Astronomy and Astrofotography

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 ...

Voyager is a software to simplify and automate astrophotography. This allows the entire equipment to be controlled and programmed by a PC. This makes it easy to make long recording sequences fully automatic. 4.12.2019: 1st attempt Installing the software was easy. However, there were problems with the connection to the telescope and the SteelDrive Focuser. Despite various efforts, I did not get it up and running. Even the software supplied by Baader Planetarium SteelGo could not connect to the SteelDrive. SteelDrive was recognized in the selection but when connecting it there was a timeout and the connection did not succeed. 8.12.2019: Firmware update I received a new firmware from Baader Planetarium support. After upgrading the SteelDrive II firmware, the SteelDrive II Focuser worked with the SteelGo software without any problems. Therefore, I thought that updating the Celestron firmware could also be useful. The update worked without an error message, but the telescope could n...