Some holiday snaps.

[Grant93]

Hello everyone,

Been a few weeks since my last pictures, been taking a few, a few I have yet to process but here are some fresh ones from last week.

As always whenever I'm choosing the location for our walking holidays with the fiance and the dog, I always choose somewhere with a reasonably dark sky and during a new moon, just in hope that I can either get some snaps or just enjoy the view with binoculars .

This time I chose the Lake District, was in a 'good' bortle 4, Sky quality 21.6 according to the app, compared to my bortle 5 19.7 back garden. So a significant step up! And it was certainly noticeable. Usually on my back garden the Samyang 135mm washes out at F2.8 within 30 seconds. Here I was getting 120 second subs not even close to washing out. My aim for both of these was to pick up the surrounding IFN on these objects, as I love a good IFN picture.

I have tried an IFN snap of M45 from the back garden, with reasonable success, but this one is a definite improvement. Bodes and the cigar was taken with the taps wide open at F2.0, however I now see why people recommend against that, a bit of coma on the edges and caused blue fringes around the stars, and M45 was taken at F3.2, dont know why, probably should of stuck to F2.8 since thats usually sharp enough.

M45 was stacked in Siril and proccessed there, with some star reductions in StarTools.

Bodes and Cigar was stacked in DSS as Siril didnt seem to like stacking this, not sure why, and fully processed in StarTools, as Siril also didnt seem to like processing something from DSS.

Both 3 hours worth of data at 120 Second subs

800D + 135mm Samyang on the iOptron Skyguider Pro

Let me know what you think

Grant

[Richard_]

Wow, Grant! These are amazing, just look at all that dust and detail from just 3hrs! Very jealous of your images, especially M81 (I've taken 6hrs with my 120mm f6.5 refractor and haven't captured any dust...). 

Hope you enjoyed your time away as much as you did taking these images. Well done! 

[happy-kat]

I like this view of M45

[OK Apricot]

Incredible image of the Cigar and Bode's, I've not seen one like that before, excellent job! 

[david_taurus83]

Love the M45!

[Grant93]

13 hours ago, Richard_ said:

Wow, Grant! These are amazing, just look at all that dust and detail from just 3hrs! Very jealous of your images, especially M81 (I've taken 6hrs with my 120mm f6.5 refractor and haven't captured any dust...). 

Hope you enjoyed your time away as much as you did taking these images. Well done! 

Thank you for the kind comment! To my knowledge, from what I've learnt from people on here, IFN is very faint, and needs two things, dark skies and fast optics, so it helped me being in a relatively dark sky and also shooting at F2.0, you can capture it in more light polluted, but need a lot of data!

Thank you to everyone else for your kind comments also

 

[barbulo]

Lovely pictures! 
It seems that Samyang f/2 thing performs outstandingly for wide field AP. It’s in my radar for long term acquisitions. 

[Grant93]

3 hours ago, barbulo said:

Lovely pictures! 
It seems that Samyang f/2 thing performs outstandingly for wide field AP. It’s in my radar for long term acquisitions. 

You won't regret it, probably the purchase I get most of my enjoyment out of. Fast and wide optics are great when you don't get much imaging time 😀 

[Adam1234]

Incredible images

[mackiedlm]

Fantastic images - well done.