Astronomy and Astrofotography

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Finally a clear night again. There were a few high clouds, but nevertheless I could finally try out the new ZWO ASI 6200 MC Pro on February 16. The clouds were noticeable in the photos, but the result was still promising. At least I could try out a few things and among other things initialize and activate the autofocus function in the Voyager. So from now on I can automatically refocus during longer image sequences. On February 17th it was clear and I had programmed the following objects to be photographed: - M 31 - Andromeda Galaxy - M 42 - Orion Nebula - M 45 - Pleiades - IC 434 - Horsehead Nebula The Andromeda galaxy soon disappeared behind the house, and so I could take only 10 pictures, which were not enough to make a good photo. Next I processed the Pleiades. From 48 pictures à 30s the following picture was created: M 45 - Pleiades: ZWO ASI 6200 MC Pro, C 11 EdgeHD, Hyperstar V4.0 After that I started with the Orion Nebula. From 138 images à 30s the following image was created: M...

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...

For a long time I have been editing my photos only with PixInsight. The software is enormously extensive and therefore also very complex. Since I have problems from time to time and researching on the internet is not always easy I decided to participate in this workshop. Already on the first day I learned a lot of new things, especially in the area of handling the program. Now I am able to use PixInsight much more efficiently. Also the hint on the first day that one should apply many processing steps (e.g. sharpening) only to the luminance part of the image was new to me. Until now I had always applied everything to the RGB image. On the second day we continued with masks. I had already read a lot about it, but here were some easy to understand methods to create good masks very easily. Next I will edit a few photos I took and I am very excited to see the difference. Now I reworked an image of the Trifid Nebula and applied some of the newly learned steps. On the left side is the old ima...

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)

June 24, 2020: Today I was able to pick up the new Celestron CGX 1100 Edge HD. At home I immediately installed and adjusted the polar finder. Then I mounted the optics and balanced the whole thing. Then the finderscope is adjusted to the main optics. Unfortunately I didn't have the right screws to mount the StarSense. Either they were too long or too short ... When it was finally dark I had to do a manual alignment. First I aligned the polar finder as precisely as possible to the north and then carried out a 2-star alignment. For some reason, the finderscope was no longer properly aligned with the main optics. That made it very difficult to find the star with the main optics. Therefore, the whole alignment took a long time. Besides, I probably hadn't done it well either. In any case, I positioned the scope on the M 27, but saw nothing in the image field. The plate solving with Voyager also broke off and could not determine the position. Then I tried it with the M 51, which was ...

Thanks to the beautiful weather, I have been able to take a lot of photos over the past few weeks and also try out and read a lot. The pictures were reasonably ok, but I found that the stars are not really beautiful and always a bit misshapen. Since I had this phenomenon with 30s as well as with 60s or 120s exposure time, I do not think that it is a problem with the tracking. Otherwise this should have been much more pronounced at 120s exposure time than at 30s. But it wasn't. I also had various problems with editing with PixInsight. The software is extremely extensive and by far the best software for editing astro photos. But correspondingly complex, so I signed up for a course in June and hope to learn a lot there. Here is a list of what I found out during my research on the Internet: The Atik Horizon CMOS sensor is apparently not able to generate stable bias images, i.e. my procedure for preprocessing (bias, dark, partly flat, light) was wrong and therefore could not...

Tonight I wanted to try if I can find the comet C / 2019 Y4 (Atlas) with the telescope and if necessary can take pictures ... So first align the telescope and set up north. Then I focused with APT (Astro Photography Tools) (first with autofocus on Capella which didn't work so well and then with the Bahtinov help). Then I looked for the current coordinates of the comet on the Internet (theskylive.com/c2019y4-tracker) and aligned the telescope (with Voyager). The comet was almost immediately visible in the center of the picture. I then exposed for 60s and it was clearly visible. Comet C / 2019 Y4 (Atlas): Atik Horizon OSC 60s, unprocessed photo Comet C / 2019 Y4 (Atlas): Atik Horizon OSC 5 x 60s, processed with PixInsight

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...

On 4 July 2019 the package arrived with the SteelTrack/SteelDrive II. Of course I assembled it immediately and mounted it on the telescope. According to the weather forecast it should be clear tonight. I will set up everything early and focus the NexImage on a mountain. Unfortunately I had not managed to find the focus with the NexImage. Shortly before it got dark I mounted the Atik Horizon. Focusing is much easier with the Steeltrack/Steeldrive if you don't have to touch the telescope anymore. However, the seeing was relatively bad and therefore it was almost impossible to take really sharp pictures. The images looked very good with 0.01s exposure time, but the Infinity software makes some changes to the histogram. On the PC afterwards I saw that the images were not really well exposed. Next time I will try a bit more. But here now a first picture of Jupiter. It is a single image without any editing:

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)

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...

This morning I got up at 4:30 am with the goal to see Jupiter and Saturn, and of course to take photos. I immediately realized that Saturn was too deep for me to see. So I focused on Jupiter. I could see Jupiter, also some cloud bands and three of his moons. I tried to make some images with the Celestron NexImage 10, which I did not succeed. No matter how much I tried to center Jupiter and screwed on the focus, no picture. Then I connected the Atik Horizon and there I saw the Jupiter and was also able to take some pictures, but unfortunately all were overexposed. Even though I had centered the Jupiter perfectly, after switching to the NexImage, nothing was visible. I reset all parameters to the factory settings. That did not help either. When it was getting light, I unfortunately had to stop the exercise without usable images. But the next opportunity will come for sure. In the meantime I'll try to take a few images of the moon with the NexImage, just to make sure everythin...

It was good weather again tonight, so I made a few more attempts with the Atik Horizon. However, I must now deal with the issue of image processing. If I just stack the pictures in Astro Art, that looks awful. Almost always it has a red or green cast I do not really bring away. In addition, the area in the middle of the pictures is always brightened. Especially in the foto of the Whirlpool galaxy you can see that very clearly. And also the colors are not really good, so I have to learn a lot ... M66: Whirlpool-Galaxy M51:

First, I photographed the Horsehead nebula with the Atik Infinity software and played a bit with the parameters. The result of the live stacking looks pretty good. Since the crash of the Atik Infinity software no more frames are saved. Therefore I have only this picture and no photo series that I could still process. Pferdekopfnebel, 30.3.2019 Atik Horizon: