Sadr Region

[Adreneline]

At only 40 degrees above the horizon in the glow of East Midlands Airport trying to image the Sadr region is not ideal. With only 90 minutes of darkness this is 25 x 120s of Ha and 20 x 120s of OIII using a Samyang 135mm + ASI1600 at unity gain, offset 50 and -20 degrees. There was also a near 50% moon!

Processed in PI and combined in PixelMath with a little bit of colour tweaking in PS.

Thanks for looking.

Adrian

[Allinthehead]

I like it, nice image. The Butterfly looks like it just dropped its star.

[kirkster501]

Superb, well done Adrian.

How did you connect the ASI to the Samyang please?

[Adreneline]

6 minutes ago, kirkster501 said:

How did you connect the ASI to the Samyang please?

I use a TS EoS adapter and filter holder :

It’s a bit tight on achieving the correct spacing!

[kirkster501]

Cool, many thanks.  I will investigate.

[Adreneline]

15 minutes ago, kirkster501 said:

I will investigate.

This is the adapter and this is the filter holder.

HTH

Adrian

[Adreneline]

55 minutes ago, Allinthehead said:

I like it, nice image.

 

31 minutes ago, kirkster501 said:

Superb, well done Adrian.

Thanks very much guys for the kind comments.

I am still learning how to get the best from the ASI1600 so I thought I'd start with unity gain, offset 50 and experiment with different exposure durations.

Adrian

[Adreneline]

Couldn't resist adding some SII; out of 35 lights taken 23 were spoilt by clouds and aircraft on approach to EMA (Arghh!).

I find it really difficult to get the colour balance right with the Hubble Palette so any tips or help would be much appreciated.

Ha, OIII and SII masters were all 'balanced' using LinearFit in PI and then combined using Annie's Astro Actions in PS. Resulting magenta halos were removed in PI followed by a final colour balance in PS to try to align the histograms.

Thanks for looking.

 

[AbsolutelyN]

Stunning image and really interesting to see how you have mounted the lens. Do you know of any article which explains how to build such a rig? Specifically interested in how to build the belt focus system part, really struggling to find anything on such a setup.  Many thanks.

[Adreneline]

12 minutes ago, AbsolutelyN said:

Specifically interested in how to build the belt focus system

Thank you for your kind comments.

I can certainly give you all the details if you would like them. Essentially it is a based around a NEMA 17 stepper motor and drive unit all driven by an Arduino Uno along with a rotary encoder. The belt is from MotionCo as is the toothed pulley. The tube rings are from TS Optics. I should point out my programming days are long, long over - I'm too old to learn those sort of new tricks! - so all I did was adapt some existing code (I didn't need a digital display but you can leave that code in place as it makes no difference) and housed the Uno + stepper control unit in a weather proof box. The system is entirely manual and is not USB, ASCOM or anything else clever. I focus at the start of an imaging session by going outside and focussing the 135mm using SharpCap (on my laptop) and sometimes/rarely an external Bahtinov mask. I have found the Samyang focus never changes during an imaging session. I rarely do more than one filter per session but even when I do the focus seems to be the same for all filters - maybe I'm lucky!

I don't have the luxury of a permanent setup. It takes me typically 15 minutes to be setup and running, including polar alignment and then maybe another 5 minutes to make sure the focus is as good as I can get it. It takes 15 minutes to strip down and most of that is waiting for the camera to warm up!

 

The dual mount lets me replace the Samyang with either my ED80 or ZS71 but I tend to prefer the wide field imaging these days.

HTH

If you need more detail on specifics just ask.

 

[AbsolutelyN]

That's amazing, thanks so much for such detailed info! I'll have a good look at this, looks like quite a project to get up and running with steep learning curve. Brilliant setup!