Out catching them pesky Jellyfish...

[Smiller]

The seeing was especially poor so clarity isn't great, but managed about 2 hours on the Jellyfish Nebula between rain events.  With winter weather, you have to take what you can get.

A target I never knew existed until the day before.  Amazing how many interesting things there are to photograph.

This was about 2 hours of 6 second exposures using my Orion XT12G Goto Alt/Az Dob and the IDAS NBZ filter.

[ollypenrice]

So this is from an unguided, driven Dob? Give that man a medal.

I hope mine won't be the only reply.

Olly

[andrew s]

12 minutes ago, ollypenrice said:

So this is from an unguided, driven Dob? Give that man a medal.

I hope mine won't be the only reply.

Olly

Indeed brilliant and I am not normally one to comment on images unless they are outstanding.  Regards Andrew 

[KevinPSJ]

Beautiful image!

2 hours of 6s exposures - that's 1200 subs to process! You must either have a monster of a PC or boatloads of patience. Either way this is extremly impressive and goes to show that long exposures aren't the only way to skin the cat  Or jellyfish in this case.

 

[MartinB]

Clever data collection.  Reveals one of the blessings of a CMOS chip.  Even that bright star looks happy, it usually looks pretty horrible in most Jellyfish images.  Fabulously delicate with perfect contrast.  I think the medal should be the size of a dustbin lid!

[900SL]

That's incredible! Bravo!

[windjammer]

2nd'd - really, unguided alt az dob!  1200 subs !  I have never really explored exposure time vs # of subs tradeoff properly - just settled on an exposure time to get a decent signal and run with that for as long as the night lasted.  Makes one wonder.

Simon

[old_eyes]

Something special given how it was captured.

[Smiller]

On 09/03/2023 at 11:05, ollypenrice said:

So this is from an unguided, driven Dob? Give that man a medal.

I hope mine won't be the only reply.

Olly

Oops, slow on the responses, sorry.  Yes, I bought the Dob for visual use and it was great for that, but then starting doing planetary and lunar with a planetary camera, then I tried my daughter’s full frame Nikon Z6 in it and took a quick shot of Orion nebula. Then I pointed my planetary camera to M 51 and pretty soon I realized you could do deep sky too… the big breakthroughs were these modern low read noise cameras, fast computers, and using Nina to control everything.

[Smiller]

On 09/03/2023 at 11:22, KevinPSJ said:

Beautiful image!

2 hours of 6s exposures - that's 1200 subs to process! You must either have a monster of a PC or boatloads of patience. Either way this is extremly impressive and goes to show that long exposures aren't the only way to skin the cat  Or jellyfish in this case.

 

Well, it is a reasonably fast computer (An ASUS ROG gaming laptop with the 8 core Ryzen 5900HX, 64 Gigs RAM, and a 2 TB NVMe SSD).  But patience is the main element:  Get it stacking in the morning and come back later in the day when it’s done. So stacking time, storage space, and data management are the big challenges to what I’m doing.  But I see the latest laptops using the latest processors are 16 core with twice the speed, storage, etc…. So Moore’s law isn’t quite dead yet and this will get easier over time.  Plus I’m using a slow stacking program (Astro Pixel Processor), SIRIL and Deep Sky Stacker are both about 10x faster.  I use APP is I’m used to it, like its features, and don’t care so much that it takes the computer time… I just let it do it’s thing.

 

[Smiller]

On 09/03/2023 at 11:05, ollypenrice said:

So this is from an unguided, driven Dob? Give that man a medal.

I hope mine won't be the only reply.

Olly

 

13 hours ago, windjammer said:

2nd'd - really, unguided alt az dob!  1200 subs !  I have never really explored exposure time vs # of subs tradeoff properly - just settled on an exposure time to get a decent signal and run with that for as long as the night lasted.  Makes one wonder.

Simon

 

On 10/03/2023 at 09:09, MartinB said:

Clever data collection.  Reveals one of the blessings of a CMOS chip.  Even that bright star looks happy, it usually looks pretty horrible in most Jellyfish images.  Fabulously delicate with perfect contrast.  I think the medal should be the size of a dustbin lid!

A few people have asked how I do it and I was always typing these long replies.  So I decided to write it down and it’s in this document on how I learned to do Deep Sky with my Dob:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1IrL9-wdy6783PtPPElcP5u4r0IP6PbxA/view

Cheers,

Steven

Edited March 14, 2023 by Smiller

[windjammer]

Thanks for a jolly good read !  Lots in there in for everyone, no matter the kind of rig they have.