MarsG76

I thought that it was Uranus too, but looking at Starmap Pro, it looks like Uranus was further up in the 2 o'clock direction out of the frame from my latitude... According to Astrometry.net it's a star HD18256/Al Butain II/ epsilon Ari....

Hi All, Sharing my images to add to the thousands of the latest lunar eclipse images already posted... these images were imaged at 13:15, 13:28 and 13:45UTC with a stock Canon 40D, through a C8 at f6.3. Clear Skies, MG

Awesome work.. that crazy good and some serious exposure time dedication.

Nice and tidy work Olly, well done.

Hello All, Sharing my latest imaging project which I managed to complete between life and weather... The Large Magellanic Cloud, a companion satellite galaxy of our own Milkyway galaxy, located 163,000 lightyears away, visible only from the southern hemisphere. I had to image this object at 150mm focal length to fit it into the frame because it's huge in the sky. I imaged this through a Sigma 150mm f2.8 prime lens and exposed in HaLRGB color using two cameras, a QHY268M astronomy camera for the luminance and H-Alpha signal and a stock unmodded Canon 40D DSLR for the RGB color data. The reason for using the DSLR for the RGB data was to save time, capturing all of the RGB signal simultaneously as opposed to capturing the red, green and blue subs separately through filters. The noise level and overall image quality of the RGB data was not much of a concern as long as there was color data with in the signal, as I only used it to colorise the luminance channel. Guided with an 80mm refractor at 500mm FL and tracked on a hypertuned CGEM mount for a total exposure time of 7 hours and 23 minutes. I could have used my astromodded and cooled 40D for the color but I opted for a standard camera because of weight... this setup was piggy backed off my C8 & Refractor setup, and slightly to the side, so using a 700g camera body over a 1.8kg unit made the off balance tracking more accurate at this focal length. As a added bonus, the QHY268M is a similar mass so swapping the two cameras didn't require re-balancing. Imaging a wide field image like this also helps me pick interesting targets within the galaxy for me to zoom in onto like I did with the Small Magellanic Cloud Project... ...so with the immense amount of objects within the LMC, I have quite a few targets for the C8. If you read through this whole novel of a post, thank you and clear skies... Mariusz.

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

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.

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.

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.

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