Knight of Clear Skies

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.

Went back to my comet NEOWISE images from last year and had a go at stacking some frames to pull out a little more detail. Used it in this timelapse, after finally working out how to get it to display properly in portrait mode on mobile devices. Taken from Caradon Hill on the edge of Bodmin Moor dark sky park. The annotations were inspired by this recent APOD by Nicholas Lefaudeux. (My image is less detailed than his, so has fewer annotations.) His page on the comet is well worth a visit, particularly this animation showing the spiral jets.

Lovely detail, and a good decision to present the starless version first in this particular case.

Nice work, that's a lot of depth for a shot from a fixed tripod. I guess you're shooting at f1.4? The lens will need to be stepped down a fair bit (perhaps to f4) to produce good stars in the corners but in this case it was a good decision to try it wide open.

Here you go, the HD mp4 file is just 25MB. (Dropbox will ask you to sign in but you don't need to, just close the login dialogue and click the download button.)

Here you go, here's a small gif as a preview. I could put a higher quality file on Dropbox later if you like. I've been uploading my videos to YouTube, their compression seems to handle astronomical images pretty well these days.