wimvb

Here’s my setup in action last night. I’m a photographer, I don’t use a flash. But I may need to do some colour calibration and stretching. 😉

Thanks, good to know. I stll have a few in the pipeline, but astroseason is coming to an end up here, with a horrible blueshift. 😋

Depending on sky and camera, ccd or low noise cmos, you need long exposures (my guess, 15 minutes or more for ccd) or 5 minutes for cmos. But you will need lots of them. The 3C273 jet is much fainter than the one in M87. There’s hardly any risk for over exposing it. My experience with faint galaxies is that you can never have too much data. Diminishing returns is just a fable in this situation.

Apparently you still are, just of a different kind. Great image, Göran.

It may get drowned in the light of the galaxy on longer integrations, most likely.

Is that MN190's little cousin? 😉

@Rich1980, that's a nice clean setup. What's your opinion of the pegasus powerbox?

Interesting. Chance would have it that I pointed my telescope at the same patch of sky yesterday. After finishing my imaging session, I usually point my scope at some interesting object that is coming into position. Yesterday I decided to point it at M87, just because I had read about this galaxy during the day. I fired away at it, collecting 15 30 seconds subs. Registered and stacked them in PI, applied DBE and stretched the image. I cropped and rotated to approximately match your fov and resampled. Not at all in the same league as yours, but here you have it:

Thank you, Stephen.

Thanks, Göran. Maybe time for yours to come out of the closet (literally). If I had a place to put it, I would very much like to have one more. But unfortunately, my mount won't carry two.

Thanks Alan. You're correct, its popular name is the little pinwheel. But this galaxy is a lot dimmer than its big brother, and only 1/3 its real (not angular) size.

Right under the back paw of the Great Bear, is this collection of galaxies and galaxy clusters. The largest object in this image is galaxy ngc 3180 or ngc 3184, it seems to have two entries in the new general catalogue. It is situated at a distance of 40 Mly according to Wikipedia, but only about 26 Mly according to its redshift (0.00197). The galaxy is of type SAc, a spiral galaxy with active star forming regions, which I tried to enhance by collecting Ha as well as RGB. The angular size of this galaxy is only about 7 arc minutes, giving it a diameter of about 55 000 light years, half the size of the Milky Way. Below ngc 3180 is ngc 3179, a lenticular galaxy at a distance of about 325 Mly, according to its redshift of 0.02385. Althought it is catagorised as a lens shaped galaxy, it seems to have some structure in its disc (unfortunately not visible in this image). If you draw a line through the long axis of ngc 3179 upwards to the left, and another straight down from ngc 3180, you will find, at the intersection, a low surface brightness galaxy, [HKK2009] dJ1018+4109, which is at about the same distance as ngc 3180. In the image, the galaxy barely clears the noise floor. This galaxy is a dwarf galaxy in the local super cluster. Its diameter is about 4 400 light years. Towards the lower left corner is galaxy cluster ACO 971, at a distance of 1.2 billion light years. This cluster contains some 37 identified member galaxies. If you go from ngc 3180 to the left, near the edge of the image is emission line galaxy SDSS J102101.03+411946.6, at a distance of 2.55 billion light years. In contrast to "normal" galaxies, this galaxy does not emit a continuous light spectra. In stead, its spectrum is an emmision line spectrum. Going from ngc 3179 towards the right edge, is low surface brightness galaxy MCG+07-21-035 (23 Mly distant and 2 300 Ly diameter). Finally, below MCG+07-21-035 is another galaxy cluster, [SPD2011] 2168, which is situated at a distance of approximately 3.6 billion light years. Details: L: 80 x 150 s RGB: 25 x 150 s (per channel) Ha: 45 x 300 s Telescope & camera: MN190 + ASI294MM with Optolong 31 mm LRGB filters and Baader 7 nm Ha filter I first integrated all 160 L subs that I had collected during March and early April, but upon closer inspection, I decided to only use half of these. The other 80 subs had FWHM values that were too high. Ha is very weak in this galaxy, and the Ha master still has a lot of noise in it. If the weather permits, I would like to collect another 40 or so Ha subs. Unfortunately the nights are getting awfully short now, only about 3 hours of astro-darkness for the coming week. Although it is possible to collect Ha even outside astro-darkness, the increased noise will mean that I have to collect even more subs. Astro-seasom will be over soon.

AfaIk, if the object name is the same, Ekos reuses the diectories. Otoh, I don't use the scheduler that much, so could be wrong.

You may need to clear the mount model inekos. And let ekos update devices (if I recall correctly). That worked for me.

Congratulations winners. Thanks @FLO and IKI for sharing the data.

Ok guys, let's put things in perspective. The astrograph site quotes Framos, a company working in the field of machine vision, embedded vision and surveilance. Clearly these applications are for sensors that operate almost 24/7. A year of use means a continuous year of operation. Consumer cameras are used mich less, and actually spent most of their lives in a camera bag. This is basically shelf life. Before these cameras reach an accumulated year of use, they will be antiques. If sensors in consumer cameras only had a life of one year, no camera manufacturer in their right mind would offer two year warranty, or even put such a sensor in their product. Also, there are different types of grades. Astrograph/Framos refer to grades of expected lifetimes for sensors. Astro camera manufacturers can refer to grades of sensor quality. They will then refer to the number of bad pixels on the sensor. Only very few (large) sensor leave the factory with no bad pixels. Companies will sort all sensors açording to the number of bad pixels, and offer these as different grades. I believe that at least Starlight Xpress wrote about this on their web site, a few years ago.

Spoiler: this is actually diffraction from spider vanes, and not from an arachnid.

I bet you didn't think of this kind of spider diffraction: Found on Aladin Lite (DSS2 survey). It seems they sent starship Enterprise to investigate.

if it was just the amateur astro market, then Atik would probably have been long gone. The truth is that these companies also work with professional astronomers. Either as consultants or to make one off cameras for a particular purpose/customer. Even QHY is involved in professional astro cameras. https://www.qhyccd.com/index.php?m=content&c=index&a=show&catid=138&id=53 This is a camera with the same size sensor as the film frame of a vintage Hasselblad. But you're right about Atik and other traditional CCD-companies being late in the CMOS game, and desparately trying to catch up. But what these companies do have is a solid foundation in making cameras.

With customer service like that, I would be willing to pay a few punds/euro/dollars more. But the price difference between Atik and the leading chinese brands isn't that much to start with.

Try attaching THAT to your mount. Otoh, according to Moore's law, that processing power will be the size of a Raspberry Pi in a few years.

Thanks. I can see a little distorted monkey face when uppside down. Not only real star colours, also a reflection nebula behind the ape's neck. This is often missed in NB images.

61 Mpixel, 122 MB per raw image. With 5 hours of data per night and 5 minute subs (12 / hour), you better prepare for this, Olly:

Lock-down? What lock-down? I live in Sweden; no lock-down.

Here's my version According to some very old thread here on sgl, the sqm with a light-to-frequency converter can run into problems at very low light intensities, because the frequency is so low. If I were to make such a device again, I would add a display. At the time I intended to mount the sqm permanently in my obsy, and I didn't need a display.