Eventually - first image of the North American Nebulae

[Jerry Barnes]

I’ve eventually managed to get my first image.  I wasn’t expecting to get much at this time of the year but I wanted to get the process more or less worked out ready for later.

I bought my scope in feb but didn’t manage to get a mount at the same time, I gave up waiting for a star adventurer and acquired a EQM-35 Pro from Ebay in mid April.  Then came a long sequence of getting closer to things working.

Cant find any stars in live view on the camera, clouds roll in.

Next clear night, try with the camera lens and not the scope, found stars, clouds descend.

Back with the scope, after about an hour manage to polar align. I’m very thankful I brought a right angled eyepiece.  Start star alignment but cant tell what stars I’m pointing at.  Eventually gave up.

Investigated the handset and found some stars I thought I had a chance of recognizing.  Polar align in less than an hour, start star alignment.  I hope the first star I confirmed was right but finding it difficult in camera live view.  Decide a dodgy 1 star alignment will have to do.  Point towards Bode’s Galaxy (suggested by telescopius).  Took a variety of different length exposures to see what the limits were and then a bunch at 1 minute.

The next day I find that 2 minutes exposures were ok for star trailing but 5 minutes were too much.  Nothing remotely like a galaxy though, no matter how much I stretched in Photo Shop.  A couple of days later I found astrometry.net and discovered I hadn’t been pointing at Bode’s at all.  Close but not close enough.

What to do?  The camera live view doesn’t help much, buy a Telarad?  I’ve already spent more than I originally planned but that seems par for the course.  Some youtube videos pointed me towards Astro Photography Tool and plate solving.  Then comes the marathon of trying to get Stelarium, APT and the mount all talking to each other.  Fortunately the mount is too heavy to throw through a window!

It should all be working now.  Have a good look at telescopius and decide the North American Nebulae is a better target than Bode’s.

Clear skies at last, polar alignment, tick.  Mount scope, get Stellarium to slew to the North American Nebulae.  Focus on a star.  Take a picture using APT and try to plate solve using Point Craft.  Failed.  After a few more tries at different exposures find out that the field of view in the settings is wrong.  Correct that and retry, no joy.  Slew to another are of the sky and try another plate solve.  Still no joy.  Eventually give up and go to bed.

After some investigation I find I can get astronomy.net to solve the first few of the images taken last night.  It was unable to solve the remainder.  Eventually I decide that the first few tries with Point Craft failed because of the fov settings and the remainder failed because I somehow defocused and the stars were too big to solve.

Two days later I can try again.  Polar aligned ok, will focus on Polaris as I’m pointing at it.  Cant see it…  Spend half an hour trying to focus on hot pixels!  Slew to Dubhe, manage to find a star and focus.  Slew to the North American Nebulae.  Point Craft plate solve, success, Goto++, success!  Take 40 two minute subs, darks, bias and lights.

Stack and process the image using Affinity and the help of macros by James Ritson to get something to look at quickly.  I have seen many much better pictures of the nebulae but given the amount of exposure I could get and it not being properly dark at any point this time of the year I’m very happy.

Well its been a frustrating journey over about 6 weeks, lots of silly mistakes and small steps forward and loads of clouds.  I’m quite technical but there are such a lot of of things that need to be right I wonder how many people give up.  Looking forward to later in the year.

North American Nebulae, Z6, Zenithstar 61 with flattener and Optolong L-eNhance, 40 * 2min subs processed in Affinity with James Ritson’s macros.  

Edited June 2, 2021 by Jerry Barnes
removed spurious text

[Clarkey]

For a first image and at this time of year that is a great image. Hopefully all the troubles are now behind you.

With regards to the clouds - get used to it! One of the many frustrations of this hobby.

[Felias]

Nice, lots of nebulosity! I have imaged the NA nebula for the first time this week too, also with a Z61 and an unmodded Canon 77D. It's the first time I picture a nebula (I have tried a couple of galaxies before), but I made such a mess! I can't get my star adventurer to work well with the Z61, I keep losing Polaris. I suspect it's bad levelling, since my observing site is on the side of a hill, with tall grasses, so the tripod keeps shifting. Therefore I have been limited to 30s subs before I see trailing stars. I started shortly after sunset, with a bad gradient yet, and after 30 min I decided that the light pollution was quite bad on the direction of Cygnus anyway, so I stopped and sought another target. Then I realised that I had forgotten to lower the ISO I had used to find the nebula on the screen of the camera (25,600 ISO), so the subs were terribly noisy and I did not bother taking flats and darks since I thought I would discard the lights.

But I decided to process the photos anyway, so here it is, the final image. Stacked with DSS, then stretched in PS. Very noisy, as expected, and with some gradients, but all considered, it could have been much worse. At least the star colours seem right...

[Jerry Barnes]

I'd be happy with that at my stage of development.  Its a bit like learning an instrument, you have to enjoy the journey.

[rickwayne]

You are absolutely right that a lot of things have to go right for an image to appear. The upside is that when you produce an image like this, you can brag about how many things you had to get right for this to work!

I got a really cheap red/green dot rifle sight for my DSLR, with a simple little aluminum adapter to mount it on the hot shoe. Made a world of difference. I don't see that particular product on Amazon right now (Astromania). I use plate solving  now but when that fails, I'm basically thrashing around just like when I started.