Swansea Astronomical Society Blog

An hours worth of 5 minute exposure were captured by AstroDMx Capture of M101 with an SV605CC with a LPROMAX filter and a Stella Mira 66mm f/6 refractor. 41minutes worth of 10s exposures were captured of the same object with a Seestar S50. The stacked, processed images were combined in Picture Window Pro and finally processed in the Gimp.

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Combined 101 minutes of exposure of M101 through two scopes

Steve Wainwright and Nicola Mackin

posted by astroimager  # 6:21 PM 0 Comments

Professor Rees gave a fascinating account of his involvement in a range of projects ranging through Britain's substantial sounding rocket program through aircraft environment sensing systems and satellite remote sensing.  The talk was much appreciated and gave rise to a lively discussion.

posted by astroimager  # 11:00 PM 0 Comments

1 hour 1 minute's worth of 10s exposures of NGC6960 from the Seestar S50, stacked in PixInsight, post processed in PixInsight, Siril, GraXpert and GIMP.

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The Western Veil nebula

As it comes straight of the Seestar S50 with no post processing

Steve Wainwright and Nicola Mackin

posted by astroimager  # 4:56 PM 0 Comments

An SVBONY SV305 Pro OSC CMOS camera was placed at the focus of a Skymax 127, mounted on a Celestron AVX mount controlled by AstroDMx Capture for Windows via an INDI server running on a Linux mini computer. AstroDMx Capture was used to capture two 1500-frame RAW SER files of different regions of the lunar surface. The best 75% of the frames in the SER files were debayered and stacked in Autostakkert! 4. The resulting images were wavelet processed in waveSharp and post processed in the Gimp 2.10 and ACDSee.

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Region showing Mare Nectaris, Mare Fecunditatis and Sinus Asperitatus. Also Craters Messier A, Lagrenus, Gutenberg, Taruntius, Catharina, Cyrillus, Theophilus and Fracastorus.

Steve Wainwright and Nicola Mackin

posted by astroimager  # 4:17 PM 0 Comments

My image of the Eastern  and Western Veil Nebulae taken with my Rokinon 135mm prime lens at f/2.8 on my 1300D DSLR Canon camera mounted on my Star Adventure 2i pro tracking mount. I used an intervalometer to control the camera and a Bahtinov mask to focus on a bright star. Settings were 45s and 800ISO. 60 images were captured with 50 flat frames and 30 dark frames. All were stacked in DSS and edited in Siril and then used Star net ++ to removed the stars and finished off in Gimp 2.10 adding the stars back with less emphasis. The image was taken under Bortle 3 skies at Fall Bay Gower. 

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Two processings

The Veil nebulae

Chris Playle

posted by astroimager  # 12:29 AM 0 Comments

 T CrB (Blaze Star) in LRGB:

Some 16 x 60s LRGB images of T CrB  were colour and luminosity calibrated to show the star in its present dormant state. This star is a recurrent nova with a period of around 80 years which is due to outburst soon as it has been over 77 years since it last flared from magnitude 10 to 4 back in 1946. The image will serve as a "before" image should I be lucky enough to be able to image it again when it goes nova in the months ahead. I have marked the star towards the centre of the frame which at present looks comparable to other 10th magnitude stars in this constellation. A cropped and enlarged image shows the star as orange in colour. When it does flare it should be as bright as the star to the lower left of the frame (epsilon CrB). 

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The Blaze Star

Small Sagittarius Star Cloud:

Some 20 minutes of Red & Green channels and 28 of Sulphur, Oxygen and Hydrogen were blended together by stacking 8 separate palettes created in Pixinsight in Adobe Photoshop 2024 to make a super luminance channel using the image stack mean function. The integration were then used to make an LRGB image by combining it with a pseudo RGB combination in Pixinsight. 

Data from both targets were made using an ASI 533MM Pro camera attached to an Altair 60EDF doublet refractor using NINA to acquire the data.

Chris Bowden

posted by astroimager  # 9:06 PM 0 Comments

Two images of the Pelican nebula were captured with a Seestar S50. Each image is the integration of an hour and a half's worth of 10s exposures. The data were stacked with PixInsight, spectrophotometric colour calibrated, statistically stretched with further processing in Siril, and Gimp and Microsoft ICE for stitching the two images.

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Mosaic of the two images

posted by astroimager  # 12:08 AM 0 Comments

A Panasonic Lumix DMCFZ72, 60x optical zoom bridge camera mounted on a static tripod was used to capture 180 images of the 28% Moon at ISO 100 and 1/60s. The images were precisely cropped/registered in Nicola Mackin's AstroCrop before being stacked in Siril, wavelet processed in waveSharp and post processed in the Gimp.

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Steve Wainwright

posted by astroimager  # 11:40 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 153 images of the Sun at ISO 100 and 1/2000s. The images were precisely cropped/registered in Nicola Mackin's AstroCrop before being stacked in Siril, wavelet processed in waveSharp and post processed in the Gimp.

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A Panasonic Lumix DMCFZ72, 60x optical zoom bridge camera mounted on a static tripod was used to capture 153 images of the 19.7% Moon at ISO 100 and 1/50s. The images were precisely cropped/registered in Nicola Mackin's AstroCrop before being stacked in Autostakkert!, wavelet processed in waveSharp and post processed in the Gimp.

Steve Wainwright

posted by astroimager  # 1:19 AM 0 Comments

Montage:

Members made the most of a very short night to observe the slender crescent moon and several DSO objects during a period of semi darkness. The event was well attended by some 10 members who brought along their own scopes and binoculars to use along with those of the society.

M27 (The Dumbbell nebula): 86 mins of 2 min subs taken with an Altair 115mm triplet refractor using an Atik 320e CCD OSC camera. Data was acquired in NINA and integrated in Pixinsight with final processing done in Adobe Photoshop 2024. No calibration files were available.

M82 (The Cigar galaxy): 40 mins of 2 min subs taken with an Altair 115mm triplet refractor using an Atik 320e CCD OSC camera. Data was acquired in NINA and integrated in DSS, with final processing done in Adobe Photoshop 2024. No calibration files were available.

M81 & M82 (Bodes and the Cigar galaxies):  Just 14 minutes of 2 min luminance subs taken with an Altair 60EDF doublet refractor fitted with a 0.8 x FR using an ASI 533MM Pro camera. Also in the image are galaxies NGC 3077 (top right) and NGC 2961 (top left). Data was acquired in NINA and integrated in Pixinsight with final processing done in Adobe Photoshop 2024. No calibration files were used.

Sadr Region of Cygnus (Gamma Cygni): 45 mins of SHO data was taken with an Altair 60 EDF refractor fitted with a 0.8 x FR. Data was acquired in NINA and integrated in Pixinsight with final processing done in Adobe Photoshop 2024. No calibration files were used.

Chris Bowden

posted by astroimager  # 6:28 PM 0 Comments

Wide field image of the Scutum area taken with my Rokinon 135mm prime lens at f/2.8 on my 1300D DSLR Canon camera and mounted on my StarAdventure 2i pro tracking mount. I used an intervalometer to control the camera and a Bahtinov mask to focus on a bright star.Settings were 45s and 800ISO. 70 images were captured with 50 flat frames and 25 dark frames all stacked in DSS' edited in Siril and Gimp 2.10. The image was taken under Bortle 3 skies at Falls Bay Gower. 

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Scutum star clouds

posted by astroimager  # 1:07 AM 0 Comments