Camissa

47 Tucanae, 70 x 30s x RGB, 130mm APO refractor @ f/4.5, ASI 1600 MM Pro 

Spring is coming! The weather is still a bit mixed but we had a few clear nights. Hopefully we will have summer weather soon!  47 Tucanae was my target the last nights. It is a bit low over my neighbours house and when she starts her fireplace I can forget that part of the sky. But she must have used a blanket last night and finally I got some nice shots of 47 TUC! 

Nicer Version

Clear skies,

Ecki

PS.: The external link points to the image on my website. The image will be automatically adjusted to the resolution of your device. With an iPad it is particularly nice! I am always somewhat frustrated how much the images lose when they are embedded as a jpg in a forum. 

I have a new mount, an Astro-Physics Mach2. It is supposed to be installed in my future observatory. But the observatory construction has not yet started as Covid19 has slowed down the approval process substantially. Of course the new mount and a buddy finishing his observatory (no approval necessary for him - lucky [removed word]) has brought us torrential rain. We need it so I won't complain.  On Monday it looked like a clear week was coming up, so I put the Mach2 outside on the Eagle pier. Since I am familiar with the Astro-Physics mounts and software this went without a surprise. But I always guide - until now that is. I wanted to try unguided imaging with a pointing model. 

The first evening I played around building a model and taking some unguided subs. The subs looked rather bad, elongated stars although Sharpcap reported perfect polar alignment. But on closer inspection I noticed that after slewing to a target close to the meridian, I was off more than I had expected. My precision or rather lack of it was not good enough for unguided imaging. Being perfectly polar aligned at the pole does not mean I am perfectly polar aligned at my target! I gave up around midnight and did some calculations the next day. Drift rate as a function of polar alignment error, what an eccentricity tolerance of 0.42 meant in terms of drift rate etc. etc. I will spare you the details but the result was clear. If I wanted nice stars I would need to dramatically improve my polar alignment. 

The second evening I worked until 21:15 to get a good polar alignment with the added help of PEMPro. The model was ready at 22:00 and I had a great hour imaging before it got too moist. 

The third evening I was getting better. At 20:15 I had a good polar alignment and a 50 point model running! I captured some nice data, before a fog layer emerged like a screen over the city at 22:00. 

Eagle Nebula, 60x60s Red, 45*60s Green, 26x60s Blue, 130mm APO @ f/4.5, A-P Mach2 unguided

Higher Resolution Image

First impressions:

Polar alignment, balancing and HW setup must be very precise for unguided imaging. 

Unguided imaging produces very nice stars when it works. 

For a non-permanent setup getting perfect alignment and a good model consumes valuable imaging time and it is probably smarter to choose guided imaging.

Imaging unguided with a model means you have nothing to do after setting everything up. With guiding, you can watch the guide graph (I do) and contemplate tweaks to improve RMS etc. With the model, nothing happens. You can watch SGP but its rather uneventful. Rather watch a cosmology lecture on YouTube.  

I could use 95% of my subs, no bad subs due to big jumps in FWHM or eccentricity! 

I like this mount and I think we will become very good friends. 

Clear skies,

Ecki

Very nice image Lucas.  I am just processing M16 imaged with 590 mm. I turned a little bit green after looking at your details. 

Ecki

Beautifully done!

Ecki

Quote

nightmare to process due to the amount of stars, and I m not happy at all with it

Tom,

Interesting problem to have - too much data. This is going to be a tough nut to crack. But locking at the current result well worth the effort!

I am curious to see what you make out of this. Maybe start with the RGB and use starnet on the NB?

Regards,

Ecki

Thank you all for the nice comments and "likes".

This was imaged while we were on strict Covid19 lockdown. It certainly helped with this image. No airplanes, nearly no evening traffic and the quietness was almost surreal.  

Lekker image Maurice!

Thank you for the warm welcome!

Omega Centauri 

My first image here in the lounge! This April was a great month for Astrophotography. My main challenge is moisture in the sky (90% humidity) and of course as I image from a bottle 8 zone, light pollution. At 11 pm everything is most often soaking wet and I normally call it a night.  But the weather in April was better and I managed to get a couple of hours of good data every other night. 

Here is a higher resolution image: https://voelcker.com/omega-centauri

My "export to jpg" process definitely needs improvement!

Details:

Acquisition: 130mm Apo @ f/4.5, ASI1600 mm pro, unity gain, Astrodon RGB, SGP and PHD2

Processing: Astropixelprocessor, Pixinsight, Photoshop

Clear skies,

Ecki

My name is Eckhard and I live in Cape Town, South Africa.

At the moment I am setting up my rig in the garden whenever weather permits. I am busy planing a roll-off observatory and I hope I will be finished by the end of October. My main interest are the deep sky objects of the Milky Way.

I started with Astronomy 30 years ago with a Meade LX200. While I travelled for many years back and forth between Europe and California, my LX200 stayed in California. I had wonderful evenings and mellow nights under the stars. After I moved the telescope to Europe this stopped, the sky in Berlin was just too bad and I was working too much to often drive to darker skies. 

After retiring I bought an A-P Starfire 130, moved to sunny Cape Town and now the Southern Skies keep me entertained.