Swansea Astronomical Society Blog

With just a two hour weather window of clear skies forecast after sunset on the 29th December, I got the scope set up as soon as possible and managed to achieve polar alignment and decent focus during nautical twilight to maximize my imaging window. I selected the Helix nebula as my target low down in the darkest part of the sky and began taking HO data around 17:25. Due to a band of low cloud on the horizon, I could only take just over half an hour of data before the target became obscured.

32 mins of HOO data integrated in both standard and narrow band normalisation mode 3 in Pixinsight. Data was taken with a ZWO ASI 533 MM Pro camera and then a tighter crop of these data were blended together with some previously acquired OSC data taken with an Atik 320e camera last year giving an overall 3 hour colour integration. All data was acquired with NINA, with the OSC data stacked and processed in Affinity Photo and the mono HO data integrated and processed in Pixinsight. The combined 3 hour cropped image was star aligned with Pixinsight and blended in Adobe CS2.

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Helix 3 hours OSC and narrowband blend

Iris nebula: (Altair 60EDF doublet refractor fitted with a 0.8 x FR):

After imaging the Helix nebula shortly after twilight, conscious of my short weather window, I quickly moved on to the Iris nebula in the opposite side of the sky which had by then darkened sufficiently to allow good data acquisition to be made. With data from this faint reflection nebula being principally in the blue spectrum, I took 20 minutes of 5 minute blue subs before taking the same amount of luminance data and then trying to take a similar amount of red and green data. Clouds however called a halt to my imaging session by 7pm which resulted in me only being able to acquire just one 5 minute red sub. In order to get some colour LRGB data, I therefore made a synthetic green channel by subtracting the blue data from the luminance data and then enhancing the red channel and subtracting it from the resultant red/green channel. Colour data was then integrated in the usual way to produce a 45 minute stack.

I had previously shot some 2.25 hrs of narrow band data of this target back in July and I reprocessed this with the new RGB data using Pixinsight to give a total 3 hour integration.

All data was acquired in NINA and integrated/processed in Pixinsight with the combined RGB/narrow band data blended together in Adobe CS2.

Iris nebula 45 minutes LRGB

Chris Bowden

posted by astroimager  # 10:43 PM 0 Comments

I have been using the holidays and the bad weather to examine an online software that does very sophisticated processing of stacked images.

The software is written by Dennis Mellican an Australian AI specialist. The front end is a web page by which you upload a calibrated stacked image. Once uploaded, the image is passed automatically to the back-end server which is a script that does what most people do in PI. it is powerful fast and worth a try.

The processed image appears on a Delivery page from which you have an hour to download your image as a 16 bit FIT, 16 bit TIF or a JPG.

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Example Delivery page

I have written a detailed article on Astro Cooker covering two OSC and two Narrowband examples.

The full details and all of the images can be seen HERE.

Steve Wainwright

posted by astroimager  # 10:08 PM 0 Comments

My Reprocessed image of M35 region taken with my Rokion 135mm prime lens the lens was mounted on a 1300D DLSR Canon camera and mounted on a star Adevture 2i pro tracking mount. The image is a stack of 50 images stacked in DSS and Processed in GraXpert, and Adobe Photoshop.Settings were 45s and 800ISO.

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M35 region 

Chris Playle

posted by astroimager  # 10:46 PM 0 Comments

Two and a half hours worth of 5 minute exposures captured with Nicola Mackin's AStroDMx Capture through a Skymax 127 Maksutov with an SV605CC cooled OSC CMOS camera.

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The Hamburger galaxy

Steve Wainwright

posted by astroimager  # 9:49 PM 0 Comments

Reprocessing of our SHO data on the Eagle nebula from last June; with Nicola Mackin's AstroDMx Capture, an SV605MC cooled camera and a William Optics 81mm APO doublet refractor with 0.8 reducer-flattener, and an Altair 2" magnetic filter holder v2 fitted with  a 7nm H-alpha, or a 6.5nm OIII filter or a 7nm SII filter. 

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The Eagle nebula

Steve Wainwright

posted by astroimager  # 10:28 PM 0 Comments

Reprocessing of our narrowband SHO image of the Rosette nebula captured by AstroDMx Capture through a William Optics Super Zenithstar 81mm ED Doublet APO refractor at f/5.5 with x 0.8 reducer/flattener, and an Altair 2" magnetic filter holder v2 fitted with  a 7nm H-alpha, or a 6.5nm OIII filter or a 7nm SII filter and an SVBONY SV605MC monochrome, cooled CMOS camera.

Nicola Mackin's AstroDMx Capture was used to locate and capture 6 x 5-minute exposures of the Pacman nebula through each of the H-alpha, OIII and SII narrowband filters, giving a total exposure time of 90 minutes. 

Click on the image to get a closer view.

The Rosette nebula SHO

Steve Wainwright

posted by astroimager  # 10:46 PM 0 Comments

The image is a reprocessing in the Hubble palette, of the narrowband Pacman nebula data captured on December 1st. The bad weather at least provides the opportunity to practice image processing. The scope used was a William Optics Super Zenithstar 81mm ED Doublet APO refractor at f/5.5 with x 0.8 reducer/flattener, and an Altair 2" magnetic filter holder v2 fitted with  a 7nm H-alpha, or a 6.5nm OIII filter or a 7nm SII filter. An SVBONY SV605MC monochrome, cooled CMOS camera was placed at the focus.

Nicola Mackin's AstroDMx Capture was used to locate and capture 6 x 5-minute exposures of the Pacman nebula through each of the H-alpha, OIII and SII narrowband filters, giving a total exposure time of 90 minutes. 

Click on the image to get a closer view

The Pacman nebula in SHO

Steve Wainwright

posted by astroimager  # 6:28 PM 0 Comments

My Reprocessed image of the Rosette nebula. Taken with my Rokinon 135mm prime lens at f/2.8 the lens was mounted on a 1300D DSLR Canon camera and attached to a Star Adventurer 2i Pro tracking mount. Settings were 45s and 800 ISO. The image is a stack 40 images. I used an intervalometer to control the camera and a Bahtinov mask to focus on a bright star. The image was stacked in Sequator and processed in Gimp 2.10, Adobe Photoshop and Free Noise Reduction. The image was taken under Bortle 3 skies at Falls bay Gower near Rhossili. 

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The Rosette nebula

Chris Playle

posted by astroimager  # 6:14 PM 0 Comments