Tuesday night was clear from about 10om-230am so had a window to try another astro image. Was going to try some narrowband imaging of nebulae but that didn't work so decided to give M31 - The Andromeda Galaxy a go. Due to the sensor size of my camera it ended up being a close in shot of the central core and structure. When I get more time I will build this up to a mosaic I think and try and fit the whole lot in.
Image is made up of about 20 minutes each of Red Green and Blue data and an hour of Luminance. Would like to get some more RGB data over the coming nights.
wow, what camera and telescope etc, Im assuming you must have it tracking
Now I don't understand how you did that, but I'm keen to find out more.
I just pull up a chair.
Wow, that's sharp! Great image!
@big_scot_nanny - thanks. Manually focussed as well using my new William Optics clear Bahtinov mask. Much better than my opaque one.
@kimbers - yes. Scope is a TMB Optics 105/650 frac. If you do not know about TMB fracs Thomas Back was a hugely talented amateur who conviced LZOS glass in the Ukraine to make custom lens cells to his specification. He then got APM to make his tubes and then had the most fabulously over-engineered CNC'd aluminium tube rings and focusers made. Sadly, as is often the case whilst he could make the most exquisite scopes he was not so good at the business side and pretty much lost money on every one he made. APM still make scopes with the LZOS glass to his specifications and they are wonderful things but they have cut back on the CNC work etc so they aren't quite as nice.
Yes, I use a SkyWatcher AZ EQ6 GT equatorial mount which both tracks and then I guide as well.
@matt_outandabout - In a nutshell (and there is a lot more to it but I am learning still and for a starting point):
I have a special camera that attaches to the telescope. It only shoots in mono so I need a filter wheel with precision coloured filters and I shoot a lot of exposures in each Red Green Blue and Luminance. For nebulae I may also use H-alpha, Sulphur II and Oxygen III filters as well. So overall imaging time for this one was around hours made up of lots of 1 minute exposures for the RGB and 3 minute exposures for the luminance. I then calibrate, star align and stack the 4 channels individually so I end up with 4 master frames for each colour channel and then combine them and all of this is done in a piece of bespoke astrophotography software. I then use various normal phot editing packages like photoshop to tweak the image. Because the targets move across the sky (well more properly we move relative to them but the end effect is the same) the telescope is on a special mount which rotates and moves around its axis in time with the Earth's rotation relative to the sky and then on top of that I have a second small telescope with a small camera attached whose sole job is to lock on to a single star and make minute adjustments to the mount tracking so the main camera stays absolutely locked on to the main target object. All of this and the camera exposures etc are controlled by computer - I use a little Raspberry Pi with bespoke stuff on it so I tell the software what I want to image and it controls the mount, goes off and automatically finds and centres the target and then takes the image sequence. I have to manually focus the scope at the moment but at some point I will get an autofocus unit for it.
As an aside - this is a single Red channel sub-frame as it comes out of the camera. Using the astro software (although you can do the same in Photoshop or Affinity for example) you really stretch the histogram hard to pull the detail out. The software does not add anything that is not in the image data by the way but there is a lot of processing goes on to get the end image.
Thank you, a great insight into how you did that.
More pics please!
I need a break in the clouds! I have just moved over to a new control platform based on a Raspberry Pi and the Astroberry OS and it's working really well. Much prefer it to what I was using before and I seem to be getting better results.
More pics will follow as and when I manage to image them 🙂
That's fantastic!
Got any planetary images?
@richmtb - not yet. Two reasons really. The planets were poorly placed last year - Mars is always disappointing anyway as it is very small and the big boys; Jupiter and Saturn barely broke the house line behind my garden.
They are better placed this year however my imaging setup is geared towards deep space work and the setup you need for planetary is somewhat different. I will be able to shuffle stuff around to give it a go though but it is a subtly different process which I will have to get familiar with.
I see what you mean about more RGB needed, but the detail in the surrounding gas and dust clouds is remarkable! Add some more colour, especially red, into the spiral arms and that’ll be bloody amazing!
As an aside to that, I was reading about a number of stars that have been imaged orbiting Sagittarius A*, our parent galaxy’s core black hole - one of them is orbiting at approximately 6% of the speed of light! 😳
Holy crap.
class!
Strange I have to open the image in a new tab or it won't display? Chrome, Android. Anyway...
Worth it though, bloody amazing you can achieve images like that as an amateur* without a mahoosive research budget or something.
Yeah, stunning, bloody stunning.
*Not meant in a derisory way my friend!
That is very cool.
That’s excellent.
Cool 😎. The clarity of the dark patches and layering of the stars lends a texture that gives the impression you could touch it. Nice work, just like your Moon shots.
Edit- layering effect you have captured shows the perspective
Nicely done, looks like you have had some luck getting a break in the clouds as well. It's been wall to wall cloud here in the North East for what seems like forever, which is doubly annoying as we now have some astronomical darkness back. I think I have managed about an hours worth of imaging in the last couple of months and that was to try out my new Optolong L-eNhance filter. Let's hope we get some clear skies soon 🙂