Icesheet

Thanks folks!

Oops I see in my state of tiredness I put this in the wrong forum 😆

Could a mod move this to widefield imaging?

I headed out for what I expected to be my last shot at the Milkyway before the nights get too light here. What I actually got was the most spectacular display of the Northern Lights I have witnessed. One of those nights that will live long in the memory! There's plenty more to follow but I couldn't wait to post one. Like a wee kid at Christmas here 😂

If it’s primarily for astrophotography and your willing to push a little further then you might consider the Askar FMA 180. Have a search on here for some good info on it. 

Well, someone has to kick this off!

Taken on the night 14th-15th March this is the foreground stack of an image of the aurora and Milkyway over Bjørnafjorden, Western Norway. The stack consists of 3x180 sec of exposure with a Samyang 14mm wide open at f2.8 on a Nikon D600. Didn't really intend to use this as a star trail image but it does have some charm!

Do you have a sketch of your imaging train? The only way to know is to try but I would expect 4mm out would be too much. There are plenty of posts around here that show even 1/10 of a mm can be critical. The size of your sensor would impact this too. 

I even bumped into this curious bunch on the way home!

50 minutes ago, Corncrake said:

Wow! What can I say? That is just , , astonishingly perfect.

To have such little light to need to stack on the foreground, amazing, most of us need to do that to the sky whilst struggling with and cursing foreground illumination !!!!! What was the light source for it, just sky-glow/ambient ? Even the aurora is modest, just right, not dominant or over-powering !

and how did you manage to persuade the townsfolk to turn down their street lighting just right so as not to blow out your pic

Really appreciate your comments  Yes, it was just ambient lighting although it didn't seem there was any light at the time! No artificial light used at all. Actually, I could probably have been doing with an even longer exposure for the foreground. I had to raise it a bit in lightroom to bring out some detail in the grass.  Here's a JPEG of the stacked foreground before lifting the exposure. I actually had more exposure of the sky but as you can see it washes out the detail and structure in the aurora hence only using one frame for sky.

There is quite a bit of light pollution in my area but get to the right spot and point the right way and it you're all good.

1 hour ago, Carbon Brush said:

I live in a light polluted part of England, that does not get aurora very often. Even then it is usually cloudy. Well much of England is light polluted.
I can only gaze in wonder at your image. Hoping one day to see something like this. Criticism of the image composition - never.
Thank you for posting.

Thank you for the kind words!
 

Thank you all for your comments. Makes me appreciate the opportunity I have here. Hopefully, I can get more similar in the future 👍🏻

Thanks! Yeah, I’ve definitely not got an excuse in terms of possible locations. 

9 hours ago, tonylumley said:

can you lock the shutter open/ up ?, on the D3200, would save removing the mirror completely, asking as I have the D7200 and the D600, both have this facility, and use both for astro photography, 

 

Can you elaborate on this? You mean you don’t have a modification but are able to make the sensor more sensitive by doing this?

1 hour ago, Adreneline said:

Really good photograph.

I love the balance of grassy foreground and sky with the magical Northern Lights and the Milky Way and the lights from the small town in the middle distance.

Brilliant composition.

Adrian

Thanks Adrian! Wasn’t sure if the foreground maybe distracted from the sky. Glad you like it!

59 minutes ago, carastro said:

Looks great.  Oh so lucky to have the aurora.

Carole 

We don’t quite get it like Northern Norway here but does make its way down often enough. 

9 minutes ago, Kon said:

That's a great image!

Thanks!

Landscape astrophotography is something I’m interested in getting into more. There were some faint Aurora recently so I decided to give it a go. This is a foreground stack of 3x180sec on foreground and 1x30sec for sky, Nikon D600 and Samyang 14mm. A half critical eye will show my blending needs work and of course the sky is quite noisy since it’s only one frame at fairly high ISO. Hopefully it’s still semi pleasing to the eye 😊

I’ve had both and used both on a Nikon D600 but not at the same time unfortunately so can’t give you an objective comparison. 
 

The short answer is you probably can’t go wrong with either. Personally I have had a better time with the Askar. The stars have been much better in the corners than what I had with the Samyang. Although I may have just had a bad copy of the lens. The other factor that puts the Askar ahead of the Samyang for me is the versatility. It acts as an astrograph, guide scope and spotter and is good at them all. It does seem the Askar may have some blue bloat but easily solved with a filter.
 

Of course the biggest advantage of the Samyang is you can image wide open at F2. There’s nothing else at that price that can do that.  
 

As I say you can’t go wrong. Just buy from somewhere with a good return policy 👍🏻

If you're going to stick to as wide as 14mm and want something for general photography too then I don't think you need a modded one. If you only plan to use it for nightscape photography and potentially with longer focal length lenses then I think you would get more benefit of a modded camera. Full frame can for sure be an advantage if you have the lenses that cover the sensor.

On 01/03/2021 at 02:22, kens said:

If you are game to install from the nightly build then:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mutlaqja/indinightly
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt install indi-asi-power

A new release of KStars and INDI is imminent so be careful as the nightly build is on a different version to the stable build and might mess things up for you

I'm about to push a set of minor fixes to the driver. Hopefully this allows the package to enable the systemd service and also adds some small enhancements. These will take a day or two to make it into the nightly build.

To remove the nightly ppa

sudo add-apt-repository --remove ppa:mutlaqja/indinightly

 

Thanks! I will give this a go when I get the chance 👍🏻

4 hours ago, kens said:

Correct. 

Show me where to sign up 😂

25 minutes ago, kens said:

No. The idea is that if you want to install an alternative OS you can still control the power ports. It can also be used on a normal RPi if you want to DIY power ports and control them.

So the idea is you can load another OS on a different SD card and then it would be possible to switch between the two depending on your needs/ equipment?

Your images just make me want to sell my gear and get a RASA and 2600MC. If only it was as easy as that! I know that it takes a lot more than gear to produce what you do 👏🏻 

It makes sense the closer to Polaris you are the less a guide star will move. How that plays into the calibration I don’t know. It does seem that the PHD2 ‘lite’ version the ASIair uses is a little erratic. I certainly have to fiddle more with settings and do more calibrations than when I was using the full PHD2 on my laptop. Also, I’ve had runaway guiding a few times but I think I worked that one out. It’s after I cross the meridian then I have to go into settings and flip my calibration then it starts guiding again. Just in case you come across that.   

1 hour ago, Thorney said:

These look similar to my settings apart from the focal length to the guide scope. I assume you are using a different one to me? Also my Auto restore calibration was off as I think I have been doing that manually. I shall be double checking this though. 
 

Thanks 

Hi,

This isn’t actually my settings. Just a screen grab from the internet to show you where to look. Yeah I would have auto restore on unless you are imaging from different locations all the time. I only reset the calibration if I’m getting bad guiding that I can’t troubleshoot. 
 

Also, you mention your focus was as good as it’s been. As far as I’m aware it’s actually good practice not to have perfect focus. Just slightly out of focus is good as this makes it easier for the algorithm to track the star centroid. Probably something mathematical behind it but have a Google about it. 

I’ve had problems with guiding calibration on the ASIair before. I managed to get a good calibration by changing the calibration step and max ra and Dec durations. Can’t remember if I increased or lowered it but you can give it a go. Worth a try anyway!

Edit: Hadn’t noticed @Delboy_Hog has suggested this already
 

9 hours ago, david_taurus83 said: Another idea could be to find a really good image on Astrobin with a similar FOV, plenty of IFN and clear background. Register the image with yours, and use it to place markers over the background. Make a new instance and then apply to your image. I had to do this on an Orion and Horsehead image I done last year.

I would never have thought of this, great idea!

Some good things to work on. Thanks folks

46 minutes ago, geeklee said:

I tried a variety of methods to add Ha to my M81/M82 image and one successful one was using a mask so it only goes where you want it - so, definitely not the background or the stars.  I'm not sure if any of the scripts mentioned doing this as I haven't used them.

That makes sense and I haven't tried that yet. Will see how I get on with that.

48 minutes ago, geeklee said:

I don't have a lot of experience with DBE but from reading and experimenting myself, that background might not be ideal.  Typically it's removing a gradient so it should be smooth not lumpy.  In areas that look lumpy, look where samples have been placed, remove and re-run.  Always keep an eye on the background model.

I've quickly thrown ~5 hours of Lum into PI and DBE.  It's not perfect (at all) but an example (simple STF - orig, after DBE, background model):

That looks a lot more like what I was expecting. Seems I maybe haven't been careful enough with the samples then. Will go back to this too.

51 minutes ago, geeklee said:

BTW, great images and processing.  The IFN is REALLY faint and even Holmberg IX - you've done well to pull the latter out cleanly even though it's faint.  You might find the GAME script can help with galaxies and areas of interest you'd like to work on in isolation.

Thank you! That GAME script looks useful, I will try that when trying to add the Ha to the galaxies.