Swansea Astronomical Society Blog

A Seestar S50 was fitted with a 3d printed nosepiece made by John Beer attached to an Oak-Optics adapter. The 3D printed nosepiece was made to hold a sandwich of two disks of OD 3.8 Baader photographic grade solar filter to create an OD 7.6 Baader filter.

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A 3 minute RAW AVI was captured with Seestar manual exposure settings of 30ms exposure and 70 gain, to make sure that none of the colour channels was overexposed.

50% of the frames in the RAW AVI were debayered and stacked with 1.5 Drizzle in Autostakkert!4, wavelet processed in waveSharp and post processed in Gimp 2.10 and ACDSee.

The Sun in white light

Steve Wainwright and Nicola Mackin

posted by astroimager  # 11:30 PM 0 Comments

A William Optics Zenithstar 71mm doublet refractor fitted with a field flattener was used to image a couple of deep sky objects using an ASI 533MM Pro camera using LRGB and narrowband filters. Images were captured using NINA with integrations and processing completed in Pixinsight, Adobe Photoshop 2024 and Fitsworks4

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The great Pegasus Cluster (M15): 40 mins of 30s LRGB subs - imaged on the night of 12th September 2024. M15 is an ancient globular cluster located in the constellation of Pegasus some 37,500 LY from Earth and is estimated to be around 23 billion years old. The cluster contains over 100,000 stars that have undergone core collapse that are suspected to orbit a central black hole.

M15

The Crescent Nebula (NGC6888): 120 mins of 2 and 4 minute narrowband subs of Ha/SII and OIII - imaged on the night of 13h September 2024. Four different palettes were produced from the data to show the various gases more clearly. The Crescent nebula is an emission nebula lying some 5,000 LY away in the constellation of Cygnus. The nebula glows brightly due to gas left from when the star expanded into a red giant being heated by the current Wolf Rayet star's solar wind, resulting in two shells of gas with two shock waves travelling at different speeds interacting together. 

posted by astroimager  # 5:15 PM 0 Comments

100 x 120s unguided exposures using my ASI533 with an Altairastro 4nm Ha/Oiii filter and my Altairastro 80mm x-wave triplet refractor. First image with this combination.

All processing was done using Pixinsight. Their new gradientcorrection tool was very good as was fastbatchproprocessing. I then used BlurX, StarX and NoiseX once the stars were removed. Narrowbandnormalisation allowed me to boost the Oiii slightly.

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The Crescent nebula

To my surprise, I then saw that I'd captured the Soap Bubble nebula in the bottom left. It is more visible in the starless image.

Anne Startup

posted by astroimager  # 4:53 PM 0 Comments

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Sun in White Light: 15% of 11,868 images were captured with a Player One Apollo-M Mini camera attached to a Herschel Wedge fitted to a William Optics Zenithstar 71 doublet refractor. Data were acquired with Astro DMx Capture, stacked in Autostakkert!4, wavelet processed in Registax and further processed with Pixinsight's Solar Toolbox and Adobe Photoshop 2024.

Sun in Ha: 15% of 4,974 images were captured with a Player One Apollo-M Mini camera attached to a PST. Data were acquired with Astro DMx Capture, stacked in Autostakkert!4, wavelet processed in Registax and further processed with Pixinsight's Solar Toolbox and Adobe Photoshop 2024.

Chris Bowden

posted by astroimager  # 4:49 PM 0 Comments

The Sun in white light today with a Seestar S50 and stacked OD 5.0 + OD 3.8 Baader solar filters.

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Steve Wainwright and Nicola Mackin

posted by astroimager  # 10:55 PM 0 Comments

 I've just reprocessed my Tulip nebula from the end of last year. It was imaged using my SXVR H694 ccd camera, binned 2x2, 6 inch RC scope on the CEM60. 30x600s subs using Ha, Oiii and Sii filters.

The new processing used Pixinsight's new Gradient removal script, StarX,NoiseX and BlurX, and Narrowbandnormalisation. I then extracted a luminance and used 3 instances of HDR on clones using different settings to accentuate the sharpness of various areas of the image. The clones were then averaged together to create a new lum image. This image was then combined with the HSO image. A few adjustments of levels and curves to finish.

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The Tulip nebula

Anne Startup

posted by astroimager  # 3:30 PM 0 Comments