Felias

The Celestron does indeed fit the Baader zoom, but once you have locked it in place, you can't turn the zoom wheel anymore. It's a bit annoying, but not too bad: once you have decided on the optimal level of zoom for the current seeing, you can stick to that magnification.

6 minutes ago, Stu said:

Those are excellent shots @Felias 👍

Thank you, Stu! I tried to use my DSRL since I found a T2 mount and Canon adaptor from the old school telescope, but I couldn't reach focus. I was a bit disappointed, but at least I had my phone.

I saw the eclipse from Canterbury today. My photos cannot compare to the ones posted already, but I thought I'd join the party anyway! 🥳 I took a couple of videos by holding the phone in front of the eyepiece (Baader Hyperion zoom), and using a Lunt 40 on a basic alt-az mount. The pictures are therefore not great, but I had a lovely time watching my first eclipse in H-alpha.

36 minutes ago, Ouroboros said:

It is a shame. I wonder whether there’s a sense that the cathedral doesn’t belong to the people anymore. I remember back in the 60s/70s locals used the cathedral and precincts as a cut through, as they had for centuries probably.  A three way short cut through Kings School, round the cloisters and out through the main gate in Burgate(?) or in and out from Broad Street.   It must feel like an exclusion zone now. 

A bit, sadly. Besides, they have closed Green Court for visitors this term, so neither tourists nor locals are allowed unless they enter with an authorised guide. This is the trend now in most Cathedral towns I believe, all across Europe. They did the same in my home town in 1992.

5 minutes ago, Ouroboros said:

What a lovely place to work! Plenty of opportunity for photography I’d have thought.

Tell me, do locals get a sort of free pass to the precinct and cathedral? I hope they do.  

Yes, I've been taking pictures around the place for years. Most of the time I only have my old phone, though, so they are not great. There's no free pass for locals, but you can attend the services if you want to enter the Cathedral freely, or walk around the Precincts in the evening after they close the building. A shame, I know.

18 minutes ago, Ouroboros said:

Lovely shots …… and rather nostalgic for me. They took me back to my youth when the precincts of Canterbury cathedral and the cathedral itself were free to public access unlike now. Mind you, I don’t recall them being open at night. Did you have to get permission to take the photos, @Felias?

I actually work within the Precincts. 😇 I had to attend the Eucharist on Sunday, so I decided that, since I was there, I'd at least take some pictures. Mind you, they now open the Precincts in the evenings after the Cathedral building is closed for visitors, so you can wander at leisure for an hour or so and take pictures. While I was manipulating the camera, two blokes who were walking around the Precincts asked me when the Cathedral was built. They couldn't believe it was so old when I told them when each section was built. 😅

@Nik271@Sunshine Thank you, the moons were difficult, there was a cloud cover, so the haze from Jupiter almost made them disappear!

I took these last Sunday, during the full moon, but I've been really busy this week, so I have been slow at processing. All taken with a Canon 77D, the first one with a Samyang 16 mm f/2, and the others with a Samyang 135 mm. The last photo is just a crop of the previous one, but I think it works on its own, and makes it easier to see Jupiter's moons through the haze of the clouds.

8 hours ago, Astro_Dad said:

Excellent image, well done there. Can clearly see Ganymede. Unfortunately poorly youngest child here last night so no observing for me though I did spot how close Jupiter was to the Moon. Nice view through the window! 

Thanks, I hope your child is better. Mine kept stomping near the tripod, so it's a miracle I got any picture at all!

1 hour ago, Whistlin Bob said:

Not much chance of astronomy when you're in the middle of Birmingham, but here's the moon and Jupiter over Grand Central station tonight.

Nice! I also spotted them from the rather polluted Canterbury city centre, so I couldn't help taking a picture from the living room. Double exposure, with a Samyang 135, merged in PS -and oversharpened for Instagram. ☺️

When zooming in, one can see Ganymede before eclipsing:

16 hours ago, Mandy D said:

Proof that Britain is not eternally covered with impenetrable cloud! Nice result.

Well, it has been a dry summer, I'm told... 😅

I have been testing some photographic paper I bought for my pupils to build pinhole cameras, and I thought I'd post the result here. I taped the camera (a beer can) outside the window a few days before the summer solstice, and took it down today. Sadly, I don't have a scanner, so I used the photocopier in the school, which apparently can only deliver colour jpeg files or pure b/w tiff. I opted for the jpeg, so it's a bit blocky due to compression, but I guess it's acceptable. The towers at the bottom left of the solar trails belong to Canterbury Cathedral.

On 21/09/2022 at 14:45, ollypenrice said:

There is no simple answer to this question and any simple answer will almost certainly be wrong. The most important thing to understand in DS image processing is that you cannot expect to process all parts of the image in the same way if you want a good result. This has been called 'The Zone System,' meaning that different parts of the image have different processing requirements and should be worked on differently. It follows logically from this that different parts of the image have different requirements in terms of quality.

Ah, yes, what Vernor Vinge calls the 'Zones of thought'...

I'm pretty sure that Andromeda's core falls, like the Milky Way's, in the category of "unthinking depths", when it comes to processing. 🤔

Just I fast picture I took of the moon and Jupiter rising tonight, from my living room. Canon 77D, Samyang 135 f/2. -handheld (that lens is heavy!). Basic corrections and cropped in Lightroom. Quite hazy, but I like the halo.

Really good for the first attempt, and only 30 min. Here's my processing with Siril (very useful for the photometric colour calibration) and Photoshop. There's plenty of noise and banding, so I did not push it much, as I didn't want to clip the background. I didn't reduce the stars with Starnet to save time, but it could help in making the galaxy pop. You just need to gather more data, but you're definitely on track!

5 minutes ago, Bluesboystig said:

Nice result! The learning curve with Siril + GIMP is steep, but definitely worth climbing! Your result on my file looks really good (I was working from a TIFF and exported the final result as a JPEG), actually impressive compared to what I was getting. Thanks for the pointers, really appreciated.

The photo you linked is an absolute masterpiece though, I'm absolutely amazed! I hope one day I'll manage to get something even half that good! 

Siril should be easier if you follow the tutorial step by step: https://siril.org/tutorials/tuto-scripts/

And thanks, but the only trick to that photo was a dark sky, honestly!

It's not too bad, actually, you just need to get rid of the light pollution. A simple background extraction with Siril, and the most basic arcsinh stretch with Photoshop yields this:

It's definitely there, and you should be able to get a better result departing from your original tiff or fits file, instead of the jpg I have used. It looks like there's coma in the stars, though, so worth checking your lens. And do not be afraid of longer exposure times, it's not too bad if there's a bit of trailing. I did this 50 mm with 8-second exposures, you gain more than you lose by letting the stars trail some:

Sad news. I was just reading another thread in the Lounge that was edging towards the paranormal, and now that I learn this, it's impossible not to think about Ian MacLeod's 'New light on the Drake equation'. Not easy to find (see http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?100406 ), but one of the great modern classics of British sci-fi. Well worth a read.

I have made a timelapse:

The random lights on the windmill are from cars, it is near a road. And there's ALWAYS traffic in Kent!

It was rather windy last night, and clouds got in the way sporadically, so it was not worth setting up the full rig. But it is the last weekend of my holidays, so I wanted to go out. I decided that star trails would be fine in such weather, and I had only done them once many years ago. Besides, I had been meaning to photograph the Chillenden windmill since I found out that its restoration was completed, and it's only a 20-minute drive from home.

Canon 77D, Samyang 16mm f/2. 110 x 1min subs, ISO 200, F2.8. I light-painted the mill with my headlamp.

18 hours ago, Barna20 said:

Good point on the lens topic. I'll try to buy a camera with two lens a 18-55mm kit lens and a 75-300mm, I don't have any plans to buy telephoto lens with larger zoom any time soon. I've got my eyes on the RedCat 51 APO and some other SkyWatcher APOs and refractors, but I don't really decided on this topic yet, I would pick one only after I bought the Star Adventurer GTi anyways. I think a telescope like those would be a good fit for a DSLR, but for a ZWO, they certainly would be.

I started with the 77D and a WO Z61II, which is only slightly larger than the RedCat. I didn't find it particularly difficult, even though I jumped straight from the standard 18-55mm lens on a tripod to a Star Adventurer and telescope. If you are planning to do deep sky, I'd say a small apochromatic refractor would be a better choice than a good telephoto lens, for a similar price.

As for the camera, there are very good suggestions in this thread. Whether you go the DSRL or the astro camera path depends on whether you can use a laptop or not. I do not have a garden, so I decided that I was not ready to set up a station in the middle of the fields at night, and that my rig would be as portable as possible. Therefore, an AA battery-powered Star Adventurer and a DSRL were the reasonable choice. I know that a dedicated astro camera would give me better images, but under my present situation, I'm happy with my current setup. If you will be imaging from home, maybe you should heed what others say about skipping the DSRL step!

As stated above, any Canon will be a good choice, but make sure that it has a flip-out screen. An APS-C sensor should be cheaper, and good enough for the objects you want to photograph. I'm still a beginner myself, but I've been quite happy with my Canon 77D and, more recently, with an astro-modded Canon 700D. Now, if you are planning to buy a Star Adventurer, and you don't have any lenses for your DSRL... well, they are expensive, so you may want to skip that step and invest on a small refractor instead.

Just got this form FLO (so fast!),

As usual, very safely packed. The little box on the top right corner is empty, I wonder if it contains something when you get the bundle, or is it there just to prevent the box with the counterweight from sliding? 🤔

Sadly, the camera tripod I've been using with my older Star Adventurer is not sturdy enough for the GTi, so I cannot test it until a new tripod arrives. At least I could connect the mount's wifi to my phone and the SynScan app seems to work properly. Hopefully the new steel tripod will arrive soon...

Something similar happened to me once when I took by mistake some flat frames that were too bright. The substraction washed out all the nebulosity. But I have always used a DSRL, I don't really know if that could happen with a ZWO.

I like the second one better, the first one has too much star and noise reduction for my taste. Perhaps something in between the two images would be ideal? There also seems to be plenty of chromatic aberration in the stars, you could correct it with the camara raw filter in PS.

11 minutes ago, eshy76 said:

Thank you... it's one of those to target when you are in the Southern Hemisphere, though with a DEC of -24, this is probably very possible from anything around 20° N.

 

Even at higher latitudes, it's doable. I got this from Camargue, at 43.5° N. And as you suggest, with a very light setup, just a DSRL with a 50 mm lens, and a tripod:

I bet it would even be doable from here in the SE, were it not for the massive light pollution. I'm always thinking in the summers of driving South, to the Romney marshes, and have a go, but it's not easy when you have to take care of a young child the next morning!