Astronomy and Astrofotography

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:

Today the weather is good and the weather forecasts for the Friday evening are also good. I would like to use this to test the Atik Horizon camera. I'm very curious how the difference to the Canon EOS 550d will be. So that I have a comparison I would like to photograph the following objects: - Orion Nebula with 30s exposure time - Horsehead Nebula with 1min exposure time - Crab Nebula try with 1min exposure time - Bode's galaxy with 30s exposure time I'm really looking forward to the results. Unfortunately, the Atik Infinity software crashed and did not save anything after the reboot. That's why I lost a lot of data (especially the Whirlpool galaxy looked great in the live stacking preview). But the rest of the results were very good. Now I have to learn to edit the pictures correctly. Crab Nemula: Orion Nebula: Horsehead Nebula: Of course, the green spot in the middle should not be. No idea where it comes from. Bodes Galaxy:

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...

The results of 100 stacked shots of the Crab Nebula did not really convince me. The improvement over the 11 stacked pictures was not very big. So I planned to double the exposure time (1min instead of 30s) or even increase it. Now I have read several articles. The best ISO setting for astrophotography with the EOS 550d is apparently at 800, although 1600 is still quite good. It tends to be better to use a higher ISO setting than to extend the exposure time. The longer the exposure time, the more noise there is in the picture, with less noise due to higher ISO settings (at least for ISO 800 and 1600). The shutter speed should be set so that the peak of the histogram is about 1/3 of the range (from the left). So next time I try to do a series at ISO 800 and 1600 respectively. Whereby I will first try the exposure time based on the histogram. With these settings, I will then take a series of photos and stack. I'm really looking forward to the result.

In the last attempt to photograph the Crab Nebula, I took 15 photos at 30s exposure time. While stacking with Astro Art you can see the Crab Nebula, but the picture is still very bad and apparently exposed too little long. Therefore, I would like to take more photos for the next try. Since it is not comfortable to expose a large number of photos with the remote shutter itself, I will now install the software Magic Lantern on my EOS 550D. With that I can have a series of pictures done fully automatically. This time I will try it with 100 pictures with 30s and let's see what comes out of it. The first result when stacking was rather disappointing for me. I could not see any real improvement. Only the editing in the photo shop has brought an improvement. Although this improvement is still not satisfactory. Crab Nebula composed of 15 images 30s at ISO 200: Crab Nebula composed of 100 images with 30s at ISO 320 I then loaded the image in Photoshop and worked a bit with the...