Hallingskies

The last one is stunning.  Well worth getting up for!

30 cycles of LRGB 1 second exposures, 2x2 binned, stacked and LRGB combined in Astroart (Esprit 100 and Atik 460/EFW2) from around 3.40 am this morning.

Some funky colour gradients caused by bright morning twilight and various horizon obstructions.   Think you can make out the blue ion tail but any details in the main tail have been lost to the brightening sky.  Unfortunately my obbo horizon is around 10 degrees and I only just caught this before it vanished completely.  

An obvious competition subject for now is best photo or sketch of Comet NEOWISE.  There's loads of good ones coming in at the moment, why not make it a competition theme?

2 hours ago, carastro said:

That looks very useful Halling skies, and have made a note of it.  I am going to give the original adapter another try first as I am sure it was OK initially, and maybe something just worked loose.

Hate spacing, various threads, and apertures.  

Carole 

 

Hope it works out for you.  I have had a nightmare trying to get an SX-694 (T-threads and a 16mm back focus! 😱) with a manual ATIK filter wheel connected to a Samyang within the 44mm target, but I finally managed it.  You get used to trawling the web for adapters...

On 01/07/2020 at 07:16, Marvin Jenkins said:

I have been following a thread in imaging about how bad the effect of Star Link has become for imaging.

I suggested we highlight the problem instead of getting rid of the trails. Perhaps a challenge to produce the most stunning image utterly ruined by sat trails and aircraft?

Marvin

Not saying that anyone here would cheat but it would be too easy (or tempting) to add a few trails in PaintShop, just to make a point! 🤣🤣🤣

On 04/07/2020 at 16:50, carastro said:

I've already been down that route and asked FLO if it will fit my EFW.  Apparently it won't without another adapter adding back to the spacing again and thus defeating the object.

I am going to try in the first instance using my Geotik Canon to CCD adapter again and see if I can get focus with all filters with that as I have finally managed to remove the "foot" which was getting in the way of the EFW when I wanted to screw it on.

Carole 

 

Would this work for you...?

https://www.modernastronomy.com/shop/accessories/adapters/male-m54-to-m48-female-adapter/

...coupled with this...?

https://www.firstlightoptics.com/adapters/astro-essentials-samyang-lens-to-m48-adapter.html

I think the adapter should allow you to connect your M54 EFW2 to the FLO M48 Samyang adapter with around 6mm total length.  The EFW2/ATIK 460 combo is around 36mm back focus, with another 2mm for the wheel to camera connector, so you should be at the 44mm focal distance of the Samyang lens.  Apologies if you have already considered this.  

Good to see someone still using a VC200L.  I’ve had one for about 20 years, gives excellent images and holds collimation well.  I don’t use mine anywhere near as much as I should.  Not sure Vixen make them any more.

28 minutes ago, Craney said:

Gnarr-boo--hiss!!!

I was up at 3.00, but missed it totally, even with binos.   Must have been hidden in broad twi-light.

My NE horizon is not too bad. Maybe my latitude counts against me at the moment.

Well done everybody for seeing it and reporting back.

I bagged it at 3.45 when it was a bit higher, but I used go-to and saw it first through the finderscope.  I would have struggled without knowing where to look - it’s a bit like trying to see Venus in the daytime.  Easy if you know exactly where.

2 hours ago, Pete Presland said:

Terrific image, the tail is beautiful!

Thanks Pete.  No real processing, that’s pretty much how it dropped out of Registax.

Registax stack of 34 x 1 second images, Canon 450D at ISO400, Vixen ED 114 600mm, at 3.45 BST this morning. Easily seen with bins including a definite tail, just visible through the murk with the naked eye, provided you knew where to look.  The twin outgassing structures were clearly visible in 6x30 bins.  It seemed about the same brightness as theta Aurigae to me, which puts it at around magnitude 2.6, but this was only at an altitude of 8 degrees.

Excellent, thanks for sharing.  Got a glimpse in SE England but seem to have dissipated here.

Very best of luck with POTH and dome-synching.  I have never got it to work, with the dome just going to random positions     that are nowhere near where the scope is pointing (and yes, I have triple-checked my input dimensions). Every time I used it, something also happened to the dome position in the native Pulsar software (even though it wasn’t open) which meant I had to recalibrate the dome in the Pulsar software to get it to home/park in the right place.  It also permanently messed up the link between my mount and the PC, so that I had to unplug the mount EQdir lead and plug it back in again to get the computer to recognise it every time I started up. 
I gave POTH up as a bad job, deciding that imaging time and life is too short to waste on it.  I just set the dome tracking rate in the pulsar software instead and keep a periodic eye on it.  With a bit of care I can usually get 2-3 hours before I have to give the dome a nudge, depending on object elevation.

Been having a play with Starnet, now that I have finally found a computer in the house it will run on.  It seems a finiky bit of software, but for the price you pay for it.... The missus and I both have year old second hand but good spec Lenovo lap-tops - but no go with Starnet.  It won't run on any of my considerable collection of older Win 7 PCs either.  I got my son to try it out, and lo, it runs on his gaming PC and his HP laptop, but both of these will be returning to university when he does (or should I say "if" in this febrile climate...).

Anyway...

I run Starnet on separate Ha and OIII stacks I made of M16 the other night, and then HOO combined them.  I'm really impressed with how cleanly it picked off the stars on the monochrome stacks, just a little bit of clone brush needed to mop up the residues of the cluster stars.  It didn't do quite as good a job on the colour image I had already prepped.  Not sure about the aesthetics of starless colour images. They have a striking Turneresque appearance, but they seem a bit flat - don't know if that's just my poor processing skills or a product of the Starnet process.

The power of Starnet seems to be in the ability to selectively stretch nebulosity without blowing out stars.  I struggle with star shapes and alignment anyway, and heavy stretching seems to make things much worse.

How do folk out there use Starnet in processing?  Do they hit individual channel stacks with it before colour combining or do they de-star the colour image?  How do they put the stars back in?  I subtracted the starless stack from the stretched "pre-Starnet" stack to give just the stars, HOO combined the stars, then layered them back over the image above in blend lighten mode, but the star colours were odd and they looked too sharp and painted on, although running a Gaussian blur of the star mask first helped.

In the end, I blended the "re-starred" version with a "normally processed" one, which seemed to put a bit of snap and contrast back into things.

I'd be interested to know if and how you experts out there use Starnet.

Those old Pentax 135s are good lenses.  Got one myself.

Interesting data.  It certainly supports my purely empirical point of view. I was out imaging on June 22nd/23rd and at 1.00 am, the sky looked as dark as it ever does in my moderately light-polluted skies. The only real problem of summer nights for me is the short window of quality imaging time.

2 hours ago, Zakalwe said:

Do a search on here for slow broadband access and gauge their comments. Especially those that now are working from home.

I think that defacing the night sky to cure slow broadband is the wrong solution to what is hardly a life-threatening problem. You seem to think otherwise.  And that’s fine.  We agree to differ.

Starlink puts me in mind of Thomas Midgely’s contributions to the well-being of mankind:  a cheap and highly efficient refrigerant that just happened to wipe out the planet’s ozone layer.  Or an equally cheap and effective anti-knock agent for ICEs that has contaminated everything and everyone with lead neurotoxins.  These “advances” also had their apologists, who sneeringly dismissed any concerns as so much fashionable hand-wringing nonsense on the outrage bus.  Ditto tobacco. Plastics. Climate change.

Whilst not (as far as we know) as Earth-damaging, Musk’s solution to the strictly first world problem of Improving internet connectivity is to effectively write indelible graffiti across the night sky.  I would venture that Musk is filling the sky with satellites simply because it’s sexy and he has the ability to so: he has the sledgehammer to crack that walnut.  Are there really no better ways to achieve “better” internet access than to permanently disfigure the night sky? 

It’s not the impact upon my trivial little hobby that really bothers me.  No-one knows how that will pan out and I suspect that clever software will help to mitigate the impact of Starlink and its ilk on my silly and ultimately rather pointless astropics.

What gets my goat is the sheer arrogance of Starlink.  That a single country or corporation can fill everyone’s night sky with thousands of moving points of light and there is nothing anyone can do to stop it.  One of the many highlights of my stay in New Zealand many years ago was looking up into the velvet darkness of a truly clear, dark sky.  No man-made light or dust pollution, no aircraft lights.  Just the timeless glow of the Milky Way and the wondrous brilliance of an unspoiled cosmos as seen by generations.  Mr. Musk and his like are going to steal that from everyone on the planet.  My grandchildren will never see that sky as I did.  And that is tragic.  As terrible as climate change or coronavirus or over-population or pollution?  No.  But still terrible.

No amount of rationalising will change that.  Human life will become that tiny bit poorer thanks to Starlink.

And for what?  “Better” internet access?  Some folk may be happy with that, and think it is “progress”. 

I’m not, and I don’t.   

3 hours ago, Zakalwe said:

 

Two things:

Sigma rejection in stacking will almost certainly remove the trails.

You are imaging when there is no true darkness. Satellite trails will be at their brightest when the Sun is just below the horizon which is exactly where it is in the summer months. You might as well complain about there being no true darkness and damn whoever put the Sun in the sky. Complaining about that wouldn't be as fashionable though.

 

Musk’s sky-wreckers are a man-made phenomenon.  There’s a difference.  “Fashionable” doesn’t come into it.

To quote HRH Prince Charles on the subject of carbuncles, “That really is appalling”.

Probably need to pack up and sell my kit while it still has some resale value.  In a few years it seems the night sky will be so full of satellites that deep sky imaging may well be impossible.

Still, at least the FaceTube brigade will be able to post their cat pictures or whatever a few milliseconds faster, so trashing the night sky will be a small price to pay.

May the next massive solar storm fry Musk’s space junk to a (hopefully blackened) crisp...

So far I have not had too many subframes photobombed by Musk’s selfish wealth creation project, and sigma stacking has cleaned them up.  It will be interesting to see how your final image scrubs up.  

What software fixes can be used to remove lines?  I gather the latest version of AstroArt has a vertical line removal tool, assume you would have to rotate the subframe first which would be a pain.

Saw a similar thing on my ATIK 460, changed dessicant in desperation, problem went away.  Why bits of ice should migrate randomly across the chip is beyond me, but it seemed to be the problem...🤔🤔🤔

Date: June 22nd. 2020

Equipment: ATIK 460EX with EFW2, Skywatcher f5.5 Esprit 100 ED refractor, Avalon Linear mount, guiding with Lodestar X2/PHD

Subframes:12 x 300s Ha, 12 x 300s + 6 x 300s (2x2 binned) OIII, no flats/darks (hot pixel removal in Astroart).

Stacking in AA, final processing in PSP.  Write-up here if anyone is interested...

How about astroimaging when there’s no astronomical darkness?  It’s certainly a challenge for me...

2 hours ago, carastro said:

Hi Hallingskies.

To be honest I am guiding because I can.  I haven't tried imaging with this lens without guiding.

I stopped down to F2.8 as I was advised to as a beginner with this lens,  but might try imaging at F2 soon.

I am using an Atik camera with an Atik EFW2 filterwheel, and an adapter from Bern at Modern Astronomy which is supposed to be for the ZWO camera, but fits my Filterwheel OK, it all seems to fit.  (I went for this arrangement as I saw another Samyang Owne using the same equipment as me and he said the back spacing was fine.  So I just emulated what he had).

This is a photo of my set up.  

Thanks for the info Carole.  I‘ll take a look at MA’s adaptors to see if that can help with the back focus as I’d rather use a filter wheel.  Can’t tell from the photo whether you have automated the focus - it seems OK to do manually from my initial tests but I am guessing critical focussing might be pretty challenging at F2.

On 21/05/2020 at 19:50, carastro said:

Samyang 135mm F2 lens, but I stopped it down to F2.8
Atik460EX and Baader filters on HEQ5
Ha 900 x 8 & Ha 600 X 9 total Ha 3 1/2 hours
Oiii 9 x 300 binned (45m)
Sii 8 x 300 binned (40m)
Hubble Palette + RGB (for the stars) 12 x 200 each NOT binned. Total 2 hours
Cloud stopped play on the 2nd night or would have got more Oiii and Sii.

Total imaging time (over 2 nights) 6h 55mins or 7 hours as near as damn it.
Bortle 8

Very nice!  Some questions, as I have a 135mm lens I would like to try out..

Are you autoguiding, or is the HEQ5 OK on its own at that focal length?

Why have you stopped down to 2.8?  Were you seeing edge defects at 2.0, even though the 460 chip isn’t full frame?

How have you mounted your filters?  I can’t get enough back focus to use a filter wheel and have had to resort to a drawer arrangement.

Any guidance (no pun intended) appreciated.