Crescent & Soap Bubble first light with Atik460

[Magnum]

Here is the first light image with my new Atik460EX mono CCD. captured 20 X 15 min subs but had to delete the first 5 due to camera tilt, so this is only 15 x 15 mins with Baader 7nm Hydrogen Alpha filter and my Altair wave F7 Triplet refractor + Planostar 0.79x focal reducer bringing it to F5.5.

Guided, captured & stacked in MaximDL, DDP stretch in Astro Pixel Processor, final processing in Photoshop. No Darks or flats.

pleased to have captured the exceedingly faint Soap Bubble planetary nebula near bottom centre, this object is so faint it wasn't discovered until 2008, the bubble is an almost perfect sphere of gas expelled by its progenitor red giant star in the centre.

Really pleased with how clean the files are with this camera, the single subs are clean enough to post by themselves with no calibration.

Also attached close up of the soap bubble

 

Edited October 23, 2019 by Magnum

[ApophisAstros]

Well done with getting the Bubble , cant wait to go for it when i get that camera.

Roger

[carastro]

Oh wow, well done.  I was always given the impression that the soap bubble only showed up in Oiii.

Carole 

[Magnum]

35 minutes ago, carastro said:

Oh wow, well done.  I was always given the impression that the soap bubble only showed up in Oiii.

Carole 

Thanks Carole, 

[Magnum]

43 minutes ago, apophisOAS said:

Well done with getting the Bubble , cant wait to go for it when i get that camera.

Roger

Its a great camera, im really pleased with it. Will be interesting to compare to my Atik383, I got both last week 2nd hand, and they are both great.

Lee

[ollypenrice]

That's a crystal clear Bubble, Lee.

Olly

[newbie alert]

Astonishing for under 4 hours of data..

Well done lee

[don4l]

Well done for capturing the bubble.  I tried and gave up when I couldn't see anything.

[Magnum]

25 minutes ago, ollypenrice said:

That's a crystal clear Bubble, Lee.

Olly

Thanks Olly,

I had a bit of a mad few days last week in buying not one but 2x used CCD cameras ( the 383 & 460 ), to replace me beloved 314.

My current plan is to use the larger chipped 383 on my 102 triplet with the 0.79x reducer, and use the 460 on the127 Triplet at its native 950mm FL.

But before that I want to try the same target again with the other camera, just for my own comparison  of the Kodak chip vs the Sony, so far I can only see a difference in the individual subs but as soon as you stack a few the Kodak seems to clean up and catch up the Sony.

 

Lee

 

[carastro]

Dual rig?

Carole 

[ollypenrice]

3 hours ago, Magnum said:

Thanks Olly,

I had a bit of a mad few days last week in buying not one but 2x used CCD cameras ( the 383 & 460 ), to replace me beloved 314.

My current plan is to use the larger chipped 383 on my 102 triplet with the 0.79x reducer, and use the 460 on the127 Triplet at its native 950mm FL.

But before that I want to try the same target again with the other camera, just for my own comparison  of the Kodak chip vs the Sony, so far I can only see a difference in the individual subs but as soon as you stack a few the Kodak seems to clean up and catch up the Sony.

 

Lee

 

I'm in a similar situation. We have a dual TEC rig with 460 in one half and Moravian 8300 in the other for high resolution work. For widefield we have the Kodak full frame in a shorter FL Tak. Although the Sony darks are 100x cleaner than the Kodaks (especially the 11 meg) the stacked results do not put the Sony way ahead. Indeed, the nicest data to process (or at least the data I most enjoy working on) comes from the noisy old 11 meg.

Olly

[Magnum]

1 hour ago, ollypenrice said:

I'm in a similar situation. We have a dual TEC rig with 460 in one half and Moravian 8300 in the other for high resolution work. For widefield we have the Kodak full frame in a shorter FL Tak. Although the Sony darks are 100x cleaner than the Kodaks (especially the 11 meg) the stacked results do not put the Sony way ahead. Indeed, the nicest data to process (or at least the data I most enjoy working on) comes from the noisy old 11 meg.

Olly

I seem to be accumulating kit at a manic pace lately, though I don’t have the weather and skies to make the best use of it 😭 And crazy thing is, it’s all mounted at the same time to my ancient belt modded black EQ6 yet still producing reasonably round stars in 15 min subs. Must be 18kg on it now 🤭

Edited October 23, 2019 by Magnum

[Magnum]

On 23/10/2019 at 15:03, carastro said:

Dual rig?

Carole 

Its just trying to synchronize  capture of 2 cams with the dithering, when they have different download times. I guide and capture in Maxim  which i really prefer to any other capture and guide programs. It does allow connecting to 2 cams at the same time but one of those is the lodestar. Ive tried manually running another instance on a 2nd pc, but even though i thought id calculated the offsets for the longer download times, the 2nd cam quickly lost sync with the main one so some of the subs got ruined by the dither. Now im thinking about it i could probably run 2 instances of maxim on the 1 machine. Wonder if there is a plug in to slave one to the other and pause until the slower cam has finished. I think I've read people do this with 2 instances of SGP, but it will be a cold day in hell before i go back to guiding in PHD lol. 🔥🔥🔥

[carastro]

Generally speaking it can't be done.  But I have a feeling more recently I heard of a possible solution to this, but I can't recall what it was, maybe some-one else will know.

I run a dual rig but don't dither and run two laptops because when I tried to download two lots of data to one laptop the downloads just "hung".  

Carole 

[Laurin Dave]

Very nice Soap Bubble Lee.  SGPro doesn't do co-ordinated dither but the developers have it on their to do list . (although not with high priority) ..  I run two instances of SGPro on the same laptop to control a CCD and a CMOS, I dither on the CCD (which are 10 or 20mns subs) every 2-3 subs and only lose about 7-10% imaging time on the CMOS compared to the CCD.

Dave

[Magnum]

On 25/10/2019 at 09:44, carastro said:

Generally speaking it can't be done.  But I have a feeling more recently I heard of a possible solution to this, but I can't recall what it was, maybe some-one else will know.

I run a dual rig but don't dither and run two laptops because when I tried to download two lots of data to one laptop the downloads just "hung".  

Carole 

Ive now found there is a way to do it in Maxim, seems its been around since 2012,  http://astro.neutral.org/software/multiple-camera-sync-maxim.html Tom How created a plugin that allows maxim on one machine ( Master ) to control another 2 maxims running on other machines ( slaves ) and can sync the exposures on the slaves to the exposures on the master and still dither as normal, and up to 3 cameras.  Seems it does it exactly what i want. Ive just ordered a network switch for the observatory to network the 2 machines together, then hopefully get the trial version working asap. The trial is limited to 15 mins per session so that only 1 sub for me, so will have to do some shorter test subs. 

Edited November 2, 2019 by Magnum

[kirkster501]

That is a very nice picture.  You could get some quick 2x2 RGB (say 8 x 5min per filter) and make a spectacular colour image out of that data blending the Ha in as the lighting layer on top of the RGB.

[Magnum]

4 hours ago, kirkster501 said:

That is a very nice picture.  You could get some quick 2x2 RGB (say 8 x 5min per filter) and make a spectacular colour image out of that data blending the Ha in as the lighting layer on top of the RGB.

I could but I prefer Bi Colour narrowband, will just grab some equal length oiii data then make the colour version as that's my normal routine.

[david_taurus83]

APT can control multiple cameras on the same PC. Hence my reason for switching back from Ekos to wired connection as going down the dual rig route. Great shot though. I replied to a an ad on ABS about buying a 460 but he never responded. Oh well!

[x6gas]

On 26/10/2019 at 14:49, Magnum said:

I could but I prefer Bi Colour narrowband, will just grab some equal length oiii data then make the colour version as that's my normal routine.

I was disappointed with my bi-colour attempt at this.  Probably my poor processing skills but IMO this also looks good in three filter narrowband using the CFHT palette if you fancy getting the SII as well.  Gives reasonably natural star colour (but in truth there isn't much SII signal from the nebula IIRC).

Lovely image though and terrific to capture the Soap Bubble.  I wasn't looking for it when I imaged this target and the bottom of the frame runs right through it!

Great work.