Knight of Clear Skies

There's not that much to it really, I just took a large set of overlapping exposures until I'd covered the whole sky. I then threw it at ICE and played around with the various projection options. Unfortunately it doesn't always work, I can't get my images from the following night to stitch and I'm not sure why. I made sure there was plenty of overlap between each frame. ICE is great when it works but for AP I'd say its success rate is about 50-50. Microsoft have stopped supporting ICE but it can be downloaded from here: https://web.archive.org/web/20180724063025/https://download.microsoft.com/download/7/3/9/73918E0B-C146-40FA-B18C-EADF03FEC4BA/ICE-2.0.3-for-64-bit-Windows.msi Hope that's some help and good luck, you're in a great location for panoramas.

Nice natural-looing unforced rendition, good work. The colours, with subtle blues in the arms, are probably a good representation of M31, which isn't a starburst galaxy.

Glad you like it. If it's clear tonight I might have a go at doing something similar by the Hurlers.

An all-sky panorama taken from the Caradon Observatory site last night in Cornwall. It was a bit hazy but the Milky Way overhead was bright enough to shine through. It's a set of 25 second exposures taken with a 14mm lens and Canon 6D camera. I used Microsoft ICE (a free download) to stitch the frames together.

I've been playing around with HaRGB imaging, combining a fairly deep Ha image with a very quick colour starfield. This is the result of my latest effort. This was taken with the Samyang 135mm f2 lens. The Ha image was about 40 minutes of data using the 1600MM cool while the colour starfield is just a couple of 30 second DSLR shots stitched together in ICE. This approach gives a nice sparse starfield which doesn't overwhelm the DSO. Registar makes it easy to align the two images and blend in the Ha, after I used Starnet++ to remove the stars from the Ha image. The wider version covers 15 degrees of sky, most of the constellation of Auriga. I like this as it bridges with the naked eye view. But unfortunately I don't have Ha data for this entire area, so it is missing some extended nebulosity. The other thing that was missing was the blue nebulosity from the Flaming Star. So I called in the Samuel Oschin telescope for a little help. I used this site to download the blue plate from the POSS2 survey for the area around AE Auriga. After I aligned with Registar I then ran Starnet++ on it to remove the stars, and blended it mostly into the blue channel using Photoshop. I'm happy with the result, I think it's good for what it is - a limited amount of data at a short focal length. This could be a good technique for UK imaging and other locations with fickle weather, the f2 lens goes deep quite quickly. I also found it enjoyable to work with the data, Ha is always easy to process with I didn't have to fight the stars which tend to bloat when the image is stretched. It also means I don't have to worry about guiding or calibration frames. I also enjoy liberating some old data from the sky surveys which I believe was originally taken on photographic plates. My next step might be to blend in some data from the WISE space telescope to make a visual/IR composite. Acknowledgement: The Digitized Sky Surveys were produced at the Space Telescope Science Institute under U.S. Government grant NAG W-2166. The images of these surveys are based on photographic data obtained using the Oschin Schmidt Telescope on Palomar Mountain and the UK Schmidt Telescope. The plates were processed into the present compressed digital form with the permission of these institutions. The National Geographic Society - Palomar Observatory Sky Atlas (POSS-I) was made by the California Institute of Technology with grants from the National Geographic Society. The Second Palomar Observatory Sky Survey (POSS-II) was made by the California Institute of Technology with funds from the National Science Foundation, the National Geographic Society, the Sloan Foundation, the Samuel Oschin Foundation, and the Eastman Kodak Corporation. The Oschin Schmidt Telescope is operated by the California Institute of Technology and Palomar Observatory. The UK Schmidt Telescope was operated by the Royal Observatory Edinburgh, with funding from the UK Science and Engineering Research Council (later the UK Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council), until 1988 June, and thereafter by the Anglo-Australian Observatory. The blue plates of the southern Sky Atlas and its Equatorial Extension (together known as the SERC-J), as well as the Equatorial Red (ER), and the Second Epoch [red] Survey (SES) were all taken with the UK Schmidt. All data are subject to the copyright given in the copyright summary. Copyright information specific to individual plates is provided in the downloaded FITS headers. Supplemental funding for sky-survey work at the ST ScI is provided by the European Southern Observatory.

Caught a glimpse of the constellation Orion rising over Kit Hill last night for the first time this year. So I took a quick snap and used it to make this composite image, to show how much sky the Angelfish nebula covers. The base image at the bottom is an 8 second exposure with a 50mm lens. The exposure details for top image of the Angelfish are in this thread.

Thanks everyone, some fine entries there.

Yes, the Samyang can pick up a fair bit of IFN from a dark site without too much difficulty. This is about 3 hours of data with a Canon 6d, using 2 minute unguided subs. From the edge of Bodmin Moor, which is typically around SQM 21.2-21.7.

Stu is right that surface brightness doesn't change with distance. However, some reflection and emission nebulae might appear brighter from the right vantage point, with less obscuring dust in the way. Probably the most impressive Messier object to see up close with the naked eye would be a dense globular cluster. (Or, if this qualifies, the accretion disc and jet of M87.)

I also made a timelapse video of last night's lunar halo.

Yes, this was 2 minute subs on the Star Adventurer.

Nice bright lunar halo from last night. This is a stack of 23 four-second exposures with the Samyang 14m f2.8 and Canon 6d, cropped to widescreen format.

Just to expand my thoughts on the first posted image, I think the composition and the stars look good. The sky image is very bright and I think it would benefit from being toned down. The Milky Way also looks unnaturally smoothed, possibly the result of over-heavy noise reduction. I think a little noise grain would look better and more natural. With a little tweaking I think it could be a very good image indeed.

Quick Lyrid from last night, at 1:23AM. I just propped the camera up in a window and let it run until the battery ran down. (I've now ordered myself an external power supply so I can leave it running all night if I want to.) Canon 6d and Samyang 14mm f2.8.

It's a nice image but I think a more subtle version would work better.

The Pimpleless Wizard? Sounds like it could be a pub. The starless rendition works well here to give it more of a sense of depth and the colour palette works well.

I'm still shooting some tiny galaxies at the moment. Partly due to some technical issues with the telescopic setup, but mostly because it is easy and enjoyable. Hardly a showcase image but there is plenty to find in there. North is to the left, the Leo triplet is at the bottom while the M96 group is at the top. Despite the enormous distance between them they might all be gravitationally bound into a single group. The M96 group is surrounded by an enormous ring of hydrogen, the result of a galactic collision. There is UV emission coming from it, which probably means dwarf galaxies are forming there. This was just 34 minutes with the Canon 6d and Samyang 135mm f2, as the clouds rolled in. Barely a hint of the Hamburger tidal tail if I stretch far too aggressively, it's faint. The two brightest stars are Zosma & Chertan. I found a faint smudge I thought might be a low surface brightness galaxy, turned out to be the Leo II dwarf galaxy, a satellite of the Milky Way. Also in frame are a few Abell galaxy clusters (1177 being the brightest), a ton of background galaxies and Vesta. Here's a closer view of Leo II from SDSS. And here's Abell 1177 from SDSS, its brightest galaxy is NGC 3551. I can't find any amateur images of the cluster in case anyone would like to have a go. I've captured a lot more data of the Virgo cluster, hopefully I'll get around to processing it soon.

Very nice, and thanks for the tips on annotation. I may have to consider PixInsight at some point.

Good demonstration that there are many ways making astronomical observations, it's certainly not just about the showpiece images.

Very good. Do you use Lightroom to reduce vignetting and distortion from the lens?

Great result. More councils are getting clued up on this sort of thing.

I'll take a look thanks.

Thanks, I did something similar for the view towards the galactic centre if you're interested.

Top marks.

Thanks, that's what I suspected, but DSS is still complaining. It says 'gain doesn't match' but I'm not sure if it's the gain or offset setting it doesn't like.