Astroimaging is so EASY

[RobertI]

Having not done any imaging for several years, I recently decided to sell my Megrez 72mm. Having cleaned it up, admired it and sold it, I immediately wanted to try some imaging again! My remaining  widefield scope is a WO Zenithstar 66 and I recall getting some nice results without too much effort (in my mind it was easy - of course I had forgotten all the pain that got me to that point). So I tracked down the reducer and camera, set up the old CG5 (with motors, but non-goto), polar aligned, attached the scope with weights slightly east heavy, focussed with a bahtinov mask using the LCD screen on the camera, moved the scope manually to the Veil, locked the clutches and began tracking. No darks or flats for now. Set the camera to 10x30secs and started the run. The clouds duly rolled in, but I think I proved that astro-imaging can be really easy.

So, here is a single shot from the night's session - I bring you, the Veil nebula:

 

 

[Chris]

hahaha it's definitely veiled Rob  I think focus might have slipped then. Yeah some people make it look easy but it really isn't. 

[Corncrake]

19 minutes ago, RobertI said:

 I bring you, the Veil nebula:

The bad news is that you even managed to point it all in the wrong direction,
that is not the Veil, it is the recently discovered Full Burka nebula,

Ducks.

 

[Debo]

You could try sharpening it with Registax wavelets, might help 😄

[RobertI]

29 minutes ago, Lockie said:

hahaha it's definitely veiled Rob  I think focus might have slipped then. Yeah some people make it look easy but it really isn't. 

Yes I think I might have grabbed the draw tube by accident when moving the scope. 🙄  I didn’t want to lock it as I know the focuser moves very slightly when doing this. Really need a handle!

[theropod]

Slightly off topic, but yeah it’s so easy.

Last fall my trusty iPhone 6 plus died. No biggie, AT&T insurance replaced it in a week, but they didn’t. They sent me a refurbished 6s plus. The newer phone has a 12 mega pixel camera with software limits on shutter open time and artificial f stop. My older phone had an 8 mega pixel camera and had far more flexibility in regard to the f stop and open shutter time. Both phones are/were running the low light app NighCap Camera, and my main interests lean toward meteor falls captured in tracked long exposure wide field shots. The newer phone has completely failed to register small meteors, and fainter stars, the old phone would have grabbed like a nail by a rare earth magnet. Side by side photos are consistently worse from the newer phone.

I exchanged several emails with the app developer. Sent him photos from old phone and newer one where both were supposed to be the same in every way. It took us two  weeks to figure out what was going on. He may write a patch, but Apple has to approve EVERYTHING.

The above leans into the topic in that my notes and settings no longer work, and to even register an image at all I have to crank the ISO more than 200% higher than previously used. This induces noise on a logarithmic scale. If I use lower setting I must extend the exposure time, and noise creeps in the longer the shot. Also the newer phone suffers from sensor heating, and the shots become vignetted with edges getting washed out. I used to be able to capture mere sparks of meteors, and now a fireball would look like a muddy streak. I used to be able to take 10 minute shots with a velvet black background and pinpoint stars, and now the darkest night shots are gray with little smudges where stars should be.

Oh well, I’ve been looking for a DSLR for a few years, and have an absolute stack of old film type Canon lenses. I understand that these old lenses, one of which is a top shelf telephoto, can be used in astrophotography. I’d get better results, but spend the rest of this summer learning everything all over again. Sigh...

Nope, nothing hard about this at all. I think I’ll take up repairing microchips next.

[RayD]

That's funny.  I should try lifting the veil and seeing if there is anything of any use under it. 😄

[RobertI]

2 minutes ago, RayD said:

That's funny.  I should try lifting the veil and seeing if there is anything of any use under it. 😄

I did try to identify the star field to see if I was actualy in the right ball park, but not joy sadly.....

[theropod]

Here is a shot from a couple years ago. Tracked, 5 minutes.

Last night in an attempt to grab Neowise, and this is the best of dozens of shots. Tracked, less than 3 minutes.

Edit to add: The streak on the right is a meteor that I witnessed. Had I my old camera/phone I would have grabbed one of those once in a lifetime shots.

No, nothing frustrating here.

Edited July 24, 2020 by theropod
Add context

[Paul M]

After some early success with a DSLR and APT and realising just how easy astro imaging is,  I too a progressed to the same standard by way of a fancy new CMOS astro camera and Astroberry. 

We could start a dedicated section to give others something to aspire to

[RobertI]

33 minutes ago, theropod said:

Last night in an attempt to grab Neowise, and this is the best of dozens of shots. Tracked, less than 3 minutes.

Well, I can definitely see the comet, so at least you captured your target! 

[theropod]

19 minutes ago, RobertI said:

Well, I can definitely see the comet, so at least you captured your target! 

Well, yes, but my god man look at that grainy result! I’m sick about it.

It took me quite a while to learn how to get a shot like the Orion meteor example, and the idea of having to go through all that again is daunting to say the least. I’ve never even held a DSLR in my life, and settling on one out of the thousands out there is going to be a nightmare in itself. Maybe I should just go on fleaBay and find an old iPhone 6. Naw, I need to go ahead and plunge in, bite the bullet, take the next step, go all in, shoot the moon and figure out which DSLR fits my budget and actually works.

[RobertI]

It's probably of little interest or consequence but I realised the 'image' I posted was of a different target I subsequently attempted that night. The main target of the Veil is shown below (equally apalling!). However I managed to identify the field stars and where the nebula should have been by comparing to Stellarium. I guess at least it demonstrates that I can fit the entire Veil complex into the FOV, and I wasn't far off with the framing. 

 

Stellarium with field stars circled:

 

My 'image' with the same field stars marked in green and, from left to right, the presumed location of Eastern Veil, Pickerings Triangle, Western Veil outlined in blue.

[Sunshine]

You may have captured the Aether! huge discovery!