Scooot

All taken with my Canon 250D 10mm, single 30 second exposures, f4.5, ISO3200. Not sure how bright they are, seems to vary with device lol. last one is showing the roof of our cabin, Great Bear was very high, about 60°.

Ah nearby then, we’re planning on watching from The LBJ State Park. I’m hoping the forecast improves, the one he sent me yesterday was for cloud around there. Although he says it’s often cloudy early on and clears up later. 🤞

Thanks for the advice Michael. I forgot to say, it is a stack, not a single image, in case you were wondering. I had it on centre weighted metering, wondered about spot, but thought if my polar alignment isn’t too good might not be best. For a short video before and during totality should be ok but I’ve been thinking about a Timelapse for the partial stage so might get more drift with that. If I get another chance I’ll try spot. I manually focussed with this but tried auto focus today and it worked quite well, switched back to manual as soon as it had focussed. I must say having a flip screen makes it much easier than with my old 450d. The focus wheel on this lens is also quite sturdy as well, bought it second hand for this. I’ve chosen to video because I want to do as little as possible and watch. Also the audio of all the surroundings should be interesting. Where are you watching from, I’m staying with a friend in Texas?

This is from a little 4k video with my Canon 250D and Canon EF 100-300mm Zoom lens set at 300mm, mounted on a star adventurer. Will be using my baby tak for visual. Probably over processed it? I took the video on auto exposure because of lots of clouds, but set it at -3 compensation.

What a lovely set.

I'm going to Texas for the Eclipse in April so I'm having a little practice with an unfamiliar setup on the sun, when I can see it of course. I'm going to use my baby Tak for visual so hope to get some images with this old 100 to 300mm lens, and 250D on my Star Adventurer. I took a few yesterday, but as I can't get much detail on the sun with this setup, and its still quite small in the field of view, I've processed it to show some brightness and sky around it. I took them through a Daystar universal Lens filter. I had a bit of drift as I haven't mastered daytime polar aligning yet so had to crop. Anyway something different.

That's very nice, I like that.

That’s a smashing image. It looks great with this fov.

The without for me, but both lovely images.

I've finally finished this after 5 nights of imaging with my 60mm Tak and ASI2600MC Pro. Roughly 15 hours worth, the most I've ever captured on a target. I must say its much easier to process with so much. If the weather hadn't changed I would have got some more. Unfortunately, I've had to crop the edges more than I liked and although I started imaging with Andromeda centered, the frame I chose to align to over additional nights had it slightly higher. Anyway,hope you like it,

Beautiful, love the background too.

Lovely image. You’ll be able to better control the stars in Pixinsight with the Generalised Hyperbolic Stretch script. https://ghsastro.co.uk Or alternatively remove them with Starnet or Starxterminator and stretch them separately. Also Pixinsight does use a lot of PC power, I upgraded to an I9 Core 24 earlier in the year which is infinitely better than my previous machine but some processes can still take a while.

and here's something a little different. A 3d plot. You can clearly see the bulk of the smaller stars with very pointed peaks illustrating they're correctly exposed. However, not that you'd notice from the main image, the larger stars are illustrated by domes with flattish tops showing they're over exposed and saturated. To expose them correctly I'd guess I'd only need an exposure of a few seconds, 10 to 15 maybe.

Here's an annotated version.

Thanks Harvey.

Thanks Jim. I spent a lot of effort trying to get a decent stack in the first place which made processing the background much easier than I usually find it. I think I’ve finally got to grips with local normalisation for which I manually stacked half a dozen decent images to use as a reference. I processed a starless image too which also helped a great deal with the background and gasses.

I actually had some clear skies without any moonlight so managed to get a good couple of nights worth of subs on M45. This is just over 5 hours worth of 3 minute images at zero gain with my baby Tak and ASI2600MC-PRO. One of my better efforts

One of your best Harvey.

I’m going, have a friend who lives just outside Austin. I’ve been talking to him about the annular eclipse this Saturday which he’s viewing as well, lucky devil. Edit: tomorrow in fact

That’s a pain, I have my 2600, focuser and mount connected to 3 of the sockets. My battery is a 13ah, and it’s touch and go whether it lasts the night, the camera with the cooler seems to use a lot of power, 3-4 hours of images is about the limit, particularly if I faff around a lot setting it up. Maybe use a separate power supply with a DC splitter. Have you asked on the Asi forum about possibly repairing it?

The 4 DC output ports were dead on my Asiair pro when I first bought it and it was replaced.

A bit of a struggle to get this image. I had to throw away most of the lights because of cloud and many of the others weren’t very good either. In addition my imaging train moved somehow and my flats only worked on the first few images. I therefore ended up with some very large dust mites on the stack. Instead of giving up and chucking them all away I decided to try and salvage it with some synthetic flats, so I’m quite pleased with the result considering. It comprises 74 one minute exposures taken with my 2600MC pro and baby Tak on the night of the 14th & 15th Feb.

That’s lovely, what a smashing image. 😀

Here’s one without the cloud. You can still see the brightness of the camera in the middle.

I tell a lie, some of that is cloud, a bank of it had started to move over 🙄 clear again now for a bit.