SX Ultrastar Mono First Light

[Astrojedi]

Captures and observations from SX Ultrastar mono first light last night.

Setup: C8@f4 using Meade 3.3FR (Japan), SX Ultrastar Mono (Sony 825 sensor), AVX EQ Mount, Orion SkyGlow Astrophotography Filter and Starlight Live software v1.1

Conditions: Heavily Light Polluted Location (visually only mag 3.5 and brighter stars visible), seeing and transparency both were average but struggled with high humidity later in the evening as the battery powering the dew strip died (forgot to charge it).

Initial observations:

• As expected the 825 sensor at a high FR works best for larger DSOs. Overall really enjoyed the larger FOV on nebulae and supernovae remnants but missed the perfect image scale X2 provides for smaller galaxies
• In my view the 825 at x1 bin mode is at least 1.5 - 2 stops slower than the X2 but still is an acceptable compromise between my ‘need for speed’ and ‘need for resolution’
• Starlight Live (lodestar live) SW does not yet have a bin option so could not try it out but I think at x2 bin 825 should provide similar speed as the X2.
• The sensor is very ‘clean’ – very few hot pixels. Very viable for traditional style imaging as well after using darks
• I was surprised by how well the Meade 3.3 performed. There was some vignetting at the corners of the frame and some coma the image was very good (at least for EAA)
• Stacking with Starlight Live SW was much slower and it really struggled to stack frames for objects in rich star fields. It refused to stack 11/15 perfectly good frames with pin point stars for the Wizard Nebula. I don’t this this is a big issue to fix – just need to optimize the registration process a little bit when there are too many stars.

Here are the images:

[Astrojedi]

[Astrojedi]

[Astrojedi]

[Astrojedi]

[Astrojedi]

[Astrojedi]

Single 60s frame for the Wizard Nebula... no stacking

[Paul81]

Superb first light!

I have been working on the stacking algorithm to improve it for the new camera (the issues you are seeing are expected).

The improved algorithm is faster and I am currently tweaking it to cope with multispectrum.

Watch this space, I still have some more work to complete before its ready! :-)

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[seo]

Very nice first light post. Thanks for sharing your observations/review.

[Astrojedi]

Thanks Paul. Really enjoying your SW and looking forward to multi-spectral capabilities.

Thanks Dimitris.

[Martin Meredith]

Great results especially given the conditions! Some nice tight stars in the Cocoon.

Just wondering: are you using nonlinear brightness compression?

thanks for posting

Martin

[laudropb]

Very nice first light images. Thanks for posting.

[RobertI]

Very nice results and first light under challenging skies (by the sound of it).

Did you find the higher resolution over the Lodestar was noticable on the night?

Rob

[SarasotaSean]

Inspiring images, I like the spiral image... Thanks for sharing.

[Astrojedi]

Thank you all.

Martin, I am not using nonlinear brightness compression, at least not to my knowledge. I did not see this option in Lodestar Live. Is there such an option and did I miss it?

Rob, yes definitely for the detail in the supernovae remnants... but need more subs from my light polluted location to really bring the detail out and suppress the noise. 

[Astrojedi]

Martin, I see what you mean (sorry I was looking for Photoshop style curves). No I am not using any of the non linear functions. Will try that next time.

[nytecam]

Very impressive results Ajedi :-) Your edge coma is much less than my early tests so perhaps I condemned the Meade F3.3 too early. Keep up the good work.

Nyteam

[Martin Meredith]

I think the nonlinear functions will help produce even better shots, especially these kind of captures where the objects have a large range of brightness. Actually, I almost never use linear scaling these days as I find x^0.25 in particular nearly always brings out more detail. Star sizes benefit a lot too.

Martin

[Astrojedi]

Thanks Martin. Will try that next time.

Nytecam, on my second session with the UL and meade 3.3 I got a lot more coma for some reason. The only difference was that the camera was in a different orientation (about 90 deg rotated). So I am thinking maybe the reducer's optical quality is not symmetric around the axis.

Will try a few different orientations.