Astronomy and Astrofotography

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.