Astronomy and Astrofotography

I have further informed myself in the field of image processing. Apparently, PixInsight is the ultimate tool for astrophotography, but hard to use. Well, the whole thing is not easy. So I downloaded PixInsight and bought a book. Yesterday I took with the camera 50 bias images at -15 degrees and 25 Darks at -15 degrees and different exposure times (5s, 10s, 20s, 30s, 60s) so I'm prepared for the next few nights. I should be able to reach this temperature even in the warmer nights. I will then make the appropriate calibration images for colder temperatures. Next up is generating Flats, so I have to try how it works. I tried it with a white T-shirt in front of the telescope and photographed the sky. However, the camera continues to expose itself while the data is being read out, and so the image upwards becomes brighter and therefore unusable as a flat. Next time I will use Artemis Capture instead of Infinity software. There I can activate "Even Illumination" so that i...

I recently received the link to the CPWI software from Celestron. This is a planetarium software that can control the Celestron mounts. According to the description, the precision of the GoTo should be better. This is of course a reason to try it, although I was satisfied with the positioning accuracy so far. So I downloaded the software and installed it so I can try it on the next clear night. The weather over Easter was great during the day, bright blue sky, nice and warm. Unfortunately, clouds always followed shortly after the sunset, making watching impossible. Although I was able to test the CPWI software a bit and perform a calibration and an alignment. The GoTo was very bad, obviously a factory reset is needed again ... Probably it's not possible to just switch from the operation with the hand controller to CPWI. But otherwise it was very pleasant to work with CPWI. On April 30, it was nice against the weather forecast. So I tried again with the CPWI software. It worked...