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Showing results for tags 'astrophotography'.
Found 268 results
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Hi everyone, I am thinking about buying a Celestron Nexstar 6se to use for astrophotography at a very beginner level. I am thinking about using a ZWO ASI224MC as it seems a good option. I have a few questions about how to setup/use it - here they are: 1.) Do you just screw it on where the eyepiece is usually at? 2.) Do you just have the cable going to a computer where you have stacking spect where that stacks the photos it takes? 3.) Does it automatically take photos of planets and DSO’s? 4.) Does it need any filters to get color on nebulae as those are they primary things I want to photograph Thats all, as you can see I am a beginner to astrophotography and just want to know how to use the camera to take decent pictures. Thanks all
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Hello to all, I've just acquired my first tracking mount, a Skywatcher Star Adventurer, having dabbled with AP some years ago with a Celestron Nexstar 5SE which I still own but quickly realised back then that I needed an EQ mount. I captured my first ever planetary images this week with the 5SE and my new ZWO ASI290MC - Jupiter and Mars -which I was pleased with as a first stab but clearly need more work and knowledge. Looking forward to contributing more on the forums. Clear skies, Andy
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HI All, I have nikon d3200 , is it good for astrophotography? i tried with 18-140mm lens but the shots are too much white not good..do i need to upgrade to d3400 or d5300 or d5600?
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I have already posted my first astrophotographic session report in the telescope review thread: Tecnosky 80/480 APO FPL53 Triplet OWL Series - Review. But since that is more of a general review/diary of my experience with the new telescope, I feel some of the issues I am having are being buried and they will probably get more visibility if I post them - in a more synthetic version - in a dedicated thread. So, a few nights ago (October, the 5th) I took out my new telescope for its first light. All the photos have been taken with the 0.8x flattener/reducer and the Optolong L-Pro 2" filter attached to the reducer. The camera is an astromodified Nikon D5300. The only processing the following pictures have consists in this: - AutomaticBackgroundExtractor - ColorCalibration - Stretch Here we have a 90s shot of M31. And here's a mosaic generated with the AberrationInspector script. What I do like: - tightest, smallest, roundest stars I have gotten since I started doing astrophotography at the end of January. Obviously comparing it to what I have been achieving with a kit 70-300mm zoom lens, these can't be anything else but better by orders of magnitude What I don't like: - star shape not consistent in all areas of the image - residual chromatic aberration, especially on stars that are not round: there's clearly some red and blue edges visible I didn't expect this from an apochromatic refractor, but maybe it's just because the stars are kinda "smeared", so not all light is focused at the same spot? I don't see this around the center of the image (or, at least, the problem is less pronounced). Maybe I have some tilting in my imaging train/sensor? I have been doing some reasoning about it and it seems like a combination of tilting and/or backfocus spacing. According to the following image about backfocus spacing: if the stars are elongated radially, the sensor is too close, if they are elongated tangentially, the sensor is too far. But to me it seems I have a little bit of both: in the top right corner, for example, the stars look radially elongated, in the bottom right, they look tangentially elongated. Top left they look tangentially elongated, bottom left also, but a little less. Seems like there has to be some tilting as well, otherwise they would all have a symmetric shape on all corners, correct? How do I determine - is there even a way - if the issue is due to tilting only, backfocus only, or the combination of the two? Is there a sure proof way of checking for tilting? Like, rotating the camera and taking pictures with, say, the camera at 0°, 90°, 270° and 360°? If there's tilting, the pattern of the star shapes should follow the camera, correct? I also tried splitting the channels in R, G, and B components, doing a star alignment of the blue and red channels with the green as a reference, and recombining the channels. The blue and red edges become a lot less evident, which is good, but obviously the star shapes remain the same. In my Telescopius gallery you can also find two other images, Capella and Capella Mosaic showing pretty much the same issues. Also, one issue with the guide camera: ZWO ASI 224MC. When attached to the guide scope (Artesky UltraGuide 60mm f/4), I can't seem to get a "sharp" focus, I even tried on the Moon, and the best I got was a soft lunar disc, with some major features visible, mainly by change of color/brightness (the maria, for example), but no details. The image still seemed blurred/bloated. Is it because of lack of IR blocking filter? I tried the same camera attached to the main refractor, with the L-Pro filter (which blocks UV and IR, as well) and I could focus perfectly. Do I need an IR block filter for guiding or even if the stars appear a little soft, the camera guides just fine? Matteo -
I have been waiting for this telescope for almost five months. Since May, 19th, to be precise. The day I went to the TS Italia store and saw for the first time the SLD model, model now discontinued. I even missed the last available piece just for a few days, once I finally placed my order, June, 25th. It was to be replaced by a newer model, available at the end of the Summer. Boy, am I glad I did miss it. The wait was definitely worth it. The new and improved model is simply beautiful. I fell in love with it as soon as I saw it on the Tecnosky website a few weeks ago, when they posted the product sheet. But in person, it's even more beautiful. So, the people from the store emailed me Friday, October the 2nd, telling me that it was finally available for pickup. I read the message only a whole hour later and it was soon going to be closing time. I started calling at 4:30 PM and I finally managed to get my phone call through at around 5:05 PM. The store closes at 6:00 PM and doesn't reopen until Monday. And it's 40 minutes away from where I live. I made it there in 35. There was no way I was going to have to wait till Monday, knowing my scope was only a few minutes away. So, here's the pre-unboxing picture: - top left, brown box, behind: Vixen clamp for guide-scope - top right, white box: 60mm f/4 guide-scope - top left, white boxes: T2 Nikon ring, 30mm spacer, adjustable spacer - center, behind white boxes: Optolong L-Pro 2" filter - right of filter: spacers mounted and already calibrated for 55mm backfocus, for eventual use of the ZWO ASI 224MC camera with the refractor - top right, Bahtinov mask - underneath the white boxes, top left: Losmandy bar to attach telescope to my NEQ6 Losmandy saddle - big box underneath all of the above: Tecnosky 80mm f/6 FPL-53 OWL Triplet, with carrying case and 0.8x 4 elements flattener/reducer - ZWO black case: ZWO ASI 224MC guide-camera / planetary camera - front left: Talisker 57° North and two glasses (don't mind the shape of the glasses, they are the closest to Whisky suitable glasses that I currently own...) ready for me and my wife to celebrate the end of the wait - front right: box for the aforementioned Whisky I actually waited for yesterday (Saturday, the 3rd) for the unboxing, because I wanted my best friend Omar to be present and help me with filming and taking pictures. We have been friends since we went to kindergarten and we always have had astronomy as a common interest. It just so happens, to my immense surprise, that my telescope is actually SN. 0001, so I own the first telescope ever produced of this new series. The certificate is also very promising, with a Strehl ratio of 0.974 and a Ronchi test that seems very well behaved. I like a little less the red edges on the lenses, but I guess only time and a proper visual - and astrophotographic - session will be able to tell. Obviously the "new equipment curse" didn't help, but we got almost a whole hour with clear sky patches and obviously I couldn't pass up the opportunity. I quickly setup with the bare minimum necessities for a visual observation and me, my wife and my best friend Omar - who helped with the staging, recording and directing of the unboxing event - took a quick look at the Moon, Saturn, Mars, M31 and Perseus Double Cluster. I can definitely understand now, even if the seeing wasn't perfect, and my eyepieces didn't offer enough magnification (25mm and 10mm give me 80x and 200x, with my C8, but with a native focal length of 480mm, even with a Barlow 2x, we could only achieve about 38x and 96x, respectively), what people mean when they say that an apochromatic refractor brings out the objects from the background sky. The contrast was stunning, the stars were absolute points, pinpoint, small and sharp (with my C8 they always have kind of a "blob" feeling), the contrast on the Moon was fantastic and I could see many details, despite it being almost full, and only at 48-96x. I think it passed the visual test with honors. I was also very happy to be able to see the Double Cluster all in the same field of view for the first time. Saturn was well defined, could clearly make out the rings - don't recall, in all the excitement, rush and cycling between me, my wife and my friend, if I saw the Cassini division, but I'll definitely try again next clear sky night. Mars was also beautiful, could clearly see its rusty red color, the polar cap and some darker, black features on the surface. I really can say it's a beautiful telescope, very well made and machined. The attention to details is really of another level, the paint finish is very nice and matte. Also very lovely all the different red and black anodized surfaces, they really give it a nice finish and personality. The focuser is also the best I have ever had on a telescope. Very smooth, precise, with no backlash. Coming from a C8 where every touch of the focuser throws off the image all over the place and the backlash is quite significant, I really appreciated how easy it was to fine tune focusing with a proper focuser, especially with the 10:1 focusing knob. I can't wait to be able to take the first pictures of some star field, to check if even photographically the telescope lives up to my expectations. I hope to get pinpoint stars corner to corner and that the backfocus won't be something too hard to make perfect. Here's some accessories. Optolong L-Pro 2" filter, Bahtinov mask, Losmandy dovetail to replace the Vixen one the telescope comes with, Nikon T2 ring and spacers to use the ASI 224MC with the correct backfocus directly on the telescope, instead of a guide-camera. Here's the 60mm f/4 guide-scome, with Vixen clamp. And the ZWO ASI 224MC guide-camera. Here's the mandatory celebration beer, at Corte dell'Orso (the Bear's Courtyard). It's a Belgian sour beer, lambic style. Oudbeitje by Hanssens Artisanaal, with added strawberries. A very nice beer, sour, tart and fruity. Could definitely taste the strawberries. Cheers! Here's a couple of pictures of the full setup, with everything mounted on my Sky-Watcher NEQ6 Pro. The setup is in its astrophotographic configuration: mount, telescope, guide-scope, guide-camera, filter, flattener/reducer and at the end the Nikon D5300 astromodified. All controlled by Astroberry on my Raspberry Pi 4 4GB, conveniently mounted on a bar across the two telescope rings. And finally a close up of the rig.
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Hi! I've been struggling to get rid of slightly spiked/elongated stars that appear on the left hand side of my images. The stars have small spikes coming out the bottom left hand side of them. I use an unmodded Canon 600D with a 70-200mm Canon f4 lens (which I have recently cleaned to try and solve this issue). I use the star adventurer to track, but this doesn't look like the type of trail you get with bad alignment. I've attached some images as an example of what I mean - Example 1 is the bottom left of an image of the North American Nebula, and example 2 is the top right of the same image. Any ideas?
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From the album: Deep Sky Imaging
These nebulae are located in the constellation Corona Australis, between γ and ε Coronae Australis and features NGC6726, NGC6729 and NGC6723. This is not a popular group of objects or part of the sky, but I thought that the combination of reflection nebula crossed by a dark nebulae make an interesting image. This image was exposed through my Celestron 8" SCT (at F10), on the CGEM mount with my full spectrum modded and cooled Canon 40D DSLR for a total exposure time of 5 hours, 59 minutes and 30 seconds.© Mariusz Goralski
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From the album: Deep Sky Imaging
This image is a cropped and rotated version of the M16 image to emphasize the famous "Pillars of Creation" part of the nebula, made popular by the HST image of the same name. The color channels are SII, HAlpha and OIII as RGB, and color balanced to remove the heavy green color cast created by the strong Hydrogen Alpha signal. The total exposure time spent on this image was 20 hours and 57 minutes consisting of the following subs exposures: RGB: 13x15s, 19x30s, 17x60s, 12x90s, 17x120s, 15x180s HII: 2x600s, 9x900s, 4x1200s OIII: 1x600s, 8x900s, 1x1200s, 11x1500s SII: 2x500s, 14x1800s All at ISO1600.© Mariusz Goralski
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From the album: Deep Sky Imaging
My latest image of the Eagle nebula (M16/NGC6611) in the constellation Serpens, this time imaged through narrowband filters using my 8" Celectron SCT, at F10 - 2032mm focal length, with my astromodded and active peltier cooled Canon 40D DSLR. The color channels are SII, HAlpha and OIII as RGB, and color balanced to remove the heavy green color cast created by the strong Hydrogen Alpha signal. The total exposure time spent on this image was 20 hours and 57 minutes consisting of the following subs exposures: RGB: 13x15s, 19x30s, 17x60s, 12x90s, 17x120s, 15x180s HII: 2x600s, 9x900s, 4x1200s OIII: 1x600s, 8x900s, 1x1200s, 11x1500s SII: 2x500s, 14x1800s All at ISO1600.© Mariusz Goralski
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Finally I processed the Comet Neowise captured from Bangalore. Simple Set-up: Canon80D, Sigma 70-300 DG APOII @100mm F/4. ISO2000, 50x5s Stacked in Deep Sky Stacker Processed in Pixinsight. Lots of noise as I wanted to pull out both tails -
Hi, I would like to share my design of a smart barn door tracker. It is a simple to build isosceles barn door tracker with tangent error correction through a Arduino micro-controller. I have shared all the details about the tracker including the mechanical design, electrical circuit and the software source code here: https://barndoor.spa...ference-design/ If you are interested in the math and other details about a barn door tracker, more details are there in the blog. Also find an online calculator which helps in calculating various parameters while designing a barn door tracker. The blog is here: https://barndoor.space/ M46 and M47 shot with this tracker. 135mm lens, ISO800, 15sec X 200 subs (50 minutes) exposure. Cannon 500D. Comments and suggestions most welcome! Regards, Arun
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Hello again. I have recently had my passion for astrophotography reignited. I can't help but think it might be something to do with being locked in the house for the last three months, but whatever the reason I'm happy to have new challenges. The last time I did it was ten years ago and through the help of the good people on this forum, I managed to get a decent Orion's Nebula and Andromeda. At the time, I was doing everything wrong. No polar alignment, no guiding, using a Newt with no comma corrector and way over my mount's carrying capacity. It's a miracle I managed to shoot anything at all! On my return, I decided I'd stop doing it wrong and hoping for a result and instead, put my hand in my pocket and stop cutting corners. I left the big Newt in the cupboard and instead dusted of the C80 ED-R and added a .8 reducer/flattener, a guide scope package and an LPF. I had ordered the guidescope package last month (Altair Astro Starwave 50 and GPCAM) so I had at least messed around with PHD2. My results were not great. Mostly (completely) down to me being inexperienced. My guiding graph was all over the place. It looked like seismic readings for the San Francisco earthquake! I realised after some research that my issues were mostly down to a) my ageing CG5 mount with more backlash than an ill-thought comment on Twitter, b) the fact I didn't have the guidecam aligned with the mount's axis and c) an unbalanced OTA due to the limitations of the standard C80 tube holder, a DSLR, reducer and guidescope all pushing the CofG to somewhere near Leeds. I needed a rethink and redesign. I junked the standard OTA holder and instead went for tube rings and a dovetail bar. This made a huge difference and I could now easily balance the setup with an east bias. I stripped down my mount and tried to eliminate as much backlash as I could reasonably achieve. Aligned the guidecam. Purchased ASCOM cablesfor the mount and then waited to see if my endeavors would reward me with a result. I had to wait a while. Eventually, the sky offered me some testing time on the longest day of the year -_-. Oh well. Testing is testing. Did my work make things hugely better? Did I get 10 minute exposures with rounded stars? Nope. It was marginally better though. I shot some random star fields and and I got some random star fields. (I was actually trying to get the Veil, but don't tell anyone). I'd done everything I could reasonably do to the mount and it still wasn't performing. I made the decision. I'd replace it with the Skywatcher EQ6-R. Once I'd made that decision, I figured I might as well replace the DSLR too and once I started rolling down the hill of spending, my wallet gained momentum. After I'd added everything up, I realised it was going to cost me over £3k and I would essentially be replacing everything, including the OTA for a Explorer Scientific 102mm APO. Now I'm not super-rich. These acquisitions will have to be done in parts. I had to decide in which order to split off the main outlays. Which bits would benefit me quicker while I wait for the other bits? I opted to go for image train improvements first, then the mount then in two months I'll get the OTA. So with that being said, I purchased a Tri-band filter, iPolar polar finder and an Altair Astro 183 Pro TEC. Of course, as soon as these items were delivered last week, the storms rolled in over the UK. Sorry about that. However, fortune favours the brave and on the evening they arrived, a window of clear skies miraculously appeared over Yorkshire and I knew I had to at least have a go at setting it all up for the first time. So with all that preamble out of the way, I received and setup the bits I've got so far and realised in one epiphany type moment that all my mount troubles had been down to poor initial setup. The iPolar camera gave me a flawless polar alignment which had the immediate effect of excellent guiding. I pulled off a 9 minute exposure with round stars! As mentioned somewhere above, on my first forays into the summer sky I'd been looking for The Veil Nebula. It was my summer goal, but I have to admit, I'm not familiar with the summer sky at all. I'd always been a winter sky watcher. So I was just blind shooting really. The night I got the new gear setup however, I decided to use plate-solving in APT. I had no idea if it was even going to work, but I tried a plate-solving goto move and after a few minutes, it said it had been a success. I had to trust it. I fired off a 4 minute sub and I was almost convinced that I could see a faint outline of structure, but I wasn't sure if it was just wishful thinking. It was 12:00 am at this point and I was mindful of the fact that I had to be up early and deliver a training course to an Italian company in the morning. I decided to fire off 10x 2 mins exposures. It would suffice as a test of the gear, the guiding, the gain settings and whatever else I'd been messing with. I finally got packed up at 12:45 am and didn't even get a chance to stretch an image to see if I'd got any useful data. I had to go to bed not knowing and work through the morning without knowing. At lunch time, sandwich in hand. I stacked what I had in DSS. No darks, no flats, no bias. I just needed to see. As I did my first stretch in PS I almost cried out with joy. I realise that it it by no means a great shot, but for a moron with brand new gear, I'm pretty pleased with it for just 20 mins of data. In 2024, when the skies will be clear again, I'll add some tri-band data and some more broadband data and see if I can't fill it out a little. I also need to calm down on the gain on the 183 and I'll no doubt be asking a lot of question here again. Anyway, it's great to be back in the hobby and back on the forum and I look forward to looking at all your inspirational images over the coming months. Without further ado, my first attempt at the East Veil. Thanks for reading. Frooby
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Friends, I am back with a tutorial video on how to modify your Sky Watcher HEQ5-PRO mount or its American twin, the Orion Sirius EQ-G into a belt driven mount. The benefits of converting to a belt drive is that you don't have to worry about Backlash. The procedure took me about an hour to complete. Link is below https://youtu.be/PjDZiXaN5KM
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Hi everyone! So I’ve been lurking on this forum for a couple of months and thought it was about time I made an account as I’ve been back and forth deciding on which scope to purchase. I only got into Astro a couple of months ago when I took my first photo of the moon on the night of the ‘flower moon’, with my Canon 700D. I don’t know why it had never occurred to me to try and photograph it, but I think lockdown prompted me to look around and notice the sky a bit more! Since then I’ve been trying to get photos of the stars whenever there’s been a clear night (rare in Manchester anyway, plus my garden is Bortle 8 on pollution). I’ve succeeded in a few nice snaps but it’s time I invested in this hobby now I think. Having never owned a scope I’m completely new to this so trying to pick something that isn’t massive (for storage purposes), that I can get a good view of the planets but mostly something where I can see and hopefully photograph deep sky objects from my garden if possible. I’ve recently been looking at the SkyWatcher Explorer 130PDS or 150PDS, and want to spend £400 max. I’m leaning more towards the 130PDS due to cost, and based on some photos I’ve seen on here, although I imagine the 150PDS would be better, although appears to need a mount purchasing separately. I nearly went for the William Optics SpaceCat 51 at one point, then realised I was probably trying to run before I could walk! Any help at all would be fantastic. Many thanks, Nat -
Hi, Here's a quick shot of last night's moon. I've broken the crayford on my SkyWatcher 130pds so had to hold the focuser tube to get it sharp. Not ideal but I'm pleased with the result. Àny ideas how I can add more colour without affecting the detail? Thanks
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Hi guys! My name is Andrew, I only just stumbled across these forums just now! Couldn’t have come across a better community to help me with some questions I have! So I’ve Come to the conclusion that I’m going to be buying a Celestron Nexstar 6SE telescope everything about it appeals to me. I currently own a much older manual celestron telescope and am ready for my first proper telescope! I do plenty of photography and own a DSLR and am aware that with this telescope that it comes with a software that will record video of what you’re gazing at and stack the images if I’m correct? because I’m familiar with normal photography and not so much with Astro photography I was wondering if anyone could help me out. For the stocking software, is that all the process completed within the telescope and no DSLR? Or is that recorded with the DSL are and then the software stacks? What kind of adapters would I need to be getting into AP? By the way I’m looking at mainly photographing the moon and hopefully get some awesome shots of the other planets too! not so much deep AP, as from my research I’ve gathered that this isn’t the greatest for it... anyways. Is it better to use a DSLR and an adapter on the eyepiece for imaging? Or the stacking and what would I need for best result stacking images, especially of planets like Saturn and Jupiter?! Are the individual eyepiece attachments you buy for the telescope, cameras in themselves? What is aci? I’ve got no clue! Haha a lot to learn! I thought I was on the right track looking by myself for equipment and I came across the 10MP celestron Neximage eyepiece or whatever it is? I’m not entirely sure? And also what is a T ring? Is that a Dslr adapter? Does the stacking software come with the telescope or with additional purchases?! Sorry for the bombardment of questions! Obviously I’m very excited to get going and am very keen on getting some equipment! Any answers are much appreciated! Have a great day! Andrew -
Hey all, I made an acquisition and processing tutorial a while back (3 years ago? Yikes!) and it is fairly dated in terms of what I'm doing these days. I've been asked for a long time to make a new one showing what I'm doing these days. Specifically how I'm processing a single shot image for both the surface and prominences and how to process them together to show prominences and the surface at once. I've abandoned doing split images and composites and strictly work from one image using layers. Acquisition does not use gamma at all anymore. Nothing terribly fancy, but it's not exactly intuitive so hopefully this new video will illustrate most of the fundamentals to get you started. Instead of an hour, this time it's only 18 minutes. It's real time from start to finish. I'm sorry for the long "waiting periods" where I'm just waiting for the software to finish its routine, it lasts 1.5 minutes and 30 seconds tops typically at first. The first 4 minutes is literally just stacking & alignment in AS!3. I typically will go faster than this, but wanted to slow down enough to try to talk through what I'm doing as I do it. Hopefully you can see each action on the screen. I may have made a few mistakes or said a few incorrect things or terms, forgive me for that, this is not my day job. I really hope it helps folk get more into processing as its not difficult or intimidating when you see a simple process with only a few things that are used. The key is good data to begin with and a good exposure value. Today's data came from a 100mm F10 achromatic refractor and an ASI290MM camera with an HA filter. I used FireCapture to acquire the data with a defocused flat frame. No gamma is used. I target anywhere from 65% to 72% histogram fill. That's it! The processing is fast and simple. I have a few presets that I use, but they are all defaults in Photoshop. A lot of the numbers I use for parameters are based on image scale, so keep that in mind, experiment with your own values. The only preset I use that is not a default is my coloring scheme. I color with levels in Photoshop, and my values are Red: 1.6, Green 0.8, Blue 0.2 (these are mid-point values). Processing Tutorial Video (18 minutes): https://youtu.be/RJvJEoVS0oU RAW (.TIF) files available here to practice on (the same images you will see below as RAW TIFs): https://drive.google.com/open?id=1zjeoux7YPZpGjlRGtX6fH7CH2PhB-dzv Video for Acquisition, Focus, Flat Calibration and Exposure (20 minutes): (Please let me know if any links do not work) ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Results from today using this work flow method. Colored: B&W: SSM data (sampled during 1.5~2 arc-second seeing conditions): Equipment for today: 100mm F10 Frac (Omni XLT 120mm F8.3 masked to 4") Baader Red CCD-IR Block Filter (ERF) PST etalon + BF10mm ASI290MM SSM (for fun, no automation) Very best,- 22 replies
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I moved from color (Canon) DSLR camera's to more advanced ZWO black and white camera's with color filters. Now I have to handle gain and offset instead of ISO. In theory I think I understand very well what it's about, and took notice of the literature. In practice at the telescope I have to rely on trial and error with test exposures. Can someone point a (reference to a) cookbook-like procedure to me, which lead to the optimal setting of gain and offset? Johan, Netherlands. [C14/Hyperstar, with a ZWO-183, and with a lot of light pollution.]
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Unable to replicate observed detail in photograph
Matt Hayden posted a topic in Imaging - Discussion
Hello! What with all this locking down business and home schooling my ten year old son, I have dusted off my TAL-1 and created a slightly less than ideal setup in his room. The westward facing window has been providing great views of the moon and venus over the past week. Obviously doing this indoors is not great (the floor is pretty solid, as is the TAL stand!) but it does mean we get to use the scope every evening, rather than going through the process of carrying the whole rig outside every day. I have a T-mount converter for my old-ish Pentax k-M DSLR, but have quite disappointing results with the camera, when compared to the observed image using the eye. The eyeball view is nothing less than banging - crystal clear detail with a 25mm eyepiece, strong contrast - it's spectacular. I add the camera with an eyepiece inside a tube, and can't replicate the same result, or anything like it. It's OK, but not good enough. I've cleaned the eyepiece today and collimated the scope. The primary mirror looks fine other than a couple of tiny dust particles, no scratches or weirdness on the coating. The camera is working pretty well as far as I can tell. Apart from a little clumsy-ness with the adjustments, the clarity in the eyepiece suggests it's all working fairly well. Photo attached of best result from last night. My question is: is this a focusing issue or some sort of aberration? Should I expect focusing to be difficult in the camera eyepiece? What's going on?! Does anyone have any other tips I can try to get this working better?- 11 replies
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Hello, I noticed the sky was clear enough to get the telescope out for the first time tonight since getting it for Christmas (newbie), my phone mount to take images properly hasn't arrived yet but with my Note 9 pointing straight upwards I took a few photos (max 10 second exposure, F1.5 and ISO 800) and believe I have captured M45/Pleiades and California Nebula, please correct me if I am wrong though. Thought the second photo was also cool. Feedback and tips would be greatly appreciated. Spencer
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Hello, I am an amateur astronomer that wants to get into deep-sky astrophotography. I already have a telescope which is Celestron Nexstar 127 SLT but it doesn't meet the requirements to take photos of wide field nebulaes/galaxies, (Ex: Orion Nebula, Andromeda Galaxy). I need some help on what to use and afford! It has to be under £550. I need a 70 or 80mm optical tube, with a mount that does polar alignment and can be attached to the optical tube then I need a Canon camera that can take long exposure high ISO photos and last a filter or two to help reduce light pollution and contrast the nebula/galaxy more! This is just for my birthday, I do not expect the best! I just need a beginners setup.
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I have a nexstar 6se and I love it. I've only had it about a year and it's my first proper telescope. Every opportunity I'm out in the garden both looking through it and attaching my dslr to the back for fainter objects. I'm noticing I'm getting movement in the longer exposure photos and after a bit of googling I think it's the mount. So I'm looking to upgrade. I'm thinking something a little future proof but I'm not made of money so decent, reliable, cheaper end but good enough for astrophotography and with the possibility I might continue to add bits and pieces. What do I need and how much am I looking? Help thanks in advance.
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Hi! I've recently acquired a new Astromodified Canon rebel XT and I've tried to take pictures of nebulas using it but I've noticed that there are these weird black artifacts that keep appearing in my images. Would like to know if anyone has experienced this before? Or are these dirt/dust specs on the camera, filter, and telescope glass? I've attached some of my edited and raw pictures for your reference. The black artifacts can already be seen in the raw image of the horsehead nebula and after stacking I think it got amplified. Anyway, advance thanks and I hope everyone's doing well.
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From the album: Astrophotography
Taken with my iOptron Skytracker and Canon 70d with 300mm lens.- 3 comments
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- orion nebula
- orion
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From the album: Mike's Images
Cat's Paw Nebula - NGC 6334 ( aka Bear Claw Nebula ) An emission nebula in Scorpius (near the scorpion's tail) RA 17h 25m 39.6s ; Dec -35deg 43' 48" . 7th August 2015. Skywatcher Quattro 10" f4 Newtonian. Skywatcher AZ Eq6 GT Mount Orion 80mm f5 guide scope and auto guider - PHD2. Baader MPCC Mark 3 Coma Corrector, UHC-S 'nebula' filter. Nikon D5300 (unmodified). Field of view (deg) ~ 1.35 x 0.90. ISO800, 14bit NEF, Long Exp. NR on. 28 x 200sec (starting at zenith) no moon, 3deg C, 70%RH, moderate LP. PixInsight© Copyright Mike O'Day 2015 - all rights reserved
