Swansea Astronomical Society Blog

A montage featuring a few galaxies in the Leo 1 group and M5 taken after Thursday night's meeting. The Leo 1 image comprises 4 hours and 40 minutes total exposure of LRGB/Ha and M5 one hour of LRGB data taken with an ASI 533MMPro attached to an Altair 60EDF doublet refractor fitted with a 0.8 x FR. Data were integrated and processed in Pixinsight.

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M5 LRGB 1hour

M96 LRGB Ha 4 hours

posted by astroimager  # 7:23 PM 0 Comments

Fitswork was used to reduce the star sizes a little in order to give more prominence to the nebulosity.

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Auriga wide field

Chris Playle

posted by astroimager  # 7:00 PM 0 Comments

John Beer (Swansea Astronomical Society) took us on a very personal journey from his early interests in photography and astronomy to the present day, with his interests in making and 3D printing. John explained how the Astronomy and his work on outreach within the SAS benefited his health and confidence. He showed how his astronomical imaging has improved in recent times and showed some of his very good astrophotographs. 

posted by astroimager  # 11:00 PM 0 Comments

The ZWO Seestar S50 is a smart altazimuth telescope. It is a 50mm apochromatic triplet with a built in UV/IR cut filter and a dualband 20nm H-alpha and 30nm (OIII, H-beta) light-pollution filter (atumatically or 'manual' placed in the light path. It has a built in camera which uses the Sony IMX462 CMOS sensor which has a resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels (2 MP). The Seestar has a focal length of 250mm, and a focal ratio of f/5. For solar observing/imaging, a solar filter is provided. It has a built in dew heater and the Seestar software, which runs on Android or iOS can control the scope and autofocusing. The Seestar can be set to capture 10s 20s or 30s exposures or video (which can be RAW or MP4). Being an altazimuth mount, if long exposures are being used, it will depend on which part of the sky and elevation one is imaging, which exposure it will be reasonable to use. Our initial deep sky imaging was done with 10s exposures.

The scope plate solves to centre the object once located. The built in compass aids the telescope in finding it's targets. Once located and centred (which is a quick process) the scope can be set to start capturing. It captures exposures and does a live stack so you can see the image building up on the screen. (We used a 10.4 " Android tablet to get a really good view of the developing image.) 

Daytime Seestar.

Seestar with the provided solar filter

Solar image from stacking a RAW AVI file

The Sun setting over the mountain as seen by the Seestar

Night time Seestar

10 minutes Stacked Rosette nebula as shown by the Seestar

Ten minutes stack of the Rosette nebula processed by PixInsight's CreateHubblePaletteFromOSC script.

HOO rendering

The Horsehead and Flame nebulae, stacking and  processing of the individual exposures

Steve Wainwright and Nicola Mackin

posted by astroimager  # 6:04 PM 0 Comments

M44 known as the Beehive star cluster in  Cancer. Taken with my Rokinon 135mm prime lens at f/2.8 mounted on a 1300D DSLR Canon camera on a Star Adventure 2i pro tracking mount. Settings were 45s and 800ISO. I used an intervalometer to control the camera and a Bahtinov mask to focus on a bright star. The image is a stack of 35 images 25 flat frames and 30 drak frames all stacked in DSS and processed in Siril. 

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M44

Chris Playle

posted by astroimager  # 1:26 PM 0 Comments

Wide field image of Auriga taken with my Rokinon 135mm prime lens at f2 mounted on a 1300D DSLR Canon camera on a Star Adventure 2i pro tracking mount. Settings were 45s and 800 ISO. I used an intervalometer to control the camera and a Bahtinov mask to focus on a bright star which was Rigel in Orion.The image is a stack of 250 images 25 flat frames and 20 dark frames all stacked in DSS and processed in Siril.The image was taken at Fall Bay, Rhossili Gower under Bortle 3 skies.  

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Auriga wide field

Annotated image

Chris Playle

posted by astroimager  # 10:35 AM 0 Comments

With a rare night of clear skies that encompassed the whole sky, I set up my scope at an elevated position to get the best vantage for imaging three southern hemisphere deep sky objects that skirt our horizon at this time of year. As each of the targets popped into view, I managed to take images of them as they reached their highest points at just 10 degrees above the horizon. A total of 6 hours imaging was achieved, using different filters with an ASI 533MM Pro camera attached to an Altair 60EDF doublet refractor fitted with a 0.8 x FR. Data were stacked and processed in Pixinsight with final processing done in Photoshop 7.0. A montage shows the three objects imaged, a view of the southern horizon looking out over Gower and the equipment used for imaging.

DSO's from left to right: 

NGC 3109: This galaxy in the constellation of Hydra is thought to be the furthest galaxy in our local group at a distance of 4.3 Mly. This was a 1.6 hour LRGB integration.

Sh2-308 (the Dolphin head nebula): An area of ionised hydrogen lying 8 degrees below Sirius with a nebulous bubble lighting up a star preparing to go supernova. Thankfully it is around 5,300 ly away! This was 3.75 hrs of R/G and OIII.

M83 the southern Pinwheel: One of the closest and brightest barred spiral galaxies lying about 15 Mly away in the constellation borders of Hydra and Centaurus. This was just 0.6 hours of LRGB data. 

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Dolphin head nebula

posted by astroimager  # 10:26 AM 0 Comments

Wide field image of the Gemini region including M35 Star cluster, the Jellyfish nebula and the Monkey head nebula.Taken with my Rokinon 135mm prime lens at f/2.8 mounted on a 1300D DSLR Canon camera on a Star Adventure 2i pro tracking mount. Settings were 45s and 800ISO. I used an intervalometer to control the camera and a Bahtinov Mask to focus on a bright star. The image is a  stack of 110 images 30 flat frames and 23 dark frames all stacked in DSS and processed in Siril. The image was taken at Falls Bay, Rhossili Gower under Bortle 3 skies.

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The object rich Gemini region

Chris Playle

posted by astroimager  # 9:51 PM 0 Comments

In the late 1990's we started doing deep-sky imaging with very low light (0.001 lux or lower) video cameras and later, frame-accumulating video cameras. These cameras were essentially TV cameras and made individual exposures of 1/50th of a second. Simulated long exposures were made by summing hundreds of thousands of these 1/50th s frames into 32 bit deep FITS files. In this session we decided to capture short exposures of the Orion nebulae to see what detail could be captured.

Very short exposures of the Orion nebula were made with AstroDMx Capture, through an Altair Starwave 60 ED refractor with an 0.8 reducer/flattener and 2" magnetic filter holder with a SkyTech LPRO MAX 2" broadband filter, using an SV605CC cooled, 14 bit OSC CMOS camera. The scope was fitted with a Pegasus FocusCube v2 controlled by AstroDMx Capture via INDI. The scope was mounted on an AVX GOTO mount which was controlled by AstroDMx Capture via an INDI server running on the imaging computer indoors.

Clouds limited the number of frames that could be captured so fewer images were captured than we would have liked. 150 images were captured in total: 100 x 1s, 30 x 3s and 20 x 5s exposures. The camera is a zero amp glow camera so dark frames were omitted. However, Flats, dark-flats and Bias frames were used.

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The equipment used

posted by astroimager  # 9:36 PM 0 Comments