SiriusDoggy

It's very, very dry. One day earlier this week the humidity was 4%. Our record a few years ago was .3% I think it's around 7% today. Yeah, The Little Bramper was a gadget that made the rounds about 8-10 years ago. It was sold as sort of a kit with just the circuitboard and keypad and you had to provide a box for it to hold the parts and battery holder. I bought it a long time ago and fooled around with it for a while and never seemed to be able to get it to work right. Now that I've been unemployed, I've been cleaning up and ran across it in a drawer. And with plenty of time to fool around with it, I think I've figured it out. At some point I may make a little how to video of it in use.

Thanks Quroboros. I think it's fixed now.

As I'm sure everyone is aware, Comet NEOWISE has passed into the evening sky now and survived its trip near the Sun. I haven't made it out to a dark sky location with the scope yet because our daytime temps have been hovering around 115°(46°c) and even at sunset it's still around 105°(40.5°c) so setting up all the gear will be brutal. I did decide to see if I could capture it with a simple DSLR/tripod rig from my home balcony and even though I couldn't make it out naked eye, it did show up on the camera. I wish now I had let the camera shoot longer, at least another 30 minutes, but I really didn't think I had captured anything until I loaded the files on the computer. You might also notice a fairly smooth transition from day to night, well I was using an old device that I bought around 2010 called the Little Bramper. It's a bulb ramping device that steadily adjust your shutter speeds and compensates for ISO changes. The only limitation I see so far is that its shortest exposure is 34ms. That means that even at ISO50, f2.8 the sun would completely blow out the images. I had to wait until the sun set behind the mountains to begin the day to night timelapse. This timelapse started at ISO50, 34ms and ended at ISO400, 1.5 seconds. Pretty smooth transitions! Let me know what you think.

Thanks Dirk! And thanks Russ too.

Good luck. Thursday morning was it's highest angle. Every day now it's getting closer and closer to the sun. You should still be able to see it Saturday though but you're going to need very clear horizons down to the north-east, east.

Hey guys/gals, here's the video of the comet that I created from a series of my stills. Details: Canon 5D MarkII, 24-70mm f2.8 lens, ISO 400, Shutter speed starts out at 15 seconds but changes to 2 seconds and finally 1/2 second as dawn arrives. You'll see the jump in exposures. The closeups at the end you have probably already seen here in an earlier post. I'd love to get some new subscribers to my new YouTube channel. Will you be the person that puts me in double-digits?! https://youtu.be/J-W-7Ioohr8

Thanks guys. Sorry about your weather. We had a run of about 20 days with winds so high that they would knock your scope over so I'm happy that's over for now.

Thanks everyone. This really is a "real" comet. It's my best since C/2014 Q2 Lovejoy in February, 2015.

Another great morning capturing this beauty of a comet. I really hope she holds together as she passes around the sun. I think even more people will get a chance to view it once it's in the early evening sky. But I'm not complaining about getting up at 1am, leaving the house at 1:30am, arriving at my observing location at 2:15am and heading home at 5:15am. It was worth every minute. And my dogs were happy to get a run in the park at 5:30am before the triple-digit temps hit us yet again here in the Vegas Valley. I'm still working on a wide-angle timelapse of the comet rising in the east that I'll share later in a separate post but here's three closeup's from today. If you remember my post from yesterday, I was using my ED127mm which is 655mm focal length with the reducer/flattener. Well, today I took my StellarVue SV70T which is 380mm with the reducer/flattener because I wanted to try and capture all of the tail. It's TOO BIG even for the 380mm to really capture the whole thing! Comet C/2020 F3 Neowise StellarVue SV70T with .8x reducer flattener (380mm FL) ZWO ASI1600mm cooled camera (-15°) This is a series of multiple exposures at 30 seconds, 15 seconds, and 10 seconds through LRGB filters totaling 25 minutes, 40 seconds. You can make out the pale blue ion tail trailing off the left side in this image. 15-second exposures through LRGB totaling 300 seconds 10-second exposures through LRGB totaling 200 seconds. In this frame, you can really see dawn fast approaching.

Yes, The scope was on my CGX mount and tracking. There is a tad bit of movement but Astro Pixel Processsor worked it's magic! First time I've ran a comet sequence through it and it passed.

Well, Lake Mead is just southeast of Vegas and I was shooting towards the east opposite of the city so pretty darn good skies. Nothing in that direction for hundreds of miles. Thanks ~!

07-08-2020 Shot over Lake Mead near Las Vegas, NV Canon 5D Mark II and 70-200mm lens at 70mm f3.5 ISO 400, 15 seconds 07-08-2020 Explore Scientific ED127mm telescope with .7x reducer/flattener (665mm fl) ZWO ASI1600mm cooled camera 5x 10second exposures through each RGB filter. Total Exposure time: 2 minutes, 30 seconds

That kind of processing may be above my pay grade.... Haha! But I'll give it a try. Thanks~

Thanks for the comments Paul. It's entirely possible there is a slight green cast there. I have three computer monitors and I've tried calibrating all of them equally yet my images show slightly different color casts across all three. It doesn't help that my monitors are all over 10 years old.

There's lots of good ol' broadband data in this subject.

M27 The Dumbbell Nebula 30 minutes of Luminance and 60 minutes of each RGB data. Explore Scientific ED127mm and ZWO1600mm camera, Baader filters.

I maybe overcooked this version a bit but I'm just fooling around with processing techniques to see how far I can push this data. Some folks may like it and others will probably be appalled. Comments and critiques are always welcome. This is only the narrowband data. 1hr of Ha, SII and OIII.

Making lemonade from lemons... Unity gain for my camera is 139 but when I'm focusing I crank up the gain to 500 to make exposures shorter and focusing easier. Well, I forgot to reset the gain until after I captured an hour of 60 second exposures. I almost tossed the data into the bin but decided to see what I could pull out of it. Not bad for over-cranked gain. Explore Scientific ED127mm and ZWO1600mm cooled camera, Baader Ha filter.

I've already posted my LRGB version of this image. I managed another night and captured Ha, SII, and OIII data, 1 hr of each. I combined all 7 channels of data using AstroPixelProcessor and came up with this. This is my first time attempting to combine all 7 channels so I'm sure there's plenty to learn. Any tips or suggestions are welcome.

It's fairly dark to from the east down to the south, southwest. The north is horrible.

M16 The Eagle Nebula - yet another Messier object under my belt while COVID-19 unemployed. Taken from the Long View Overlook at Lake Mead National Recreation Area. https://goo.gl/maps/CJ3dFkwovJq26mDz8 30 minutes of Luminance Data and 1 hour of each RGB. Baader Filters. Explore Scientific ED127mm scope and ZWO ASI1600mm cooled camera.

Thanks Steve.

M20, the Trifid Nebula in Sagittarius. Explore Scientific ED127mm and ZWO 1600mm camera Baader LRGB Filters, 1hr Luminance, 35minutes ea. RGB Processed using Astro Pixel Processor and tweaked in PhotoshopCC

Lunt80mm single stack and ZWO 1600mm camera 550frames for surface and 500frames for the prominence detail. Stacked with AutoStakkert 3!, processed with ImPPG and colorized in PhotoshopCC. It's nice to see some sunspot activity in AR2765.

All three of these objects could each use hours of data to clean them up but I was going more for quantity over quality because of my limited time to image. All three images have the same technical data. Explore Scientific ED127mm scope and ZWO 1600mm camera with Baader LRGB filters 30x 30seconds of exposures through each filter. Processed in Astro Pixel Processor and PhotoshopCC M61 & Supernova SN2020FJO NGC3643 & Supernova SN2020HVF on Smugmug M104 The Sombrero Galaxy