Knight of Clear Skies

Everything is a 16-bit FITS file (that's a mistake I've made before).

On 11/04/2021 at 23:53, tomato said:

It’s  does seem to be easier to see on shorter integrations.

I believe short subs are the key, to avoid blowing out the core. I also think some people have had success using an Ha filter.

I wonder if anyone can help me please. DSS is complaining that the gain setting for my flats and dark bias aren't matching with the lights I took in APT. How do I access the gain and offset settings in Sharpcap please? There doesn't seem to be a control for 'offset', there is 'brightness' but I'm not sure if that's the same thing.

Good find, not much showing here on the SFD dust map here (select from the imagery dropdown at bottom-left).

A panoramic image from last night covering nearly 180 degrees of the outer Milky Way. 6D and Samyang 14mm f2.8, stitched together in Microsoft ICE. Each pane is a stack of five 20 second exposures.

Also made an annotated version showing the approximate field of view in Stellarium and the constellation sectors on a Milky Way map.

For getting started with imaging, especially on a budget, I'd tend to recommend the Samyang 135mm f2 lens over a scope. Enough focal length to pick up detail on a good number of targets, very fast at f2 and much more forgiving of the mount.

On 09/04/2021 at 14:49, vlaiv said:

I don't think that these have special name as a cluster of galaxies - but that is edge of Virgo super cluster. Close by there is M94 / Canes I Group (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M94_Group)  but I don't think that is it - that one is outside of your image - in upper direction.

Probably just outskirts of Virgo super cluster.

Thanks vlaiv.

On 09/04/2021 at 14:52, KevinPSJ said:

Great image - love the colours on M51 in the close crop! I've been thinking of switching from using my DSLR at prime focus of my skywatcher 150P to using a long focal length lens on the camera so I can get longer exposures (I'm shooting unguided). This image has convinced me!

Thanks, glad you like it. When imaging unguided it's far easier to get results at short focal lengths, especially when using a DSLR.

The arc on the right is intriguing, I wonder if it's an old supernova remnant? The Ursa Major Arc runs near there but is much less curved, due to its enormous size.

Fine effort and good job with the framing.

Don't often see the Whirlpool and Sunflower in the same image, but here they are.

Which is why you don't often see them together, they must be a good 6 degrees apart. Just shows the gravitational reach these galaxies have. The M51 group only has a few confirmed members.

Here are closer crops of M51 & M63.

The two bright stars in the corners anchoring the frame are Alkaid & Cor Caroli.

There are a ton of faint galaxies at upper right but I haven't identified the galaxy cluster yet.

Samyang 135mm f2 and Canon 6d, 30 minutes in 2 minute subs.

27 minutes ago, ollypenrice said:

The implications of this are alarming. Does anyone want their camera to last just a year?  If it did, I would need five or six weeks per year fully booked just to pay for one camera.

Olly

I wouldn't be too concerned Olly, consumer-grade sensors in DSLRs typically last many years.

A quick process in PS, mostly using Noel's Actions. Looking more closely the stars are a little out of round but that could be fixed using the repair tool in StarTools.

You have some very good data there. Here's a quick version with just curve and level adjustment, no other processing.

You're doing a great job with the data collection and your stars look good, which are major hurdles to imaging. Something isn't right with your processing workflow, you are clipping the white-point and black-points and possibly introducing noise by boosting saturation.

This was fun to put together, here's a little planet projection taken from Kenhenge at the Caradon Observatory site.

Was surprisingly easy to do. 20 second exposures with the Samyang 14mm f2.8 lens and 700D, stitched together in Microsoft ICE. Then I followed these instructions to make it into a little planet.

This was the source image, which can be viewed as a 360 degree draggable panorama on 360 Cities.

I'll have another go at this sometime, the full-frame 6D would be a better choice for this but it was busy shooting on the Star Adventurer mount. I'll also try taking another circle of images further up to see if I can get it to stitch up to the zenith,

Very good thanks. Did you mean there is software that can be downloaded or just the images the page generates? I can't see a software download link on the page.

1 hour ago, MKHACHFE said:

Lets be honest...most AP sessions consist of hundreds of subs..is it REALLY that big an issue if a handful are ruined? 

As an amateur, I'm not concerned, a sigma-clip when stacking will remove nearly all the trails. It's a problem for professional observatories though which are going to have a lot of ruined observations. The Vera C. Rubin Observatory survey telescope is commissioning soon. Satellite constellations are going to have a big impact on its operations.

"A study in 2020 by the European Southern Observatory estimated that up to 30% to 50% of the exposures around twilight with the Rubin Observatory would be severely affected by satellite constellations. Survey telescopes have a large field of view and they study short-lived phenomena like supernova or asteroids,[114] and mitigation methods that work on other telescopes may be less effective. The images would be affected especially during twilight (50%) and at the beginning and end of the night (30%). For bright trails the complete exposure could be ruined by a combination of saturation, crosstalk (far away pixels gaining signal due to the nature of CCD electronics), and ghosting (internal reflections within the telescope and camera) caused by the satellite trail, affecting an area of the sky significantly larger than the satellite path itself during imaging. For fainter trails only a quarter of the image would be lost.[115] A previous study by the Rubin Observatory found an impact of 40% at twilight and only nights in the middle of the winter would be unaffected."

"Particular scientific goals of the observatory include:[61]

Studying dark energy and dark matter by measuring weak gravitational lensing, baryon acoustic oscillations, and photometry of type Ia supernovae, all as a function of redshift.[41]
Mapping small objects in the Solar System, particularly near-Earth asteroids and Kuiper belt objects. LSST is expected to increase the number of catalogued objects by a factor of 10–100.[62] It will also help with the search for the hypothesized Planet Nine.[63][64]
Detecting transient astronomical events including novae, supernovae, gamma-ray bursts, quasar variability, and gravitational lensing, and providing prompt event notifications to facilitate follow-up.
Mapping the Milky Way."

This timelapse video I made shows M31 under attack by swarms of satellites.

Good luck and fair sailing. I'm east a bit shooting the Virgo cluster.

On 01/04/2021 at 18:58, LukeSkywatcher said:

Six more weeks of winter.

You emerged and saw a shadow?

Rosette and Cone region, RGB Ha with Samyang and modded 1100D, more details here.

Nicely done, what equipment did you use please?

3 hours ago, matt_baker said:

I did think of using registar but I don't have a licence so I can't save the registered subs

I held off buying it for a long time as it just does one thing, but it's made a huge difference to my imaging. For example I had a go at blending an Ha image into a very quick colour image, then blended in some data from the WISE IR telescope.

Reprocessed version of my Rosette and Cone now I have Registar to properly align the Ha with the RGB image. Just a DSLR image, modded Canon 1100D and Samyang 135mm f2, think it was about 40 minutes of data in RGB and Ha.

Monoceros (the unicorn) is well named after a mythical beast, as there is nothing bloody there when you look at it with the naked eye.

Good to see some public data being used with some imagination to produce something new. There are lots of resources out there which can be used to complement our own images.

Could you have used Registar to align the frames for you?

I took a similar image the other evening with a really long selfie-stick. Man, my arm is aching today.

Great definition there, really superb.