First light in Russia. Astrophotography through my telescope. Moon, The Orion Nebula, and Perseus Double Star Cluster.

This Double Cluster image is 30 images lasting 120 seconds each! With added dark, flat as well as bias frames for correction. Mind the non-round stars please! I've yet to acquire a coma corrector. [link to drive.google.com (secure)]

Nice pictures.

Counting the stars in the Double Cluster ;) , it seems the light pollution in Moscow is worse than in Hamburg.

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Thanks for sharing!

That, or I used shorter exposures, then usual due to seeing? The DeepSky UltraHighCcontrast filter should cut off around 95% of the light pollution. The remaining 5% are pesky LED lights and emit highly unregulated lumens all over the place ;)




You are very welcome! All of my images are made on a free and open license. I do this for the sheer cause of making others react positively.

The exposure time I use when I observe in Hamburg is 20 to 30 sec at ISO 800 or 1600 - if I expose longer the light pollution starts spoiling the images.
I don't like the UHC filters - the one I had gave all the images a green tint (may be I should try a different brand).

What king of scope do you use (I think you mentioned this earlier but I cant find your post)?

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Generally UHC filters will help with nebulae, but not stars or galaxies; you'll just end up dimming both the stars and the light pollution. If it's a Lumicon Deep Sky it might be general purpose though, UHC and Deep Sky were two different filters I thought.

Anyway, don't worry about light pollution when you're taking the images, let the background separate from the left side of the histogram. You can take out the light pollution in post processing using dynamic background subtraction in programs like IRIS and PixInsight after stacking. Then adjust levels and you're golden. Nice job though, good focus and tracking on that double cluster.

Gorgeous!

Excellent photography OP :)

:fivestarzzzz:

Nice!

Well thank you Mister Astro! Deepsky is a popular astronomical gear in Russia. Same glass / coatings as Baader, just cheaper. I also have a Deepsky F=190mm/500 aperture guidescope. I usually use the UHC filter to maximize contrast against the light-polluted sky. It really helps! Especially on long exposures, when usually the sky goes all pink on me. All stacking is done in DeepSkyStacker. Then some Levels and Curves. Combine the stretched histogram in a Photoshop plugin to make all the colors more, or less evenly distributed. Do some Noise Ninjaing for the noise as well.



My telescope is a Skywatcher BK2001P. I feel that the UHC filter really helps. The sky is less pink and more blue/dark. It can even negate some high clouds as it lets through peaks of Ha+OIII, as well as that Hbeta. At least judging by the spectrometry of the filter. My exposure times have ranged from 30 to 120 seconds. If I get a clear night and proper focus I will dare five minute exposures with guiding.


Here are two variants of the Orion Nebula I have fiddled with while our skies are cloudy. Taken with my Nikon D3200 and no Barlow, had a lucky focus spot, but only managed to take three images*30 seconds ISO 6400 before the battery was drained. Stacked with 25 darks, Bias, and Flats. Processed to the maximum in Photoshop. The embedded image shows one variant, while the link provides another. Please keep that in mind Which one is your favorite?

[link to drive.google.com (secure)]



Last Edited by Snuffielover on 10/09/2014 08:27 PM

Thanks for sharing my Russian friend.
Greetings from queens NY.

Here is an image I made from a simple star field in the constellation of Vulpeculis. I aimed for the Dumbbell Nebula, but the telescope's coordinates were off. So this is what I got. Why let it go to waste? :) Wouldn't mind your warm thoughts for a clear night today. Going to move my telescope to a better patch of my humble little garden to follow Orion and the Moon much better. No pesky foliage shall get in my way!

[link to drive.google.com (secure)]



Last Edited by Snuffielover on 10/10/2014 12:15 PM

Try IRIS for removing that pink sky, I find it works wonders for me.
[link to www.astrosurf.com]
I'm going to try to get out there tonight as well, maybe do a webcast.

Thank you for your tip. Alas, it's above my head in terms of command line use and whatnot. I feel that Deep Sky Stacker helps out a lot, and the sky is no longer pink through my filter. Still good tips though! Best of luck out there, star hunting can be so much fun!

Oh, you would still use deep sky stacker, IRIS just helps remove gradients and background light after stacking. Anyway, it's just a suggestion.

That you, Snowden?

Really beautiful images throughout the thread, 5 stars ! I wish I could see those colours in M42 at the eyepiece. I like the embedded one for the rich colours and the link one for the trapezium.

K

Thank you very much for your feedback. I am glad you liked my quite modest Orion Nebula image. The smaller one is actually one image with no darks, or flats added ! I just worked some Photoshop magic on it. The second one are two stacked frames with the whole shebang of darks, bias, as well as flats. Surprisingly the nebulosity shows off much less.

The skies are layered with high clouds and contrails. I also moved my telescope to a new location, better fit for the Orion in hopes of doing 12*300 seconds guided work. So it needs to make a sky chart mapped to its local gear ratios again.

That is performed by slewing to an object in my Stellarium with the "StellariumScope" plug-in, taking a 6400 ISO, 30 second shot with my DSLR and solving it on Astrometry, giving the correct coordinates to Sync to. Then re-slew to the object proper. Syncing also tells my mount the offset errors and eventually it builds a map of my local sky, as the mount gearings see it.

Hope I didn't go too techy on you all. I am quite passionate when it comes to this rather newfound hobby of mine.

I looked at the IRIS tutorial and my thought was: OMG, how long does it take?

Some time ago I got a cheap 600mm tele lens and adapted it to my Canon.
After taking the first shots I noticed that the lens had a very big vignetting problem when the full aperture (f6.3) is used.

Thus I present one of the worst astrophotos I ever made:

Single 20 second exposure of M33
:FW-M33S:


Next I stacked 10 images (each 20 sec) in Fitswork and made a little histogram adjustment to gray - the result:
:FW-M33ST:


Next step is one click in Fitswork (flatten to starfield) to remove the vignetting.
I think the result is comparable to IRIS, with the difference that you have just to do one click:
:FW-M33STF:


Some more quick and dirty adjustment (no darks, flats, ...):
:FW-M33STFF:


Took me about ten minutes from the first to the last step (including the time needed for the processing).

I think Fitsworks is worth a try.
In contrast to DSS I have no problem to stack images of faint comets - DSS didn't even discern the comet in the images.

Download (English version): [link to www.fitswork.de]
Short tutorial: [link to intervalometer.appspot.com]


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Good deal pickle..........nice one!!!!!!!*****

Ah, very nice. I keep IRIS around mainly as a backup way of doing manual registration when DSS has trouble seeing a comet in an image, I use PixInsight for background subtraction and it's much more automated than IRIS. I don't tend to recommend it though unless the person doesn't mind spending lots of $$$$$. IRIS is nice to recommend simply because it's free and very versatile, but not user friendly. I'll have to check out that fitswork, might be a better free recommendation.

Last Edited by Astromut on 10/10/2014 07:40 PM

Fitswork is quite common in Germany. The problem is that - though there is an english version - there are almost no tutorials in english (the one I linked to was the only one I could find).

It's quite intuitive but takes some time to get familiar with it. By now, after trying some other programs, it's my favourite.

A lot of things can be done by batch prozessing (stacking, RGB split, noise reduction, flatten, ...)
Excellent correction of colour layers (if your scope has chromatic aberation)
Colour fringe removal around stars.
Stacking options: add, subtract, min, max, median, sigma, ...
and a lot more gems.

You really should try it - no installation needed, just unzip into a folder of your choice. Don't forget to download the additional file for camera RAWs.


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The conditions this night weren't favorable as we had a warm front come through with lots of wind. A record-breaking +19C today! Great for being outside in the night and not freezing my tail off. Lousy for atmospheric stability.

I managed to snap a partial panorama of our Moon though. Did my best to sharpen it, as the seeing was lousy. Hydra, could you share the .raw and dark/bias/flat files for your stack please? I would like to do my magic on them and see if I arrive to a different result!

[link to drive.google.com (secure)]

Last Edited by Snuffielover on 10/11/2014 07:36 AM

The M33 images were just test-shots to look how the 600mm tele lens performs on a faint object - thus I have no RAW files, only JPG and didn't make any darks/flats.

If you are still interested, I can upload the JPGs and send you a PM with the link.

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One JPEG would be enough then. Just make sure it's fullsize please. Since I have a 64Gb card I always shoot in RAW, even the test exposures! Helps correct for eventual lens distortions. The rare times I use my 50mm F/1.8 lens for wide fields. Coming to think of it. I have yet to try that out while piggybacking on my scope. Should do it some day. I think The Andromeda Galaxy will come out just perfect

Last Edited by Snuffielover on 10/11/2014 10:47 AM

i'm pretty sure this is the most beautiful photo of the Moon i've ever seen :)

did you catch the Blood Moon, Snuffielover?

Thank you very much! This is the kind of comments I am aiming for, people enjoying seeing the wonderful sights of our Universe.



Sadly I did not :( It was five or so hours East of me. But I did catch this. Took some hours for the embedded image to be accepted.



Last Edited by Snuffielover on 10/11/2014 10:50 AM

Hydra, I did some work on your Jpeg files. Not much, but it's my version of processing. Hope you won't mind if I share this with people. Strangely the M33 had more nebulosity in the blue channel. Is it a mostly Hydrogen Beta - emittant galaxy?

I'm used to the Red channel showing most of the image information. Perhaps it's your Canon camera? Anyhow, here is what I managed to pull out of it without too much noise being introduced. Well nevermind that, the noise is aweful! But you can see the nice nebulosity, and one dust lane in the upper spiral arm.

The before and after iamges are quite different indeed! I Drizzled this x3 in DSS to focus on the galaxy. Most of the noise (five times more, then other channels) I found in the Red channel. Must be all that heat degrading the image quality. How was the temperature like, when you recorded this beauty?

[link to drive.google.com (secure)]



Last Edited by Snuffielover on 10/12/2014 11:21 AM

I am going to bump this thread with a new image I made yesterday. Still Orion's Nebula, as the easiest target for a newbie. Nikon D3200, 200mm Reflector telescope and a UHC filter.

The new addition to my setup is a Baader RCC Coma Corrector. So far it doesn't seem to work, or I am mis-collimated (thus the oblong star streaks). This is a single 30 seconds exposure with ISO800. I also managed to snag the Dumbbell Nebula finally, but it is way too grainy. Maybe I will have better luck tonight

Getting that dubmb-bell shape on my second attempt at pointing my telescope at it, seeing how it was revealed,even at low exposures made me giggle like a little schoolgirl. Just a small,silly fact from the life of a humble, Russian astronomer there for your enjoyment.

Here is the result in JPEG form to save your hard drive space:) Let me know, if you want me to upload the original as well. The embedded version will follow shortly,as soon as it is approved.

[link to drive.google.com (secure)]

Here is the built-in version for y'all :D Is it an improvement over my previous versions I wonder? There is only so much you can do with thirty seconds of exposure sadly.



Last Edited by Snuffielover on 10/30/2014 08:57 AM