Yawning Angel

Just before work (ah, the joy of working from home) I was able to catch a few moments between the clouds: 80ED / asi178mm 2 panel mosaic, white light with a 2" Altair wedge. AS!3 -> Registax -> Photoshop. Manual alignment of the 2 parts in PS then combined with 'Auto-Blend Layers', which seems to do a good job at the colour matching

June 20th (high cloud) v 21st (clear) v

Thank you Trevor! The kit is and asi178mm / RGB filters and a Skywatcher 80ED AS!3 for stacking (50% of 1000 each) -> Registax -> imPPG for alignment -> PixInsight for RGB combine + some curves then finally Photoshop for colour balancing, crop etc

Tonight's moon, around 21:00. The same data, processed 2 ways (Daylight / Mineral) Mineral: Daylight:

Yes, a Baader 1.25” IR/UV ahead of the quark.

My first (successful?) Mosaic of our local star, from the 12th. 21 panels in Ha with a Quark Chromosphere / 80ED. First try using Photoshop's auto align rather than Microsoft ICE. A couple of panels turned in a bit soft due to cloud, however it still show up a number of small prominences False colour with a levels adjustment from the mono capture

Outstanding images! Thank you for sharing!

This was the base image

Aha, trickery I’m afraid. Red level up, green down a bit blue down more = sunny orange

Single frame, captured through clouds. Quite surprised what can be salvaged, including the odd sunspot or 2

I had change to grab some scope time on Saturday (05/06/2021) morning before the day got properly warmed up. 2 panel mosaics in white light, showing AR2827 and AR2829 (asi178mm / Altair wedge). A few hours later I was able to swap out to the Quark and captured AR2829 in more detail (Chromosphere / Hypercam174m), although the seeing was degrading with the heat of the day. Enjoy! Mono, as captured: Colourised in PS: Colourised in PS:

Ahead of the expected cloud spectacle / eclipse I thought it best to test out my white light setup. Being in the north of England this is likely a wasted exercise, but we'll see Skywatcher 80ED with an Altair 2" Herschel wedge, then either an asi178mm or Altair Hypercam 174m fan cooled - both further filtered with a Baader IR/UV filter and Solar Continuum stack First up, the 178mm: Crop and Full disk (2 panel mosaic) - click for full size Now the 174m Full disk / Inverted full disk (because why not?) - click for full size All stacked with AS!3, and sharpened in Registax but no further processing other than a tidy up crop and export as PNG Looks like the 174m is giving a very suitable FOV. The full disk sits comfortably on the sensor without being too tight. The 178mm has the resolution advantage, but at the expense of needing 2 panels. I could use the 0.85 reducer, but was trying to keep unfiltered glass out of the light path

Thank you! Microsoft ICE is a fantastic tool - I have it backup up myself, just to be safe, as I'm sure what could do the job otherwise

As an experiment I tried a 2.5x barlow with my 80ED to see if it could get useful data with my asi178mm. 23 panels taken around 21:00 hrs in the fading light. 23 x 500 frames, captured in SharpCap 4 beta. asi178mm / green filter / Celestron Luminos 2.5x barlow Batch processed in PixInsight, restoration filter Mosaic compiled by Microsoft ICE Processed in Photoshop, including 'Content aware fill' to fix the background sky areas not covered by the mosaic Reduced by 50% to stop it being unreasonably large. (It's still well worth clicking through to the full image) I keep thinking about replacing the 80ED, but it keeps delivering

Thank you! It's appreciated! Thanks for the kind comment! Looking good!

Captured around 18:30 this evening. 1000 frames each in RG and B with the asi178mm / Evostar 80ED. I find balancing up the colour a challenge with day time mono imaging, but I've aimed for a fair approximation of the visual I've been experimenting with Registax wavelets to see if I can get a good balance of sharpness without crater rims blowing out, which is very easy to do! I have saved myself a preset which I applied to each channel's image before combining. I've included (below) a shot of the settings used here, in case it is any use.

Far too late to enter for this, so I hope it’s okay to share my version to this thread? PixInsight (roughly from memory) - arcsinh stretch, LRGB combine, Starnet, curves on the starless part, enhance dark structure script, add stars back in then scnr green Lovely to have data that doesn’t fight back, thank you!

Double post

I’d run it via sharpcap and see how it performs when you up the gain and exposure

Thank you! I love seeing the sun in motion 😁

It presents the same symptom, yes. I’m not sure if it’ll impact your guiding however?

Captured over 4 hours, 1 x 2000 frame stack every 2 minutes giving 120 x 4gb files! AS!3 batch stacked and mass processed in PixInsight for 8 seconds of animation 🙂 SW80ED / Daystar Quark Chromosphere / Hypercam174m Stills from the same data:

Tonight's moon, at dusk - starring the Lunar V and X

Sunspot 2816 this morning. Hypercam174m as captured and colourised SW80ED / Quark / Hypercam174m

Thank you! and thanks to the mod who kindly moved this to the right section👍