Astronomy and Astrofotography

Although it was almost full moon I wanted to photograph some objects. I wanted to photograph the Dumbbell Nebula M27, the Cat's Eye Nebula and the Owl Nebula. With the Cat's Eye Nebula I couldn't see any details, it was probably just too bright. With the Owl Nebula you can see a little bit and with the Dumbbell Nebula a little bit more. The photo was preprocessed with PixInsight, then color corrected and a histogram transformation was done. Otherwise no further processing was done. M27 - Dumbbell Nebula:

After the last attempts with medium gain adjustment of the camera I wanted to try now with low-gain, but with 60s exposure time instead of 30s. Since in the last photo sessions I also had a lot of mistakes due to dirt on the optics I decided to clean the optics first. With pure water and a microfibre cloth I cleaned it carefully and the result was top. Then I set up and set up the equipment (alignment, north orientation, re-alignment with 3 additional reference stars). Since it was not quite dark, I first made a few shots of Jupiter. Afterwards, I made 53 shots from the Ring Nebula, each with 30s exposure time and low gain. From these, I was able to use 41 images and process them with PixInsight. However, I have only done a preprocessing and then a color and histogram correction. I have not made any further edits yet. Nevertheless, the result has become quite good. For this image 39.7 GB of data has been generated and processed.

Since I still received relatively poor results when working on the galaxies, I had planned to make a few attempts with the medium-gain setting of the camera. As a result, I hoped for much brighter images. The images of the two galaxies (M 51 and M 101) were not really good. But the Ring Nebula came a little better than the first attempt a week ago. June 8, 2019: Ring Nebula (M 57)

On the 30th and 31st of May it was clear weather and so I tried to take a few pictures. On the 30th, I only tried the Pinwheel Galaxy (M 101), on the 31st I then tried to photograph additionally the Sombrero Galaxy (M 104), Whirlpool Galaxy (M 51) and the Ring Nebula (M 57). Mai 30th 2019: Pinwheel-Galaxy (M 101) Mai 31st 2019: Pinwheel-Galaxy (M 101) Mai 31st 2019: Sombrero-Galaxy (M 104) Mai 31st 2019: Whirlpool-Galaxy (M 51) Mai 31st 2019: Ring nebula(M 57)