Recent Images

Cygnus Emission Nebula

NGC6914

Cygnus

19/07/24

34 x L, 10 x R, 8 x G, 8 x B all at 180seconds. Flats and Darks. 3 hours integration.

I tried the ASI1600MM on the back of the new Refractor. So I went for an LRGB of NGC6914 in Cygnus, a reflection nebula near Sadr in a large emission nebula intermingled with dark nebula too. Looks like one of the blue subs had a satellite trail that didn't get Winsorize Sigma clipped. I should probably blink and process them again. And I need to do the filter offsets again, the blues were not quite in focus. My guiding could have been better, I'm sure the AVX can do better! More tweaking and twiddling required!

The Butterfly of Sadr 

Barnard 347

IC 1318

Cygnus

29/06/24

100 x 30 second exposures unguided. Calibration frames not integrated.

My Flat frames didn't give an even spread of light and caused the blue speckly blob in the centre. And the flats don't have appeared to have calibrated the Lights. The PI WBPP Script gave a warning about the Master Flat not being used. So I didn't spend too much time processing. Good to see the AVX tracking so well. I need an EAF but maybe I won't bother with a guide scope, I'll just get 500 x 30 second subs with a platesolve/recentre every half an hour!

The Coma Galaxy Cluster

Abell 1656

Coma Berenices

09/05/24

I went camping last week as a guest of the Orpington Astronomical Society at their Deep Sky Camp in darkest East Sussex. Here's the Coma Cluster, Abell 1656, in Coma Berenices, captured over two nights. I captured almost 5 hours of data over the two nights but by the time I had blinked out all the subs with satellite trails the total integration was down to 3.5 hours. There's over a 1000 galaxies in the Coma Cluster. That's trillions upon trillions of stars. Makes you go wow!

The Sun.

08/05/24

All this excitement about the aurora and I missed it! Ironically because I was camping in a field in East Sussex at an astronomy star party, came back home a bit knackered and went to bed early. Anyway, I did manage to capture an image of the massive Sunspot group AR3664 that expelled the coronal mass ejection that caused the aurora.

The Moon at 96% illumination.

21/04/24

Virgo

Almost Full Moon, the Luminance capture of a 300 frame SER video using the recently released SharpCap 4.1. Did a few runs of 300 x L, 100 x each RGB in Mono16 SER files. The ROI was about 3500 x 3500. The frame rate struggled to stay in double figures! SharpCap 4.0 kept freezing on me but the new release 4.1 worked very well. If it had an auto filter offset focus adjustment it would be perfect! The video frames were stacked in AS3 and saved as .fit files. I've not been able to combine the LRGB .fit files in Pixinsight, apparently they're not the same size! Looks like I need additional tuition! So this is the Luminance capture only. A not quite full Moon shows the crater rays well and a few crater shadows on the Western limb.

The Draco Triplet 

NGC5985, NGC5982, NGC5981

30/03/24

Draco

Galaxy Cluster

I captured almost 6 hours of LRGB but blinked it down to 2 hours 36 minutes by the time I got rid of the clouds, the condensation and the satellites.

It was a bit of a practice run. In May I'm going camping for a couple of nights in the middle of nowhere, central East Sussex, as a guest of the Orpington Astronomical Society. I've got the Coma Cluster on my list of potential targets.

The Intergalactic Wanderer 

C25, NGC2419

24/03/24

Lynx

Globular Cluster

Well the full Moon bleached everything out as you would expect. But when the night sky is clear you got to do what you got to do! I was tricked by the low humidity and forgot to turn up the percent aggression on the dew controllers for a close to zenith target so copped some condensation. But I didn't want to over process it and loose the detail of the glob. So here's a suboptimal Caldwell 25, the Intergalactic Wanderer. I was going to rotate the camera to get a nice horizontal conga line but I had already calibrated the guiding and didn't want to move it!

 The Medusa Nebula

Sharpless 2-274, Abell 21

16/02/24

Gemini

Planetary Nebula

I had a go at the Medusa Nebula. It is a dim target and was never going to be a prize winner sitting as it does low to the south above the Medway Towns light pollution. But it was a good test for what I can see in that part of the sky. Aka SH2-274 and Abell 21. I managed five hours of LRGB exposures which I whittled down to four after blinking out the wind gusts and CGX guiding quirks. All at 240seconds, 20 x Dark, 20 x Flat. Captured in NINA. It's a bit over processed in an attempt to tease out the colour in the nebula. Processed in PixInsight.

Lunar X and V Clair Obscur

16/02/24

This is a first for me and it nearly didn't happen. There was intermittent cloud after sunset. The X was due at 23:45. The Moon was photogenically sitting right next to the Pleiades tonight but my field of view is too narrow to capture both targets together. As the due time got close the clouds got thicker! I was looping 30 second exposures just to help keep on target. Then with perfect timing the clouds cleared, I reduced the exposure to 0.001 seconds and caught a few frames. Single frame, masked stretch, curves adjustment and sharpened in PixInsight.