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...

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)