One of my favorite galaxies. I like all edge-on galaxies and this one has a uniqueness to it that makes it special. The original had a splotchy background and the color was muted and dull. I increased saturation and shifted the color balance to be more bluish. I used the add noise PS filters to get the background to look smoother.
This version of the Outer Limits Galaxy came out better than my first go of it with the Rising Tech IMX224 cam, even though it seems to be slightly out of focus. I bet I will be trying again soon, since I think it could be better with the right exposure/gain, location and of course, better focus. 🙂
Not too bad considering the amount of light pollution and the short time (only 33 minutes.)
Here’s an object I’ve been itching to shoot with the RT IMX224 cam. This is only 27 minutes worth of 20 sec exposures! 🙂
I think that between 500 and 1000 subs would really be what this object needs with this setup. In the meantime, I put the above image together with 25 minutes of DSLR camera data taken with the same scope. Check it out:
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.
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.
By luck I framed this one with M31 and the Cassiopeia region and got all the good nebulae that were in the area to boot. You can see the Heart and Soul Nebulae, the PacMan Nebula, emission nebula NGC 7822, and other smaller nebulae like the one near Gamma Cass. The Double Cluster is there along with lots of other open clusters.
It is not the best lens and I did do some distortion correction in PS. It was a little difficult to process since this was the first time I used the Astronomik CLS filter. Before, I had one light pollution filter and two cameras, so I finally got another one so they both have one. All I need now is a small mount for light loads like the setup I used here and I could get two cameras going at the same time. Yeah, buddy! 🙂
I was testing the rig on this as the first thing after getting all my gear setup. It was only 5 sub-images. I stopped when Comet Johnson got high enough to shoot.
The full size, full res original is fun to poke through since there are many faint fuzzies in this area, which makes it interesting. I also have a cropped version below:
On the night following the encounter between M108, Comet 41P and the Owl Nebula, the comet was still in the field of view of my setup, so I went back for seconds. I just couldn’t pass up the opportunity to shoot a comet conjunction again!
I went with 3 minutes sub-images at ISO 200, since the 1 minute ISO 800 subs were too cooked by the LP for my taste. Unfortunately, the sky was not as transparent as the previous night and that half-stop of underexposure was needed to get around that. The trade-off was I didn’t get as much of the comet’s coma. Oh, well.
Also, at that exposure length, the comet’s pseudo-nucleus trailed a bit, since it is moving with respect to the Earth and stars and slowly picking up speed as time goes on, to boot. It was not enough to notice if I carefully over-exposed it a bit in processing to make it fatter, luckily. Check the star streaks version, which I did not overexpose, and you can see how far the comet moved in 3 minutes:
A Televue TV-85 w/0.8x focal reducer/field flattener, a Canon T3, my laptop running EQMOD, driving my Atlas EQ-G mount and PHD2 Guiding with an Orion StarShoot guider/Orion Ultra-Mini guidescope was some of the equipment used.
It is not uncommon for comets to pass near famous Messier objects or NGC catalog objects and put on a good show. This comet encounter is special in that there are two famous objects that the comet is having a conjunction with. One is a relatively bright galaxy called M108. The other is the Owl Nebula, one of the better planetary nebulae in the skies.
I shot this with the Canon T3 and Televue TV-85 combo. I used one minute sub-images at ISO 800 and that was about max for the skies I was under. I’m sure people with darker skies got better results. However, I think being able to pull anything out of the skies at this location is great. LP was bad and I had terrible gradients to deal with in post-processing, but I managed. 🙂
I also did a quick star-streaks version that seems to show a longer tail. Not sure, since there were some dust doughnuts left over from an apparently bad batch of flats I used and I had to clone them out. These aberrations were in the tail area, so it could be some remnant of that.
Check it out:
