Knight of Clear Skies

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.

Yes, this was using the Star Adventurer, it's happy with the weight of the 135mm Samyang as long as I balance it a touch east-heavy.

That would be good. You could also do a slow fade between the two versions. I've been using the free version of the VSDC video editor recently. It's a bit of a learning curve but it's easy enough to fade between images. Import the two images at once in the wizard, select both images, fade-in effect and choose the duration. Then export the video in the required format.

Thanks. No darks but I'm imaging without guiding, so the target moves a little across the sensor on a run.

Thanks vliav. Thanks for the tips, very helpful. I'll look into it more closely. There was quite a variation in FWHM values but I'm not sure if they got worse over time. I was also imaging unguided which confuses matters. I'll try stacking a short run of subs and see what that looks like.

This is just a test stack of the Horsehead and Flame in Ha through the ED120 and 1600MM cool. Pretty much unprocessed. Just stacked the Ha subs without calibration frames (I still need to take darks and flats), developed in Startools and some de-noise applied. 106*30 second unguided subs, so about 53 minutes of data. Not sure if I should stick with this combination, with the reducer the scope has a focal length of 765mm and the 1600MM cool has small pixels. Have to decide whether to switch to my WO 71 ZS scope or keep the ED120 on the mount for galaxy season. Looks like quite a good result for a quick imaging run but I don't know if I'm oversampling.

Thanks, looks like I picked up a bit of the Fish Hook nebula (MW 5).

Yes, it appears to IFN which the disc of M81, and is often mistaken for an unusual dust lane in the galaxy itself. I found a little bit of IFN in Camelopardalis last year, looking at the Mandel-Wilson Catalogue could it be a part of MW 6?

Very nice Gorann, nicely framed to fit in both the brightest part of the IFN while squeezing in Arp's Loop. This was my target last night with the Samyang 135mm f2.

Thanks for sharing your setup Martin.

Fine detail in both images, really well done.

If you train for a year, you could learn to wave the camera in the just the right way, and complete it in a couple seconds.

Lovely, is there a hint of an arch in the timelapse?

Well, it's an image of the Sun, taken this morning. I guess it appears below the hill due to atmospheric refraction? Edit - think I have that backwards and the Sun is actually lower than it appears here?

A couple of recent Samyang images. Stars of Cygnus, I wasn't sure what I wanted to image so I just framed up some dark nebulae in Cygnus. Turns out the emission nebula is the Tulip. Just a ten-second snap of M31, surprised how much of the galaxy it caught at f2. Reason I was taking such short exposures was to make this animation, I didn't want to blur out the tree too much.

Great news, there is a thread with more details here.

Back in December, I was at a loss what to image, so I simply pointed my camera towards the Milky Way and let it run. I could see a bit of nebulosity and some dark nebulae in the framing shots. Turns out the brightest nebula is the Tulip. There are some subtle lines of Ha which tend to frame the dark nebulae. Looking at deeper images I think these are shock fronts of ancient supernovae, which swept materiel into the dark regions. Samyang 135mm @ f2 and modded 100D, 34 minutes of data in 2 minute subs. Here's a wider view of the region, the imaged area is at top-right.

It landed not far away from the predicted track aggregated from observer reports (there is a KML file that can be downloaded and viewed in Google Earth).

I was lucky enough to see the fireball from Cornwall. Here's the images from the article. No doubt there are many more fragments hiding out there.

It certainly is, although it will take a while to arrive. Kate Bush reference?

Here's my entry, M31 under fire from all angles followed by a barrage from Starlink. Also includes the satellite galaxies M32 & M110, has an apparent size comparison between the galaxy and Moon, and shows how the rising Moon washes out the sky. Timelapse details are in this thread.