before more images were captured. Light frames, dark frames Flat fields and dark-Flats were all captured during the imaging session.

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The internet is replete with reports of the rotation of the field of view not being quite right after a meridian flip. We noticed this to be the case with these data which can be seen in the Autosave file from Deep Sky Stacker. The frame of the rotation is clearly visible in this image.

Autosave image from Deep Sky Stacker

The rotation frame is clearly visible.

The approach used here was to remove any gradients present in the Autosave.tif image by stretching and extracting the background in GraXpert. The stretching and background extraction function in GraXpert cut out a lot of repetitive work stretching the Autosave.tif image to reveal the nebulosity.

Screenshot of GraXpert stretching the image and placing a background extraction grid in the image.

The rotation frame is clearly visible.

Background extraction using the Kriging process

GraXpert showing the processed image. The rotation frame is clearly visible in the image.

The stretched, background extracted image imported into Gimp 2.10 and the crop area set ready to crop out the image area not affected by the rotation.

The Starnet++ plugin for Gimp is used to remove the stars. The stars are exported separately.

The starless image is de-noised

The starless image is then further processed in Gimp and the stars are added back.

Finally the image is re-scaled and re-orientated into the correct orientation.

Steve Wainwright

posted by astroimager  # 10:16 PM 0 Comments

My reprocessed M17 the Omega or Swan nebula. When I took this image I used my Tamron 18-200 zoom lens at 200mm at f/6.3. The lens was attached to a 1300DLSR Canon camera, the camera was attached to the star Adventure 2i pro tracking mount. Settings were 1min and 1600ISO. The image was stacked in DSS and processed in Adobe Photoshop 2023, and PT Photo Editor. 

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The Swan or Omega nebula, M17

Chris Playle

posted by astroimager  # 9:57 PM 0 Comments

A Panasonic Lumix DMCFZ72, 60x optical zoom bridge camera fitted with an ICE ND100000 solar filter and mounted on a static tripod was used to capture 196 images of the Sun through moving clouds at ISO 100 and 1/250s exposure. The images were precisely cropped in Nicola Mackin's AstroCrop before being Stacked in Siril, wavelet processed in waveSharp and post processed in the Gimp 2.10. Stacking averaged the clouds away but a much longer exposure was required compared with little to no clouds.

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Steve Wainwright

posted by astroimager  # 5:03 PM 0 Comments

Reprocessed Altair Quadband data on the Horsehead and Flame nebulae captured through an Altair Starwave ASCENT 60ED doublet refractor with an 0.8 reducer/flattener; using AstroDMx Capture for Windows and an SV605MC 14 bit, monochrome CMOS camera. Data captured on Jan 24 2023. Stack of 20 x 3 minute exposures. The quadband filter passes the emission lines of H-alpha (656.3nm), H-beta (486.1nm), OIII (495.9nm) and SII (672.4nm), so this monochrome image contains structures composed of these elements.

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The Horsehead and Flame nebulae

Steve Wainwright

posted by astroimager  # 2:26 PM 0 Comments

A Sony A77 milc camera was mounted on an AstroTrac portable star tracker aligned with the north celestial pole to keep pace with the movement of the Earth. The camera was pointed in the direction of the Draconid meteor radiant with exposures set at roughly 1 minute intervals using an intervalometer to try to capture some of the Draconid meteors around the time of their peak display. The time lapse was left to operate for 1.5 hours with images taken at f/2.8 and ISO 1600, during which time just three Draconid meteors were caught in the field of view on three of the frames captured. Several planes, satellites and space debris were also captured on some of the frames, including a very bright flash reflected off the roofs of the houses from the opposite direction of sky which may have been from a fireball. The three frames containing the Draconid meteors captured are shown together with a montage of the apparatus used showing how the start and end position of the sweep arm of the AstroTrac arm being driven in sidereal motion over the course of an hour and a half.

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The equipment

Chris Bowden

posted by astroimager  # 4:05 PM 0 Comments

A Panasonic Lumix DMCFZ72, 60x optical zoom bridge camera fitted with an ICE ND100000 solar filter and mounted on a static tripod was used to capture 204 images of the Sun through high cloud. The images were precisely cropped in Nicola Mackin's AstroCrop before being Stacked in Siril, wavelet processed in waveSharp and post processed in Image Magick and Gimp 2.10. 

Click on the image to get a closer view.

Steve Wainwright

posted by astroimager  # 3:35 PM 0 Comments

 Over the nights of the 7th and 8th October some 4.1 hours of data were taken of the Lion nebula using LRGB and SHO filters with an ASI 533MM Pro camera attached to an Altir 60EDF doublet refractor fitted with a 0.8 x FR. Due to the partially hazy conditions, just under 3 hours of data was good enough to use. The narrow band data of the nebula was processed in four different palettes after first removing the stars using StarXterminator software, with the RGB stars added back in using Pixinsight. The full size SHO version is shown along with a montage of the other narrow band palettes for comparison. Processing with various palettes in this way assists with identifying the different types of gases present in the nebula.

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The Lion nebula Sharpless 2-132 SHO image

posted by astroimager  # 2:45 PM 0 Comments

A Panasonic Lumix DMCFZ72, 60x optical zoom bridge camera fitted with an ICE ND100000 solar filter and mounted on a static tripod was used to capture 219 images of the Sun at ISO 100 and 1/1600s exposure. The images were precisely cropped in Nicola Mackin's AstroCrop before being Stacked in Siril, wavelet processed in waveSharp and post processed in the Gimp 2.10.

Click on the image to get a closer view

Steve Wainwright

posted by astroimager  # 3:55 PM 0 Comments