MarsG76

1 hour ago, Kon said:

Stunning image! Did you use the IR as luminance? It's looking very sharp.

Yes, but only with a transparency of 35%. This is the level I was happy with before the image started looking "over cooked".

Hi All,

Sharing with you my latest image of Saturn which I'm quite happy with how it turned out with my average C8 telescope.

The night when I imaged this was a particularly clear and still night which delivered views in the eyepiece that were sharp as a tack all the way up to 406X magnification... I could not let such a clear night go by without imaging and so I decided to push the telescope magnification as far as I could.

I imaged this scene with my C8 SCT using a number of exposures, cameras and focal lengths.
I imaged this image using my Skyris 618C at f30, and through my DMK21au618 at both f30 and f50, 10 videos 90 seconds long at 60fps (f30)/30fps (f50) by using my 3X Barlow and 5X Powermates.
I also captured 10 videos through my IRPass685 filter at f30, although the signal was quite dim and the most I could run the capture at was 15fps for 2 minutes per video at maximum gain. The moons were imaged at f10, 15 fps also max gain.

I processed all data separately, than scaled down the f50 image to the f30 size and "screen" combined those two images aligned images together, this has revealed a little bit more detail within Saturn that was visible individually. I used this as luminance with the Skyris 618C stack as the color data, effectively creating a LRGB image.
I combined this image with the scaled up wider moon processed stack.

Clear Skies,
Mariusz

Welcome to SGL.

Hi All,

Sharing with you what I hope is a first in a series of a collection of images. This is a close up image of one of the regions in the Small Magellanic Cloud that I planned on imaging after noticing this (and a few other objects) in my wide field image of the SMC which I exposed almost two months ago. 
This frame contains NGC346, NGC371 and NGC395 which I'm hoping is the first in a set of close up images of objects detected in wide field "survey like" imaging projects... in this case the Small Magellanic Cloud.
There are a few more regions of interest in the SMC which I'd like to explore a bit more closely before repeating this idea on the "Large Magellanic Cloud".

This image is a bi-color image which was exposed through a Celestron C8 at f6.3, 1280mm (theoretical) focal length, with a QHY268M camera and filtered with a Baader 7nm H-Alpha and OIII filters. Tracked with a hypertuned CGEM mount.
Total integration time for this image was 4 hours and 10 minutes.

The reason why I want to look deeper into the Magellanic Clouds and what fascinates me about the two satellite galaxies to our Milky Way is that there are a lot of strange shaped nebulae located with in them... if not looking like a chaotic spindly mess, they look like vortices... to me the shapes of the nebulae look quite alien when comparing to the more traditionally imaged and more known nebulae.

PS: I said "theoretical" 1280mm focal length, because when plate solving the frame, it was solved to be 1307mm.

Clear Skies,
MG

Hello and welcome to SGL...

Hi All,

Sharing my first attempt at a super saturated, mineral moon image.
Who said that imaging a near full moon is boring? Super saturating the (full) moon (allegedly) reveals the minerals present on the moon's surface.
 
Exposed at 1280mm/f6.3 with a QHY268M mono camera in LRGB with an C8 SCT.

Clear Skies,

Mariusz

2 hours ago, assouptro said:

Hey MarsG76!

What software/s did you use to process this epic mosaic? 
 

Cheers 

Bryan 

Hi Bryan,

I used DSS, than Nebulosity 3.3 to star align the plates, Starnet V2 to seperate stars from the nebulosity than finished it all off in Photoshop.

MG.

On 10/09/2022 at 18:56, Elp said:

This is an amazing target and great SHO, solid dedication to this one.

The hours added up when not only did I decide to do 4 frames, but also each frame through three filters each. I'm surprised that I had that many moonless/near moonless nights almost in a row to complete the image.

On 10/09/2022 at 04:24, The Lazy Astronomer said:

Love it - I really like the colours you've got in there, lots of orangey-red. What colour pallette did you use?

Thanks for your comment.

The palette I used was the standard SHO configuration, data exposed through Baader 7nm 1.25" SII, Halpha and OIII filters.
Naturally the original image was very heavy in the green hue, so what I did was create a luminance layers from the pre color adjusted SHO as RGB combination, than aligned the colours under that luma layer by first gently using the channel mixer, color selection adjustment did most of the change away from the heavy green than a very slight color temperature adjustment.

 

On 10/09/2022 at 03:20, newbie alert said:

Blooming marvelous...

I envy your southern hemisphere skies😲

You astronomers up there have plenty of objects that make us a little green... I guess we can't have it all on this spherical existence.

Hello Astronomers,

Continuing from when I posted the first pane of this mosaic back on 6th June... this time I'm sharing with you the completed mosaic of my "Fighting Dragons of Ara" image. I started working on this image back in May 2022 and completed exposing the data on the morning of 9th June 2022 but only now was I able to spend the time to complete processing of all of my data.

This mosaic consists of four plates, imaged with a QHY268M with Baader Sulfur II, Hydrogen Alpha and Oxygen III 7nm narrowband filters, through a BOSMA doublet ED 80mm F6.25 refractor (500mm focal length) and tracked with a "hypertuned" CGEM mount.

The total exposure time spent on all four panes for this image was 68 hours and the full resolution of the finished image is 48 megapixels, definitely the highest resolution image I have taken to date.

Clear Skies,
MG

10 hours ago, Laurieast said:

Are they going to start building more of these reusable/throw away shuttle engines? 

Throw aways yes... already there... "re" usable.. not so much... so far looks to be a not even once usage deal....

5 hours ago, 900SL said:

It's a massive complex oxidizing bomba so I for one are pleased to see they are making sure they don't press launch until the system checks are good

But Boeing, oh Boeing. Once the best, then the takeover of McD, then the 5th column of beancounters reverse assimilation, table thumping PMs and bottom line before Engineering.

I used to choose flights that used 777s. Now I avoid flights using the 737 Max 

 

I'm wondering when some "genius" will decide that we need to launch green... Batteries to take off... then switch to wind power at stage 2, finally utilise solar power for the orbit... artemis 2?   

9 minutes ago, ScouseSpaceCadet said:

I'd rather NASA take their time and get it right.

That'll take a while.

15 minutes ago, Paul M said:

Indeed, it's a toss up between Apollo 11 and Apollo 13 for which was the greatest moment in manned spaceflight in my mind.

There was certainly much milk spilt on the way to the first man on the Moon but on the day it went rather smoothly. I mean, all those second's worth of fuel remaing on the descent. Vulgar excess!

I've probably watched every second of footage there is about Apllo 13's eventful abort. It had all your above list items in abundance. Those guys! What a story! 

And I could watch Gene Krantz administer his white waistcoted duties forever

 

Yeah, thats one time in history that wont be repeated for a LONG time... if ever again.

Brings a tear to my eye... a tear of shame... in 1969 they put a man on the moon... 69!!!... there was a sense of adventure, risk, courage, intelligence, ingenuity, purpose and true team work... today.. they can't even get the thing of the launch pad... I guess thats what greed, red tape and a broken education system delivers.

What a sad age we live in... Oh but they'll colonise Mars and have Moon bases by 2027... come on....  

Nice capture... plenty of surface detail visible there.

Awesome images.

16 hours ago, Greymouser said:

Excellent. Can I see a little detail on one of the moons? Or am I imagining it?

I'd say you're imaging it... the moon's were imaged at a 1/3 second exposure for 10 minutes, the longer exposure per frame to actually capture the moons, any detail would surely be blurred away. 

Nice wide field.

The sun is starting to pickup with activity... more proms... more proms...

That is a great start. If I can try and give you some tips, firstly imaging planets that are just above a house roof is going to limit and decrease the amount of detail you will be able to capture due to the heat coming off houses and causing shimmer.

The other thing is that planets do need a very high magnification, 2000mm and higher is good.. of course seeing permitting.
The other thing is the camera... the D800, or any DSLR, are not the best for planetary imaging... a dedicated planetary camera which can capture pure raw data and at a very high frame rate will help you immensely, when you have a higher chance of catching the clearest frames and allowing Registax/Autostakkert to stack more of the clearest frames for the maximum possible details to be captured in your images.

Very nice detail.

It looks like that because of perspective... the moon looks to be illuminated from a different angle if the rays were falling on it from a "flat" perspective... but because of the distances and the sky is spherical, add to that refraction, the rays do not travel in a straight line from our perspective but in a curve... OK this is getting a bit hard to explain without sounding like a flat earther.

NOW I know that light travels in a straight line, but here we're talking from our perspective which looks curved.

See the image, the RA and DEC lines are straight lines, but due to the fact that they are straight around a spherical earth, this is how they are from our perspective, they appear curved, same goes with sunlight illuminating the moon...

see my crude illustration of the SUN & moon added to the skymap, simulating rays travelling on the 23h-11h line... the moon looks to be illuminated from a "wrong" angle... even though those lines are really straight but appear curved from our miniscule perspective. 

This was harder to put into words than when I visualised it....

Did that make sense?

Hi Astronomers,

I finally had a night of half decent seeing. I attempted imaging Saturn a few time before with terrible results until 21 August... so I finally got something that worth sharing.

These images were captured with my C8 SCT using a Skyris 618C, DMK21au618 and DMK41au02 CCD cameras.

I captured 10 x 90 second videos with each camera and used WinJupos to de-rotate the best 10% of each video, resulting in the attached images.

I used the mono stack captured with the DMK21 as the luminance channel and the Skyris618C stack as the color data. The DMK41 was used for the wider FOV with a longer exposure to capture the surrounding moons... Titan, Rhea, Dione and Tethys.

Clear Skies,

Mariusz