Astrophotography

See this post.

For my 2nd attempt with the Hyperstar lens, I decided to go with a much harder target: NGC 7000 aka the North America Nebula. This time I worked around USB connection issues on my old laptop by using a new one, and capturing from a Windows VM on my Linux host :) Anyway, I could capture 467 images, 30s each. Processing the result turns out to be a challenge, and I’m pretty sure I have enough data to get a much nicer image. Anyway, here’s the initial result:

For my 40th birthday, I offered myself a Hyperstar lens. This allows a f/2.2 aperture on my C9, making it very suitable for deep-sky imaging, with relatively short exposures. For my first attempt, I took a shot at the Dumbbell Nebula. Due to hardware issues, I could only stack 80 images of only 15s exposure, and the result is already promising. I’m looking forward for more images with this lens!

This is a combination of 35 times 4 minutes exposure (total 140 minutes).

This is also the first time I’m using flat frames (not because I’m lazy but because it’s not super simple to do). I could have gathered more images, but f* Windows decided to reboot for an update in the middle of the night, a few minutes after I had decided to go to bed to try to get some sleep during the night (it was 2am and I wanted to gather 1h more of data). Anyway, here’s the result, I think I can get a little more from raw data with experience with PixInsight:

And an annotated version:

This one gave me troubles for processing. I should have used flats, but unfortunately I wasn’t able to. It’s a combination of 23 images of 4 minutes pause, using autoguiding.

First attempt with autoguiding.

First clear night after days of rain.

Given my setup, I can’t have the full nebula in a single field, so this is just a slice :)

I’m still a beginner, this picture shows some artifacts, but I’m pretty happy with it!

Better seeing, better collimation, better images :)

Animation of Mars. 40 videos of 30s. 1 minute between each video. Preprocessing with PIPP. Stacking using AS!3. Processing using Registax 6, cleanup using Gimp, and animation created with PIPP.