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...

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...