130 pds eaa 01/09/2019

[barkingsteve]

Been a while since i done any deep sky stuff. 130 pds on an evolution mount with a 294mc pro and optolong uhc filter. Bortle 9 skies, all captures are between 30-50 stacked 8 second exposures, 125-200 gain and are captured as viewed, no processing. Master dark and flat applied in sharpcap.

M31 ( andromeda Galaxy )

 

ic 5146 ( cocoon nebula )

M16 ( eagle nebula )

ngc 6992 ( eastern veil nebula )

M13 ( hercules cluster )

M8 ( lagoon nebula )

M27 ( dumbell nebula )

M17 ( omega nebula )

ngc 281 ( pacman nebula )

ic 5070 ( pelican nebula )

M20 ( trifid nebula )

Edited September 3, 2019 by barkingsteve

[RobertI]

Lovely captures, that’s a great EAA setup you have.

[Bill S]

Impressive images. Your setup and technique are beating the light pollution really well. 

[barkingsteve]

Thanks guys, the 130 pds and optolong uhc seems to be doing the job quite well  colour balance can be a bit fiddly though.

[Mike JW]

Impressed with your achievements and envious. May be I should get into using SharpCap (and darks/flats). Thank you for posting. Mike

[barkingsteve]

Thanks Mike, darks and flats make a world of difference while you are live stacking in sharpcap.  Compared to my first few efforts a year ago when i was new to sharpcap and had no idea about darks and flats,these results i could only dream of then from my location   i fully recommend sharpcap  for live stacking, making master darks and flats are very simple as well.

[Mike JW]

Thanks Steve for the recommendation for Sharpcap. I have tried using it in the past but gave up quite quickly. I find Starlight Live so easy to use especially as I do not understand what the adjustments are really doing. I need a dummies guide to Sharpcap. Cheers Mike

[barkingsteve]

Have you seen Astrojedi's Guide ?  i found this super helpful when first starting out  

https://liveastronomy.neocities.org/SharpCapGuide/The Unofficial Guide to Using SharpCap v0.5.pdf

 

[Mike JW]

Just had a look at the link. Looks like exactly what I need. Many thanks. Mike

[Cosmic Geoff]

Impressive work.

I am intrigued by the difference between my shot of M31 with ASI224MC and 102mm f5 achro and the image above.  I have a little nucleus in the middle of a 0.5 deg wide frame that ought to be nearly all galaxy, and the satellite galaxies which I imaged separately are out of frame.

[barkingsteve]

Hi Geoff, yes the 294mc pro is a much larger sensor than the 224. As you can see from the image below, a 294 would give you a slightly larger fov than my setup.

[Vulisha]

These are stunning eaa images.

Impressive equipment, too bad that camera is way out of my budget

What would you recomend for more budget friendlier alternative? Very interested since I have brotle 9  skies as well and visual observation is basically useless for DSO. What mount do you have?

[barkingsteve]

Hi Vulisha,

Thank you, i use a celestron evolution mount with starsense, i like things as simple as possible   it has built in wifi and an internal battery. I can only speak from experience but i originally started with a 385c camera. It has a much smaller field of view ( smaller chip ) but is very sensitive. Here are a couple of links where i was testing a cls and neodymium filter on the same scope and mount as i used in this post, so you can see the difference in field of view ( M27 )

unfortunately with cameras when you lower the cost you usually lose field of view as the chip sizes get smaller. Here is a link to the fov calculator i use then you can work out what kind of targets you can expect to fit in with certain scopes and cameras.

https://astronomy.tools/calculators/field_of_view/

i would also recommend some kind of filter in bortle 9 skies, do your research on filters, it's a whole new can of worms  but a general lps or cls filter does help a bit with contrast in poor skies without losing too much useful light. 

[Vulisha]

Hi barkingsteve, 

Thanks on very useful post. I allready have CLS and UHC filters, so that should be good. But 294MC Pro results are stunning. 

For now I think I might get something more affordable/used and with smaller FOV, but I think good buy will be something with 183C chip. As I can see on calculator you provided(thanks on that as well) it is half way from 385C and 294 in both price(Altair cooled is 500GBP) and FOV wise and with 0.5 reducer it could fit Andromeda. Calculator is really fun will pay with it more