Swansea Astronomical Society Blog

Here's my Seagull Nebula 2 pane mosaic from the last run of clear skies. Imaged using the ZWO533 with 4nm duoband filters and Altairastro Starwave 70EDT on the CEM40 mount.

8 hours of 5 minute subs were captured for each panel. Stacked and processed in Pixinsight. I used Mosaic by coordinates and GradientMergeMosaic to actually produce the mosaic, using the default setting.

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The Seagull nebula

Anne Startup

posted by astroimager  # 4:50 PM 0 Comments

I stacked just 25% of 9 images taken with my 350 mm F6.3 lens using 1/4000" exposure at ISO 320. I aligned and stacked them in PIPP and processed the output in Pixinsight and Adobe CS2.

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Chris Bowden

posted by astroimager  # 4:47 PM 0 Comments

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SN 2024gy:in NGC 4216: Image taken on the morning of 26th January from 05:50 until 06:53 using 2 minute subs through a Luminance filter fitted to an ASI 533MM Pro camera attached to an Altair 60EDF doublet refractor fitted with a 0.8 x FR. The supernova (SN 2024gy) can be seen as a bright point of light in the top of edge on spiral galaxy NGC 4216 as shown in the cropped and labelled image. Many other galaxies were captured in the image comprising an area of sky 2.25 degrees square which make up part of the Virgo cluster of galaxies including NGC 4168, NGC 4206, NGC 4208, NGC 4222 and at lower right part of M99 (Coma Pinwheel).

Moon: 9 x RAW images of the Moon were taken using at the fastest shutter speed and highest resolution of a Sony Vlogging camera to which a 350mm telephoto lens was attached. The images were combined in PIPP and the resultant stacked image was then processed in Pixinsight to sharpen it.

Sun: 27 x RAW images of the Sun were taken at the fastest shutter speed and highest resolution of a Sony Vlogging camera fitted with a 350mm telphoto lens. The images were stacked in Autostakkert! and wavelet processed in Registax with the final image finished off in Adobe CS2.

Chris Bowden

posted by astroimager  # 4:44 PM 0 Comments

Click on the image to get a closer view. January 26th 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 150 images of the Sun at ISO 100 and 1/1600s. 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  # 11:30 PM 0 Comments

Owen Brazell gave a fascinating Zoom lecture on Globular star clusters. The talk was wide ranging, covering historical aspects, Types of star clusters and types of globular clusters and their classification. Formation of globular clusters, their distribution and globular clusters in other galaxies. The talk was followed by a lively discussion.

posted by astroimager  # 11:00 PM 0 Comments

Paul Hancock who goes under the internet identity of Paulyman Astro explains that the palette is at its base a blend of SHO and HOO images. He has written a PixInsight script to generate Foraax Palette images. There is a fair bit of pre-preparation of images to be done as well as post manipulation of colours and hues.

I have developed a procedure that I shall be publishing shortly to do the whole process in the Gimp although some of the procedures might be better done in external programs such as Neat Image for denoising and Photoshop CS2 or Affinity photo for selective colour post processing. Nevertheless the Gimp has its own denoising function, the very powerful G'MIC plugin, and various inbuilt colour manipulations such as Hue-Saturation of individual colours. It must be said that PixInsight has the most powerful selective colour processing script that I have come across, but for this exercise, I have not used PixInsight at all. The Pixel Math can also be done in Siril, but that has not been used here either.

Whilst sensu stricto the image presented here is not in the Foraax palette; sensu lato, it is! It may be best to call it the 'SHO+HOO' palette or the 'Faux-Foraax' palette.

PixInsight has not been used here at all.

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The North America nebula processed entirely in the Gimp 2.10

posted by astroimager  # 7:12 PM 0 Comments

Here is an image of the Sun yesterday taken using a Altairastro Hypercam 174, with an Altairastro Starwave 102, f/11 telescope using the Altair G band filter.

Best 25% of 2000 frames, stacked in Autostakkert!3 and processed in IMPPG and Photoshop CS3. I've coloured it to reflect the colour when using the filter visually.

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The Sun with an Altair G band filter

Anne Startup

posted by astroimager  # 1:30 PM 0 Comments

Here's a sketch of the supernova in NGC4216 done a couple of nights ago at around midnight. I used my 8 inch Ritchey Chretien and Paul Howat's ASI174 mono cmos camera. The capture software was Sharpcap.

Click on the sketch to get a closer view

Jim Startup

posted by astroimager  # 1:24 PM 0 Comments

I've reprocessed my Witch head from several days ago. I think it's much improved. This time I extracted a luminance channel from the RGB starless. image once it was non-linear. I ran blurXterminator followed by a really gentle hdr. The cloudiness is more pronounced and show more structure. 

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The Witch Head nebula

Anne Startup

posted by astroimager  # 7:22 PM 0 Comments

All images were taken with my C8" SCT with a ZWO 533MC Pro camera.

Filter used was the Altair 4nm Duoband.

Each image was an 8 hours integration time of 5 minute subs.

The Bubble nebula

HOO

RGB

HOO

John Beer

posted by astroimager  # 5:07 PM 0 Comments

SHO part of the Spaghetti  nebula with the Altair dualband filters (Ha/OIII, SII/OIII), AstroDMx Capture and a StellaMira 66mm ED,f/6 refractor with an SVBONY SV405CC OSC CMOS camera.

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Part of the Spaghetti nebula in the Hubble palette

Steve Wainwright and Nicola Mackin

posted by astroimager  # 1:40 AM 0 Comments

Using an SX Superstar camera as an electronic eyepiece and 8 inch Ritchey Chretien in Starlight Live software to stack frames as they come in from the camera.

Click on the sketch to get a closer view

Jim Startup

posted by astroimager  # 1:33 AM 0 Comments

Here's another complete image imaged over the last few nights using my ASI533mc with ultra duoband filters, Altairastro 70EDT refractor and the new CEM40 mount.

24x300s subs for each filter, total 4 hours. Stacked etc in Pixinsight. DBE and BlurXterminator performed on the stacks, then RGB channels extracted for both images, blue and green channels combined using pixelmath. HSO palette used to recombine the 3 channels produced.

After a gentle stretch, I removed the stars then used narrowband normalisation process to balance the channels as the ha (green) was extremely strong. I removed magenta from the star image by inverting it, running SNCR, then inverting it again. I then extracted the lum channel and ran blurXterminator on that followed by a gentle HDR before recombining the Lum with the colour image.

My best Rosette by far.

posted by astroimager  # 2:57 PM 0 Comments

Here's an image of the sun as seen on 20 Jan 2024 through Altairastro Ascent 80mm  telescope mounted on my IEQ30pro. We used a Baader Herschel wedge which was fitted with an Altairastro 2nm G band filter together with a neutral density filter.

I used a 2015/16 Gpcam1 to capture 500 frame ser files. This was the best of them. The other solar cameras couldn't reach focus with the Herschel Wedge.

The G band filter shows a hint of the lighter sections on the solar surface but once photographed these areas become much clearer. The image was stacked in Autostakkert, sharpened in IMPPg then finished using PS3.

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Anne Startup

posted by astroimager  # 5:09 PM 0 Comments