Astronomy and Astrofotography

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...