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Hello from Newbie in Cumbria


David Hardie

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Hi David,

I'm new to astronomy in West Cumbria as well - I'm in Whitehaven. I have only been stargazing for a month. I have a Sky-watcher StarTravel 102 on an AZ GTe Wifi mount (EQ mode) and an Orion StarMax 90, so much more modest scopes than yours. My light pollution is probably much worse than Greysouthen especially as I'm in the down centre and a LED street-light shines almost directly on my scope. But I'm happy with the photos my ASI224MC has managed in the short time I've had it.

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On 15/12/2018 at 14:03, JBracegirdle said:

Hi David,

I'm new to astronomy in West Cumbria as well - I'm in Whitehaven. I have only been stargazing for a month. I have a Sky-watcher StarTravel 102 on an AZ GTe Wifi mount (EQ mode) and an Orion StarMax 90, so much more modest scopes than yours. My light pollution is probably much worse than Greysouthen especially as I'm in the down centre and a LED street-light shines almost directly on my scope. But I'm happy with the photos my ASI224MC has managed in the short time I've had it.

I've just clicked on your link.

In there you've quoted they're 15 x 4.4 second frames?

I'm a bit confused how you can get such results in this time span?

Stu 

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Hi Stu,

I was surprised how good they came out as well. I have just checked my SharpCap raw FITS for more details to give you. I've updated my astrometry.net album to say they were 15 to 80 sub-frames. As I found 4.4 seconds and 200 gain worked for me on the first night I stuck with it. I've only really had 2 successful nights so far (it's been cloudy other nights) : 

On 09/12/2018 I captured the Horse-head Nebula with 39 4.4  second sub-frames, and the Flame Nebula with 15 x 4.4 sub-frames.

On 12/12/2018 I captured M33 with 80 x 4.4 second sub-frames, NGC7000 with 17 x 4.4 second sub-frames (it won't all fit in my FOV), and NGC 7380 with 36 x 4.4 second sub-frames.

As to how I did it, well I'm not really sure I've only been an amateur astrophotographer for 2 observing days. :) My guess is the F5 of the StarTravel helped as a fairly fast start, the 0.5 x focal reducer brought that down to about F2.5, the ASI224 camera has quite a high quantum efficiency so is sensitive. The UHC filter probably increased contrast, and seems to cut out the wavelengths where chromatic aberration would be worse. The images were also post-processed using Deep Sky Stacker, and the exposure stretched with GIMP.

In GIMP I used Colour -> Auto -> White-balance that sometimes stretched it really well, other times I used Colour -> Exposure to get it looking right to me.

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On 15/12/2018 at 14:03, JBracegirdle said:

Hi David,

I'm new to astronomy in West Cumbria as well - I'm in Whitehaven. I have only been stargazing for a month. I have a Sky-watcher StarTravel 102 on an AZ GTe Wifi mount (EQ mode) and an Orion StarMax 90, so much more modest scopes than yours. My light pollution is probably much worse than Greysouthen especially as I'm in the down centre and a LED street-light shines almost directly on my scope. But I'm happy with the photos my ASI224MC has managed in the short time I've had it.

Looking good that! Ill follow your posts!

Come over one night !

David

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