22nd of March 2019

The weather today was reasonably good, unfortunately a bit hazy. Nevertheless, I wanted to do a few experiments with higher ISO values and possibly longer exposure time.

First, I took a few shots of the Orion Nebula with ISO 1600 and 30s shutter time. This only to see how the higher ISO setting affects.

Here is a picture of 25 stacked frames with ISO 1600 and each 30s exposure time with the EOS 550d:

The result looks pretty good. Also on the display of the camera, the individual images looked very good. Therefore, I was optimistic that the images of the Crab Nebula and the Bode's galaxy will also be significantly better than the last attempts.

When I stacked the pictures with Astro Art, the result was disappointing. It was worse than all previous attempts and that although I took more pictures than the first attempt. Apparently the light from the moon (it was almost full moon) was too strong to take good pictures.

So I took another picture of the moon. Also with the EOS 550d with ISO 200 and 1/100 and 1/200 exposure time. A total of 70 pictures I then tacked together with Astro Art:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Starizona HyperStar 11 V4

Image
December 26, 2020 was finally a clear night. Of course, I finally wanted to try the Hyperstar V4 with the Celestron 11 EdgeHD. So I tried it first with the Orion Nebula (M 42). Already after short exposure times the nebula stood out well. Nevertheless I worked with 30s exposure time (as I had done before with f6.3 and f10). So I hoped to capture more details on the one hand, and the image was not overexposed yet. Raw image stacked in Atik Infinity software (Atik Horizon OSC, 90 frames at 30s low gain) This is the raw image which the Atik Infinity software had stacked. You can clearly see how the stars are quite round in the center and look more and more like small comets towards the edge. This indicates that the sensor of the camera was too close to the optics. That means I will have to position the camera a bit further away in the future. Although the raw material is not convincing, I still stacked and processed it with PixInsight. Interestingly, the effect with the comet-like stars w...
Read more

20.7.2020: M 8 (Lagoon Nebula), M 16 (Eagle Nebula) and M 20 (Trifid Nebula)

Image
On 20.7.2020 I set up and prepared everything. In Voyager, I wrote a script that takes 200 photos with 30s exposure time each of these three objects. From these pictures I sorted out the bad ones and stacked the rest with PixInsight and did the preprocessing. The postprocessing was limited to histogram transformation and color saturation. M 8 (Lagoon Nebula) M 16 (Eagle Nebula) M 20 (Trifid Nebula)
Read more

Orion Nebula January 21, 2020

Image
On January 21st I wanted to try the new heating tape to see if the optics still fog up after a short time. So I connected it to the SteelDrive II and aligned the telescope with the Orion nebula. I then took 144 pictures with 30s exposure time each. In the good 70 minutes, the optics only fogged up slightly, without a heating tape it was fogged up every 15 to 20 minutes. The stacked live image of the Atik Inifity software already looked pretty good. Orion Nebula: 144 images 30s stacked with Atik Infinity software I then edited the images with PixInsight. This means preprocessing with biases and darks, then stacked, photometric color correction and then a histogram transformation. Orion Nebula: The same images edited with PixInsight The difference is clearly visible. However, a lot would still be possible. But PixInsight is so extensive and complex that I still have to practice a little. You can also see the vignetting of the optics, so next time I have to work with ...
Read more