I rushed to setup and shoot this one before it went behind a tree. It was only 97 frames at 8 seconds for a total of about 13 minutes. But, I love how it turned out with this Sony IMX224 camera. It looks as good as or better than most of my DSLR shots of the same object.
It looks even better if I combine the two cameras’ datasets into one image to get the best of both:
I tried long exposures with no gain and no darks using the Rising Tech Sony IMX224 eyepiece/guider cam to image the Owl Nebula, recently. I was using it like I would one of my Canon DSLR cameras with long exposures at low ISO when shooting in bad LP conditions.
Hot pixels were worse than I thought, so I had to do some aggressive noise reduction. Next time, I will definitely use darks based on this experience. The camera has low read noise, but not low hot pixels with exposures this long.
I imaged this galaxy with the Rising Tech Sony IMX224-based Eyepiece/Guider cam the other night. It could use more time, but what I did get shows it well enough. Color on the stars were lacking since the gain settings I was using washed them out.
I had in mind when starting this that I could get a mosaic going for M35 and its nearby companion, NGC 2158. So, I started on NGC 2158 first since it is the more interesting cluster. By the time I was finished, my window to shoot was just about over, so I moved on to something else and did not finish the mosaic.
What I did get came out OK for 8 second exposures. I will probably go back to it the next time I use the Rising Tech Sony IMX224 eyepiece cam. It is actually enjoyable watching SharpCap do live stacking with the short exposures. Reminds me of the old days when I was doing mostly planetary imaging. lol 🙂
The Crab with an 85mm objective. Scopes of this size are not normally known to produce good images of M1, the Crab. But, I tried anyway since I am still learning the ropes with the IMX224.
Taken from the middle of a metro area in a Bortle Red zone. 8 sec seems to give good results with the LP levels at this location. More exposure just gets more LP and very little more, if any, faint target material.
Above is the gussied-up and gaudy version. Below is the not-so-gaudy version with less saturation and curves boost.
I also left more green behind, since the Crab has some green parts. It shows that better but also shows more of the LP that I had to cut through to get the shot.
Here is a roundup of objects I was able to see during my most recent Electronically Assisted Astronomy (EAA) observing session. These were taken in a Bortle Red zone and under a nearly full moon on Dec 1, 2017.
The moon still appears full and tonight (Sunday, Dec 3, 2017) is supposed to be the night when it is actually at its largest and closest to Earth at perigee.
It looked bigger to me the night before, but I guess that was because the weather was better. 🙂 To find out, I made an animated GIF that compares the 4 days worth of images:
It does look like the 4th moon is bigger than the others! So, it was worth it to re-setup the scope and get the shot. Lucky for me the sky cleared long enough to do it. Later that evening, the clouds arrived in force and it hasn’t been clear since.
The full “Supermoon” of Dec, 2017 taken on the night of the 2nd at about 11:30 PM local time (Dec 3, 2017, 05:30 UT.) Not too bad seeing and just a few high clouds that I had to wait out.
I have another version from data earlier in the evening. At about 7:30 PM CST, the moon was high enough to shoot. I shot 2 AVI’s with 200 frames each and processed those in IRIS:
Who knew just a few years ago that I would be shooting 8 second sub-images and building up images that rival my best efforts with a DSLR camera and 180 second sub-images. Now, all I have to do is save up for one of these new breed of Sony CMOS cameras with lots more mega-pixels that can match the resolutions I get with my Canon cameras. They are not too costly anymore and the results speak for themselves.
BTW, this was shot with the bright moon nearby. I got him, too, though! 🙂
On Thursday, November 30, 2017 I tried my luck with “lucky imaging” of the moon. I set the capture to 100 frames each and took top, middle and bottom images of a waxing moon a few days from full.
I ended up using only the top and bottom panels since there was enough overlap with the TV-85 and the Toupcam IMX224 camera in those two panels. Each panel is the best 50 frames.
After a basic levels adjustment for all layers , I used the wavelets filter in the Astra Image Photoshop plug-in to do an initial sharpening of the merged image and then a SmartSharpen filter to finish it off. No other processing was done to the image beyond the above.
Update: Friday, Dec 1, 2017 moon image with the same setup as the above.
