Knight of Clear Skies

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.

Nice work. The jet can be picked up in amateur scopes, but it's only a few pixels long.

Yes, very similar colours for very different reasons.

Taken on 6th March, 72 minutes with the Samyang 135mm f2 and Canon 6D (cropped).

I've managed to just about catch mag 19 quasars at over 10 billion ly with just a DSLR and camera lens, when imaging the Virgo cluster.

Yes, it can be tricky if you can't see the target. In the past I've done this by bumping the ISO up to maximum and taking short exposures, then fiddling.

Can confirm there are no problems imaging the Moon, it's just the Solar imaging that requires special filters and careful handling.

...take pictures of them. Bit of an experiment with high ISO short exposures to get better definition on the moving clouds, ISO 6400 and 2 seconds. Samyang 14mm @ f2.8 & Canon 6D (cropped a little).

Very nicely framed.

The nova is a noticeably different colour to all the other stars in that image.

Probably fewer robots crawling over it too. 😉

Yes, the colours are very similar, although for very different reasons. I recently learned that the red iron oxide dust that gives Mar's its red hue is only millimetres thick.

https://ukmeteornetwork.co.uk/ I don't think there is any relationship with the 28th Feb fireball. Close impact point and coming from the West, but one was in the afternoon and the other at night, so they came in on completely different trajectories.

Looks like a satellite caught it. Was visible in daylight and was heard over the Westcountry. Must have been a large explosion, I'm guessing a few kilotons?

I think this is because the nebula is lit up by a passing runaway star, Xi Persei, rather than stars embedded in the nebula. So there isn't the same concentration of oxygen around the ionizing source.

Thanks. Yes, the moon is about 2 degrees from Mars on the 19th I think. Think the only way to capture everything together would be to composite a few different exposures together.

Quick snap from last night, a few 30 second exposures with the 135mm Samyang stitched together in ICE. Also had a quick go at shooting Auriga and its star clusters, but need to shoot another pane next time.

Thought this timelapse was worth sharing, nicely presented. Quite dramatic with the stars streaking past the field of view.

Looking again, I'm going to have to reprocess this from scratch. I went to stack another target using the same file list of calibration frames and noticed it wasn't set up correctly, I'd made a master dark bias but hadn't removed all of the source files. Could explain some of the walking noise patterns in the stack I had a lot of trouble reducing. Bit of a shame as it took a lot of work to get to this point, IFN isn't easy to work with.

Here's a wide view of the IFN around M81 & M82. Can just make out Arp's loop and Holmberg XI. Taken with the Samyang 135mm f2 and Canon 6d, about 3 hours of data in 2 minute subs on the Star Adventurer. (Flats and dark bias, no darks.) Had to crop it down a bit as the framing wasn't great, I was literally shooting in the dark on this one. Wish I'd moved over to the right more to catch more of the brighter nebulosity, but I didn't really know what to expect until I stacked it. The inverted BW version shows the extent of the IFN a little more clearly. Field of view is 14 x 9.36 degrees.

Glad I could help. I think there is quite a lot of scope to use animations to present astronomical images, whether it's different stretches of data or to compare different channels to show structures. Your two base images worked well together, I like the way the brighter stars and galaxies stay fairly constant while the IFN fades in.