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Showing results for tags 'dslr'.
Found 239 results
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A second hand Canon 450D that has had the IR filter and anti-aliasing filters removed. This is known as the Full-Spectrum (or naked sensor) modification. This enhances the camera's sensitivity to Hydrogen Alpha wavelengths greatly. Ideal for shooting emission nebulae, as well as making it a great candidate for Hydrogen Alpha filters. The camera has been modified by myself. It includes the camera body itself, body cap, battery, charger, plug, strap and I'll throw in an EOS-T2 T ring. Bit of cosmetic wear to the camera as to be expected. Note: removing the IR filters means that you'll need to add an astro-friendly IR filter back into the imaging train. This is usually achieved with filters like the Astronomik CLS-CCD filter (for example). Just check the description and make sure it has UV/IR cut. £150 + £11 Postage (Royal Mail Special Delivery)
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I've recently made myself a 12v to 7.4v battery conversion for my Canon 1000D DSLR Camera. This allows you to power it using a 12v source such as a Skywatcher Powertank/Leisure battery, and ensures there's no need for battery swaps mid-imaging run. If you buy a pre-made one then these are ~£40 from Astronomiser etc.Parts, Tools and Instructions are detailed below.Note: I've put Maplin codes, links and prices for some of the parts for reference, but they can probably be obtained elsewhere cheaper. e.g. eBay, Farnell, RS Components etc.Note 2: This is a guide only and I take no responsibility for people breaking their camera!Parts List:Velleman K1823 1A PSU (Maplin VE58N) £9.99Plastic Enclosure 75x51x25 (Maplin KC92A) £2.9912v Switch (Maplin N84JZ) £1.993mm 12v Red LED (Maplin CJ66W) £0.743mm LED holder (Maplin N85AX) £1.3420mm fuseholder (Maplin CT90X) £1.0520mm fuse 1A (Maplin GJ90X) £0.21TO220 Heatsink (Maplin KU50E) £1.14Canon 1000D LP-E5 Battery (eBay) £2.1912v Cigarette Lighter Plug & Lead (eBay) £2.75Wire ~£0Zip ties ~£0TOTAL: £24.39Tools:Soldering ironSolderGlue gunDrillStanley knifeWirecuttersSmall philips screwdriverMultimeterInstructions:Open K1823 kit and complete using enclosed instructions, apart from lying the large capacitor down on its side - so it fits into the case.Place heatsink onto TM317, will have to bend the component back slightly so it fits in the case.Drill one hole in either end of the plastic enclosure for wires in & out.Make holes in enclosure lid for led holder, fuse holder and switch.Fit items into lid.Cut end off cig plug.Measure & cut wires, solder up according to wiring diagram.Carefully open LP-E5 battery case & remove battery, but retain contacts. (Can cut down small pcb just to leave contacts, if easier)Make a small hole in the battery case for wire to come out of.Solder up output wires from K1823 to contacts inside battery case.Check everything including all soldered joints.Insert fuse into fuse holder.Insert cig plug into a 12v source (e.g. Powertank).Use multimeter to check output voltage.Adjust potentiometer on K1823 board to get correct 7.4v.Switch everything off.Glue K1823 board into enclosure.Fit tie-wraps both sides of wires coming out of enclosure for strain relief.Glue battery case back together.Switch everything back on & re-check output voltage.Screw lid onto enclosure.If ok, then insert battery into camera and turn on.
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The Horsehead , The Flame and Alnitak - HaO3RGB JanFeb2020
MarsG76 posted a gallery image in Member's Album
From the album: Deep Sky Imaging
I managed to get some time to process another of my images exposed in January/February 2020. This was the last image when my USB port on my Astro40D failed. This happened while imaging this scene but it happened toward the end of the imaging plan so I got almost the subs that I wanted. The total exposure time was 16 hours and 16 minutes in ISO1600 for all of the subs, RGB, (OSC through the UV/IR Cut filter), HAlpha and OIII. Imaged through my 8" SCT at f6.3, 1280mm FL.© Mariusz Goralski
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Hello! This is my first post on stargazer’s lounge, so forgive me if this is the wrong place to ask. I have a SkyWatcher AZ-GTi mount (with a firmware update + eq wedge so that it can run in eq mode). I also have a Raspberry Pi 4 with INDI, KStars, and Ekos tools. I don’t have a guidescope (and my budget is extremely limited), so I was wondering if there was a way to polar align my DSLR using just the software running on the Raspberry Pi. I’m also competent in Python, if that could be useful for anything. -
I've been having another crack at DSO imaging lately, and I've managed to produce this from 6 hours of integration: I'm quite pleased with it but I'm very new to image processing, so I'd be incredibly grateful if someone wouldn't mind having a go at processing my data! Image Info: Lights: 46x4min + 66x3min Stacked with Dark, Flat and Bias frames Stacked in DSS and processed in GIMP Taken under Bortle 7/8 skies Gear: SkyWatcher ED80 0.85x Reducer Astro-Modified EOS 600D ZWO ASI 120MM Mini Guide Camera with 9x50 Finderscope HEQ5 Pro Mount There's some dust bunnies and other artefacts on the image that I know I could spend more time removing, however I'm wondering if I'm doing my data justice in processing! Thanks, Tom NGC7023 (2).TIF -
Hi guys, So on Tuesday night I spent the evening imaging the moon with my Celestron 9.25 SCT and DSLR as shown below and am happy with the images I collated (I only took images as I did intend to take capture video but I got carried away and time was getting on). I have approx 350 jpeg (and the equivalent in raw) images and have used the Microsoft image composite editor to stitch the frames together without editing them first etc but I wonder if I'm going the images an injustice? I'm not ready to pay for editing software as I know there is a lot of very good free downloads out there and I'm asking for recommendations. Should I be processing the frames before/after stitching and what software would you recommend? Please offer any advice you have. I will post the resulting image once I'm happy with the outcome Thanks in advance!
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Hi all, My last imaging for this season resulted in 11 x 10 minutes on M51, but I already had 23 x 15 minutes from previous seasons so here is some 7 1/2 hours of data. The 23x15 minutes subs were taken under a pretty dark sky (SQM-L = 21.65), while the rest were approx 21.5. Used a modded Nikon D7000 in a 8" Meade LX200-ACF on HEQ5 Pro, guided with NexGuide. I am still amazed that stars were pinpoint in all 23 of the 15 minutes subs. I guess it helped that the OTA was pointing near zenith so flexure and mirror lock issues should have been minimal. Nowadays I stick to max 10 minutes subs. Ragnar
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With so little time left of this season, I pointed my Meade LX200-ACF to Coma Berenices so I would get as many galaxies as possible in one single frame. Used a Nikon D7000, HEQ5 Pro and NexGuide. Two nights gave a total of 6-7 hours of 10 minutes subs (1600mm F/7.8 iso200). Ragnar
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With 15 hours of 8-10 minutes exposures from different locations, this was my last trophy for this season. Captured with my modded D7000 and Meade LX200-ACF on a HEQ5 Pro, guided with NexGuide. With the reducer I used that was approx. 1600 mm FL @ F/8. Ragnar
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Hi all, I am hoping someone might be able to help with a possible way to shoot dark and bias frames on a DSLR (canon 700D) without the need to cover the scope or camera, ideally using APT scripts My thinking is that the camera, has a noise reduction mode where it will take the light shot, then with the shutter closed it will take a dark frame and subtract it from the light. So could you take a series of dark frames on ATP and lock the shutter down? If anyone knows I would love to know. Would be great to automate the lights, park the scope and have it run darks and bias, without the need to go out to it and cap up at 3.-4 in the morn Thanks Matt @astro_pics_uk -
Hello! I have a question on how can I mount my camera to my Sky-Watcher Starquest 130P telescope? I’ve watched so many videos about it and there’s so many different answers on what I need to do that. At the moment, I have 2x Barlow lens and a DSLR. I know that a T-ring is also necessary but is there anything more? Any help is highly appreciated, thanks! (I’m really new to telescopes and astrophotography in general so I hope I don’t say anything dumb)
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Hi All, Having had to move to an apartment where I could not use my CPC 1100, I decided that I have to see what I could do with my NexStar SLT 102 (alt-az achromatic 102mm f6.47 refractor). Setting up on my narrow balcony was challenging and the altitude bearing was so loose that it almost moved from the weight of the Canon 700D. I could not see M31 in the estimated 3.5 magnitude sky so I did a two star alignment and used the live-view to focus on a bright star. I then took a 15 second exposure after slewing to M31 which allowed me to see that I had it in the field of view. After a few more 15 second exposures and playing with the motion controls I managed to get it centered. The resulting picture is from 39 subs of 30 seconds at ISO 1600, 9 flats. The images were stacked and stretched with Siril and then I played with the curves on Gimp, cropped and scaled. Not too unhappy.
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Just thought i'll bring this up as a point of discussion. Today, cooled CMOS Astro Cameras are available in plenty. QHY, ZWO and other variants of the same camera are selling for very reasonable prices. However, there was a point of time when astrophotographers used to cool down their DSLR's as a cheap OSC alternative to CCD cameras. Give a choice, I would've purchased a dedicated CMOS OSC which can cool to 40 C below ambient, but since I had a Canon 500D which I had self modded, I requested a friend Kaustav Chatterjee (an avid model railroader) to cold mod my 500D (he had cold modded his 1000D long back). This newly modded camera has a TEC12703 single peltier and cools to approximately 20 below ambient.What do you guys think?
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Hi all, This is 6 hours (30 x 12 min), taken with my modded Nikon D7000 @iso200 and Astronomik 12 nm Ha 2" filter on Meade LX200-ACF with reducer (=1600 mm FL @ F8). Guided with NexGuide on HEQ5 Pro. The plan was to do a Ha O3 bicolour on this target, but the O3 may be a future thing due to weather conditions. I usually remove the stars during part of my processing workflow and put them back later on, but this time I think the nebulosity and dust came out best without them. I did however try to find out which stars belong to Melotte 15 and include only those, just to portrait the Melotte 15 without anything between it and us, but I could not find that info. Processed with DSS, Starnet and PS. Ragnar
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From the album: Marci’s Astropix
7x20s@ISO1600 (EOS1000D FSM) with 18-55mm kit lens -
From the album: Marci’s Astropix
2hrs with EOS650D at 18Mp shooting visual colour range (240s subs @ ISO800), 1.5hrs with EOS1000D Full-spectrum-modified (no narrowband filters) at 10Mp (120s subs @ ISO800 as core blows out VERY easily in full spectrum). 5x dark frames and 20x bias frames for the EOS1000D session. No flats. Stacked in DSS 64bit with 2x drizzle, processed in Photoshop CC 2018 (very little needed doing to it to be honest, just pull the saturation up a bit to bring the colour out). This is a heavy crop hence the apparent low resolution of the final image. This was the last outing for the EOS650D before I killed it, hence no darks / bias applied to the subs from that camera - it died in process of taking it off mount to shoot darks etc whilst I packed everything else away.© M Coyles
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From the album: Badgers - Astrophotos
A half moon mosaic taken using a Canon 40D and a 2x Barlow via the EOS movie record program© Anton Enright
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Hi, I'm totally New to this hobby and i'm having trouble understanding something in stellarium. I have ordered (not recieved) a Sky-Watcher Explorer 150PDS, which has a 25mm eyepiece 50degrees FOV as a default. I also have a Nikon D810. I wanted to get an idea of what my field of view would be with the 25mm eyepiece (30x on 750mm focal length), and also what it would be With my Nikon D810 mounted shooting prime Focus - no eyepieces. What surprised me was that it wasnt much difference between the frame and size of the object i get with 30x magnification (25mm eyepiece), and what i get with the Nikon D810 mounted. I dont get this. What magnification do i get With my DSLR mounted with no eyepiece?
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Hi All, So I am new to astrophotography and was looking for some advice on what to buy, mainly the mount as I don't have a huge budget. I am currently using a SkyWatcher 102mm Telescope (500mm Focal Length) with a Canon 550d along with a EQ2 mount, so no motors as of yet. Any advice on what mounts to get would be great. Thanks
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Went out on Sunday night to try and get some OIII for the Veil Nebula Bi-Colour Mosaic I’m currently working on. It ended up being a largely frustrating night though as I was fighting a big, bright full moon (in hindsight not the smartest decision I’ve ever made in fairness, lol). Factor in just enough intermittent clouds to exacerbate the issue even more, and when it finally set behind the neighbour’s house at 03:30am I was feeling pretty glum and was about to pack up for the night when I suddenly thought, what the heck, let’s try for a quick capture of 21P! As it was fairly low to the East, I had to disconnect all the cables and carry the whole rig to the other side of the house and re-do Polar Alignment, PHD calibration and focus. I did think about not guiding, as I knew the exposures were going to be short, but it just feels wrong not to guide these days so I decided to do it anyway just for peace of mind if nothing else. So I started capturing around 04:15ish and as astro-dark was due to finish shortly after 5am I decided to just do 40 subs of 90s each using the IDAS-D1 filter (we have streetlights nearby). Went in to grab a quick 60 mins of shuteye, except I overslept and didn’t wake until 06:30, so was then in a mad rush to pack up and get ready for work! Which meant I forgot to get Flats, but thankfully I was able to re-use the master Flat from my M13 image from a few months back and it seemed to work just fine ? Processing this one was interesting to say the least. This is my first comet, so I had to do some research beforehand. These days I always do my stacking in APP, but I had to go old-school and use DSS for this one due it’s special Comet-only stacking mode. So I did 2 stacks, a regular Median one just for the stars, and a 2nd Kappa-Sigma one aligned on the Comet (and using the same reference frame as the Median stack). Some subs were badly affected by intermittent clouds, so I could only stack 33 out of the 40 subs (and tbh 33 was really pushing it, quality-wise). I processed each one separately in PS and then layered in just the comet on top using the ‘Screen’ blending mode. I actually wasn’t aware there was red nebulosity in the background until I started stretching, and it certainly would have been easier to process had it not been there, lol. As expected, I have had to use quite a bit of NR compared to my normal amount, due to the pitiful amount of exposure to work with. Hopefully it doesn’t look too bad but let me know if you think it needs more or less of anything in particular. Of course, there’s only so far you can ever go with just 49 mins of data at hand. As the capture was done in such a rush, I didn’t bother worrying about the framing. I just input the co-ordinates into SGP and let it centre on the object for me. But having now worked out where in the sky this is, and looking at the FoV, I can see that had I rotated the camera 90 degrees then the Cone Nebula would have been in the frame. I actually haven’t imaged the Cone before, so I think this winter I will make a point of imaging it in it’s own right, and then I can re-use it to make a much more interesting version of this image with a much better background. Fun times! C&C welcome as always. And thanks for looking! ? Edit: Decided to make a few changes, so here's v2:- 19 replies
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Hi all! Few days ago i tried imaging a deep sky object for the first time, so i tried m13 as an easy first target, I used took 7 lights, out of witch i selected 3 for stacking, and used 5 darks. DSS only selected 1 frame out of the 3 and stacked that. The result wasn't that good but then again....it's the first time i'm doing this. Settings were iso 6400, 15 second exposure, auto WB. I have also been having this problem, when my telescope slews to a target, it's always to the left of the frame and that was a bummer since i had to crop my picture. Please give me your advice and feedback, Clear skies!
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Hi, Some old data from last November; before my camera was modded. The original image was processed with DSS and GIMP, the new version with DSS and StarTools. I'm still quite noobish when processing with StarTools. but its a really fun program to learn. On this image I forgot to desaturate the sky background to remove the LP colour glow--when I do a reprocess I will do that. I'm hoping that there will be some clear skies around November-December this year to get some better quality data. The streaky noise is caused by the rather noisy CMOS and no dithering--I didn't start using APT until the New Year. The gradient is caused by the secondary being not quite centred under the camera up/down the tube. Around 1 hour of 2-3 min subs, ISO 800 EQ5 and 130P-DS, guided with PHD2 & 50mm finder/guider EOS 1000d and MPCC Mk 4 + Cheap LP filter Old: (GIMP) New: (StarTools--Still a lot of work needed) John
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Hi all! Last night i went out to a friend's place on the outskirts of the city to image jupiter with my 8 incher and my DSLR. Atmospheric conditions were average-ish, just enough to push the scope to F20. I used backyardEOS in planetary mode to control the camera and captured jupiter 2 times about 45 minutes apart with 1700 Frame videos. In one of the images the great red spot is visible and in the other it's not. Please give me your honest feedback and advice, Clear skies!
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Hey guys Having been inspired by everyone else's fine images of M81 & M82 recently, i decided to go back and re-process my shallow stack of the same objects. I shot this back in early Feb, and at the time only decided to swing the wee 80mm scope around to it after my main target for the night (the Rosette Nebula) had disappeared behind the neighbour's house, so i wasn't able to go deep on it. I haven't bothered to return to it since, but i was never fully satisfied with the processing on it (even though it can obviously only be taken so far, given the short FL and exposure) so i decided to have another go (plus the weather's been crap recently!). I'm much happier with the star colours and background now (at least to my eye) and i seem to have eeked out a bit more detail in the galaxies themselves, especially in the jets of M82, where i was able to stretch the Ha data a lot more before blending together a mix of it and the Red channel from the RGB data. Although in hindsight i may have gone too far with the sharpening in M82. Be interested to hear what you guys think. If i was going to add more data to this, i would definitely prioritise the RGB over the Ha (i think i need a much bigger scope to properly shoot Ha on this). Oh yes, and try to remember to shoot at ISO 200 next time, and not 800! lol. Here's the new version: And here's the original: And finally, here's a crop of the new version, just to display the galaxies a bit bigger:
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Hello fellow gazers... I started shooting this one back on Feb 20, when i grabbed 11 x 1200s of Ha subs. 4 of the 11 were not of great quality, due to some light intermittent clouds, but i included them anyway in the stack (such is the trust i place in APP's 'Quality' algorithm). Then on March 3 i finally got another clear night, so while i waited for the sports facilities floodlights to switch off, i grabbed a short set of 20 x 90s RGB subs (just the D5300 with no filter) so i could use them for RGB stars. Then afterwards managed to grab 12 x 1200s of OIII subs. It's been a busy month (house move coming up) so i've only just got around to looking at it now. Processing this one has been a challenge. I wanted to push it hard, to show up some of the nebulosity that sits between the two nebulae, which meant the sky background became an utter pain to deal with. It was noisier than i would like, and still is, hence the need to use more noise reduction than i would normally. Having the stars in a separate layer is great, makes processing so much simpler. It has also improved my workflow i think, as i now tend to end up with an image that has 3 layers, Luminance, Colour, and Stars, rather than a single layer (which i sometimes would, due to laziness!). So now it's easier to go back and fix something later if i decide i don't like it. Full details: 11 x 1200s Ha (2" Baader mounted) 12 x 1200s OIII (2" Baader mounted) 20 x 90s RGB (for stars only) Nikon D5300 (modded) SW 80ED w FF/FR HEQ5-Pro Captured with SGP, pre-processed in APP, post-processed in PS. Ha assigned to Red, OIII to Blue, and Green was synthesized using one of Noel Carboni's actions in PS. I probably spent a good 10 hrs processing this one. Mostly due to trying to create a starless Ha image that was as clean as possible (which was a major PITA i must say!). Also, while the OIII signal was stronger than i was expecting for the tadpole nebula, it was unbelievably weak in the Flaming Star nebula. All i could get, after extreme stretching, was a small blob around the central section, so i gave up on the idea of using Annie's 'Hubble Palette Creation' Action and just went with a Bi-Colour approach. I might try the Hubble Palette just on the tadpoles at a later date, it should take to it much better. This one felt like a struggle, so i'd be grateful for any C&C, no matter how harsh. I think i have a tendency to go 'too far' in my processing, and i might well have done so here. Let me know what you think! Cheers!
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