This object was the main goal of the night. Not quite the 3 hrs I wanted to give it, but almost. I took a nap while this was brewing, and ended it since the mount needed a meridian flip to keep going. Instead of doing that, I decided to get M13 instead.
Here’s a detail crop view with a little more color saturation to go along with the above:
3 hours of exposure for this object. I used SharpCap 3.2 LiveStacking and a Baader UHC-S filter to cut through the light pollution in a Bortle 8 Red Zone metro area.
M51 on Jan 25, 2020. 280 x 30 sec, Gain 42, Offset 15, -20C, UHC-S filter, QHY183c, TV-85 at F/5.6.
Finally, the weather cleared after several weeks of clouds. This is typical for December down here in Cajun Country. With the clear conditions, I got a chance to try out a new UHC-S filter I purchased from Baader Planetarium. It replaces the cheap generic UHC filter I got from Amazon. Still shooting from the big city these days in Bortle 8 Red zone is a good test of these filters to see how much LP gets in and how well galaxies and nebulae show up.
I found out the L-eNhance filter doesn’t do much for galaxies unless they have lots of H-alpha regions. An hour worth of subs I took at the beginning of the month of the Leo Trio barely had anything worth keeping, so I only blended about 25% of it in to this image. The 450×30 sec Live Stack with dithering turned on I acquired in SharpCap 3.2 and the UHC-S filter was good enough to stand on its own.
Minimal post processing was done for this one, which is always nice after staying up all night imaging. lol 🙂
Before I shot the Leo Trio, I did a “blue test” on the Pleiades. I have 16 minutes worth of data and it shows how well this filter does with broad band and non-h-alpha objects. Check it out:
Six images bagged in one night, although a few need at least another nights worth of additional time. Big city light pollution was circumvented with an Optolong L-eNhance filter.
30 second sub-images for the DSO’s. The moon was 5 frames stacked in SharpCap 3.2. The Cone Nebula has 130 subs from last night and 63 from a previous session. I also shot M51, but it was only a few frames before twilight and was not really enough for a display image.
An early morning imaging session. I setup after 1:00 am and imaged until sunrise on Tuesday, Dec 3, 2019. I managed to get decent amounts of data on the Horse Head and Owl nebulae, but I only got a little bit of the Cone before it went behind trees.
I will definitely want to shoot the Cone again with 2 more sets of data – one with the Optolong L-eNhance filter and one with a UHC filter. It is a beautiful area with broadband filters, but too much LP from my current site to do it justice with one of those. I think the two filters together shooting separate sets might do it justice from this place, though.
Two sessions combined to produce this shot. One was taken with the UHC filter and the other was taken with the Optolong L-eNhance filter. Total combined time is nearly 3.5 hrs. Not too bad considering the location where they were taken – a Bortle 8 Red Zone.
Well, my luck with the weather allowed me to keep my promise and try out the new L-eNhance filter on a galaxy, in this case, M33. It came out surprisingly well considering this filter is not really made for galaxies. M33 has enough H2 and OIII regions to make things interesting, however.
I used Unity gain (11) with 4 minute subs, captured and LiveStacked in Sharp Cap 3.2. I also kept all the individual frames and tried stacking them in IRIS, but the LiveStack was better in overall quality, so I did not go beyond stacking them and viewing the results and just discarding it.
Below is the combined data from the above with 10×120 sec sub-images taken with a UHC filter:
So far, the L-eNhance does well for any H alpha objects and has a much more uniform background than my cheapo UHC. The UHC filter has a red to green diagonal color gradient always present and is exaggerated by the degree of LP in the shot, with long exposure stacks suffering the strongest. Not fun to deal with, but I’ve managed. Probably a quality control issue with coating uniformity for the cheap filter, I guess.
Since there is no uniformity-caused gradients with the L-eNhance, it lets me see the scope’s vignetting with this camera setup. Looks like I’ll need to start using flats in SharpCap to compensate, since vignetting is now noticeable.
Here is an interesting experiment I did in shooting short, 10-sub x 30 sec “subs-stacks” with LiveStacking in SmartCap 3.2 and stacking the stub-stacks in IRIS. I used Fitsworks first to orient the 5 min stacks taken after the meridian flip with the first batch. Final post-processing was done in PS.
I squeezed in two other shots this night – one of the moon and a test for guiding I did on Mirach. The test involved changing the PHD2 camera selection to the Ascom Toupcam driver instead of the regular version I used that gave trouble in the last session. That solved a problem with the camera dropping and losing connection.
Similar to NGC 981 above, I did twelve 10-sub stacks of Mirach for 5 minutes each for a grand total of 60 minutes of exposure:
The moon was out and after shooting NGC 891, I captured it in a .SER movie with 100 frames. I used 20 to make a still with the AutoStakkert software. Here’s the result:
Very clear conditions this night, but seeing was mediocre, with strong LP and moonlight interference. Cold for Cajun country, too… it got down to mid-to-upper 30’s. Brrr…
I was testing a used i7 laptop for use with SharpCap 3.2 under a bright moon on Saturday night, Nov 9, 2019 and the session yielded two images so far from the data. I was also testing a different guide camera. I switched from the Orion StarShoot mono cam to my Rising Tech IMX224 color eyepiece cam.
I had mixed results in testing. It was promising at first, but after several hours, some instabilities with SharpCap and the guider cam means I still have work to do to debug some possible driver and compatibility issues. Oh, well. At least the new laptop seems to be able to stream the camera data better than the old Panasonic ToughBook I was using.
As far as the two images, the top one was the first object I imaged since I used it to do alignment and focusing . I really wanted to see the “ghost” since I missed out getting it on Halloween. It is a crop centered around the star and galaxy at 100% resolution.
The second one was in the muck and between the bright moonlight, the LP and the terrible seeing, I thought it would be hopeless, but I managed to pull out some data that at least shows some of the spiral structure of M81. It is the full field of the camera. The linked image is at 50% reduction from the full size, 20MP final image.
Pretty clear night but the seeing sucked bad. The moon, which I did not shoot this night, was at 89%. Normally, I would not shoot on a night like this, but I had some testing to do, which was a good enough reason to get out.