tomato

Don’t waste a clear night of imaging just because the moon is up. Sure the subs will not be great, but they will be much better than nothing.

The moon was too bright last night for any photogenic galaxy imaging, so fired up by @Astro Waves recent topic on what is the furthest object you have imaged, I got two hours of luminance on APM 08279+5255, a Quasar in the constellation Lynx. It has an apparent magnitude of 15.2 so not a difficult object to image, and to look at it's nothing special, but some of the numbers associated with this object are just mind blowing: Luminosity of 10 14 to 1015 times the luminosity of the sun. The active galactic nucleus is powered by one of the largest known supermassive black holes, 10-23 billion solar masses. Using comparative spectral measurements, this galaxy has been determined to contain the largest mass of water in the known universe, 100 trillion times the mass of the Earth's combined oceans. This is evidence that water formed early in the life of the universe, the radiation was emitted only 1.6 billion years after the Big Bang. Oh, and it just happens to be 12.05 Gly (12050 000 000 light years) distant from us. Hopefully I have copied these numbers from Wikipedia correctly, thanks for looking.

That's a M81 image that certainly stands the test of time. I gave a StarGazine talk on this forum back in January, entitled 'Astrophotography Then and Now', there are lots of my crude pre-digital attempts on there if you want a laugh.😄

Wow, I thought I was serious about AP back in the late 80’s, early 90’s but got nothing approaching your M42. I could only image for about 15 minutes before LP intruded on the film, but processing was a lot more straightforward back then, you just needed the kitchen sink! Getting back into AP after a 30 year break has been a revelation, I still marvel at what can be achieved with the latest digital cameras. But believe me, it can still be a very deep money pit, I must have spent your pre digital budget and then some.

If you are imaging at around the same temperature each night you can use your dark calibration frames for every session, but if you set up and take down your rig each night you will need to take flat and flat dark frames each time and apply these to the respective light frames taken on each night. Cooled cameras help by not only reducing thermal noise but also ensuring all frames are taken at the same temperature. Once the frames are calibrated you can stack them all together in one go, but as the FOV won’t be exactly the same you will have edge artefacts on the stacked image which will need to be cropped to remove them before processing further. Do get hold of a copy of “Making every Photon Count” by Steve Richards, it will save you lots of frustration and potentially some money on kit that you might otherwise buy in error.

Nice to see someone else who gets more fired up by imaging galaxies rather than nebulae. I really like to search nebula free images for the myriad of far distant galaxies you can often see in the background ('faint fuzzies' is too demeaning a description for them IMHO). When the HST images an object in a 'clear' part of the sky you can almost guarantee there will be a host of distant galaxies visible in the background, it really is mind blowing stuff.

Great thread! I’m currently attempting to image the 3C 273 jet, no luck so far with one hour’s integration...

Just got a new motor, a Volvo (I must be getting old) and I discovered one of the drive modes is “Polestar Engineered”. It turns out it is a drive mode engineered between Volvo and Polestar, an electric car manufacturer whom I had never heard of. I’m gutted, for a while I thought the car was going to auto polar align the mount when I travelled to a dark site.☺️

Great depth, detail and colour, nice framing too. And with the moon up too!👍

Great M81 with a gibbous moon not too far away! The high cloud was very frustrating last night, I gave up in the end.

Great result, thanks for the heads up on the script. Star reduction is some thing else I need to get better at.

I note you have StarTools, would that be version 1.7? There is a synthetic flats tool in the Wipe module which might sort these, but that is I admit, dealing with the symptom, not the root cause. I thought about vignetting but your DSLR has a bigger sensor than the ASI 2600 and that didn’t have the effect so I can’t see it being that. Have you always had the OAG or is that a recent addition? Good call re possible dew, always worth a look at the plate and check it’s clear, I presume your dewshield is shielding the plate from any stray light?

I have two 300+ year old oak trees, one to the North and one to the South, the developer of our estate had to leave them be, so there are two houses with large (by new house standards) gardens and a big leaf clear up job each Autumn. They won’t be coming down anytime soon, but I do like to hear the owls hooting from them while I’m imaging.

Here are a some galaxy images taken with the ASI 178 mono, at 1050 FL, imaging at 0.94 arcsec/pixel by binning 2x2, or in the case of M51, 1x1, 0.47 arcsec/pixel. These are all around 5-6 hrs integration made up of 3 minute exposures. I should point out the scope is on a mount (Mesu 200) which can track at the required accuracy.

That’s a fine NGC 3718, I’ve not seen many images of it taken with a DSLR, but some nice detail captured.

Yes indeed, the click makes all the difference! It’s now an excellent M101.

First off, that’s a fine M101, nicely framed, focused and round, tight stars. Good colour and detail also. I’d agree that the data looks black point clipped, maybe you were tempted to do this to remove gradients, but as @CraigT82 has pointed out, this loses some of your hard earned data. At 4 hrs integration from a middling sky, there will still be some noise present, but a stronger stretch will show the fainter regions. I think some more data would give you more options when processing, this is well on the way to being a M101 an experienced imager would be proud of.👍

I have no experience of the ASI385 MC, I note it has larger pixels than the 178 which will improve the sensitivity, but on the other hand it is available as a colour sensor only so it will suffer on sensitivity when compared to an equivalent mono camera. The FOV is also a bit smaller than the 178. If you have a filter wheel and filters already its worth considering a mono camera.

Great capture and processing as always. It does look like some form of 'Cosmic wind' could be shaping the nebulosity in this region but on such a scale! Did you use PI's annotation script to identify the galaxies? I'm looking for something that will identify tiny galaxies picked up when imaging at 1050mm FL with a 0.1 degree FOV...

While listening to last night's excellent StarGazine talk I collected 4 hours of LRGB data for this image, a bit optimistic given a 50% illuminated moon, but beggars can't be choosers etc. I combined this with some earlier data which suffered from poor sky transparency and a large dust artefact on the Lum camera. I wasn't prepared to throw this away however, as I Iike to see how many more distant galaxies can come through on the image with the additional integration time. There are lots in this region, most not picked up by PI's image annotation script. And yes, I am aware that NGC 3729 is just out of shot, but to include this I would have to have rotated the cameras, and I didn't want to spend an hour doing this and miss Ivo's talk! 7.65 hrs total integration time L 75 x 3 mins RGB 26 x 3 mins each Esprit 150/ASI 178 dual rig, all data binned 2x2 Thanks for looking

I use ASI 178 mono cameras on an Esprit 150 exclusively for small galaxy or tight galaxy cluster imaging, as the FOV with this setup is only 0.4 x 0.27 degrees, usually binned 2x2 unless the seeing and guiding are exceptional. They have significant amp glow on extended exposures (> 2 mins) but this calibrates out OK. They are retro-fitted with Peltier coolers which maintain them at a constant 3 deg C to assist with calibration.

Excellent talk, Startools is a bit different, but it suits my approach to imaging down to the ground.

Thanks Martin, The hair was substantial enough to have some colour, namely white. How did it appear after several weeks in a sealed system, I guess it wafted down from the Lum filter. I have one of those little camera lens bellows which I use when assembling, I may need to invest in something more substantial.

I've seen the Saturn V at the Cape, once in 1988 when it was still outside and suffering in the Florida climate and again in 2005 when thanks to everyone's donations it was resplendent in it's own hanger. Jeff Bezos spent some of his pocket money finding and recovering some of the stage one engines from the bottom of the Atlantic, I believe they found one of the Apollo 11 engines after checking the serial numbers, I think some of them are on display at the Museum of Flight in Seattle.

Love those F1 engines at full chat, hope to see the recovered ones from the Apollo era someday, are they in the Smithsonian?