Comet 41P, M108 & The Owl Nebula. 92×60 sec @ ISO 800, TV-85 at F/5.6, Canon T3.
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:
Comet 41P on March 22, 2017, 01:06 UT. 92×60 sec @ ISO 800, TV-85 at F/5.6, Canon T3. Star-Streaks version.
M42 on Mar 18, 2017. 162×15 sec, Rising Tech Sony IMX224-based cam (RT224,) TV-85 at F/7.
The target of choice, if it is available, is always M42 when you have some new astrophotography gear to try. I went after it as my first object of the night for this session. I missed it the previous night which was first light for the new RisingTech Sony IMX224 camera because my mount was being a pain when trying to get it aligned and pointing accurately.
This was captured in the RisingTech (RT) version of ToupSky, the software that comes with all ToupTek cameras. RT has it re-branded and calls it RisingSky. lol. I installed it, even though I already had ToupSky installed.
One thing it has that the regular download of ToupSky doesn’t have is Live Stack. It is similar to what SharpCap does and the main reason why I was using that program instead of ToupSky when I imaged with the ToupTek Aptina AR0130 camera.
It does a decent job of stacking when the stars are bright, not so decent when they are dim. About the same as SharpCap. That’s why others are using AstroToaster to live stack, since it uses DeepSkyStacker as its backend, which is more powerful than the ToupTek offering and has better calibration support.
My only gripe about RisingSky is the TIFF save and export supports only 8-bit, and I used that instead of FITS when I saved. My bad for not checking first. The post processing would have went better if I had 16-bit to start with. Live and learn, as they say.
The next night after the above image was taken, I tested the camera shooting with a 0.8X focal reducer for F/5.6. It definitely made a difference in the speed and I got more nebula with less exposure time. Plus, the field of view was wider:
M42 with RT224 cam and TV-85 at F/5.6 (0.8X Focal Reducer.) 125×5 sec plus 16×10 sec.
The F/5.6 setup is also better since the camera is screwed onto the focal reducer with a T to C adapter. At F/7, I had to use an 2 inch extension with a regular eyepiece holder and leave it and the camera hanging out of the focuser a ways to even reach focus. So, there is less chance of misalignment or something slipping out of place with the reducer and T to C adapter.
M41 Open Cluster in Canis Major. 150×1 sec and 30×5 sec, RT224 cam, TV-85 at F/5.6.
In addition to M42, I also got some time on M41, which is an open cluster in the constellation Canis Major, next door to Orion. Open clusters are too easy with this setup. I can’t wait to try it on some globular clusters!
M57, The Ring Nebula. Mix of 30 sec and 60 sec exposures taken with RisingTech Sony IMX224 Eyepiece Cam and a TV-85 at F/7.
I did it. I bought a RisingTech (ToupTek) Sony IMX224-based eyepiece camera. Its a nice little low-noise cam that beats the pants off of the Aptina AR0130 color CMOS chip in my other ToupTek camera, as far as noise is concerned. I got it mainly to do Electronically Assisted Astronomy (EAA) which is sometimes all that is possible in a very light polluted environment.
I love the immediate display of a color image that it gives you. It lets you hop around the sky and see objects like dim galaxies and nebula without having to wait until you process the images to see what you’ve captured. There are various software packages that let you stack images on the fly and you don’t have to save any of the sub-images if you don’t want to. It creates the stack and you save one file in the end, if you like it enough.
I did a little of both keeping images for later and just looking at stuff and not saving the stack when moving on to other objects. It was fun and I actually stayed up all night doing it.
I plan on doing lots more of this EAA form of amateur astronomy in the future and I think the new camera was a good investment ($168.00 shipped from China, total!) It is inexpensive enough that almost any amateur astronomer can now afford one.
The M42 Project. Best data since 2011 to 2017. Mostly taken with a TV-85 at F/5.6, core is mostly a C-8 at F/6.3.
Here’s one of those images I’ve been playing with over the last few weeks. It combines a number of shots into one image and I try really hard to minimize the blending errors. Doh! 🙂
I have two versions of it. The 2nd version below has better resolution, but is cropped tighter and is not quite the field of view I was hoping to encompass like in the 1st one above.
The M42 Project. Best data since 2011 to 2017. Mostly taken with a TV-85 at F/5.6, core is mostly a C-8 at F/6.3. The tighter cropped version.
The Pleiades – Combined data from 2011 to 2017. TV-85 at F/5.6.
I took the very good Feb 2017 version of M45 and combined it with 3 other good images taken with the same scope as far back as 2011. I still have more that I can add to it, but for now this will do.
Not satisfied with the first version above, I worked up a darker version with more contrast and noise reduction.
The Pleiades – Combined data from 2011 to 2017. TV-85 at F/5.6. Darker version.
The Orion Nebula. 226 x 8 sec, Gain 350, Toupcam Aptina AR0130 Color Cam, Televue TV-85 at F/7.
It was Friday, March 3, 2017 and the weather was iffy for imaging at my dark sky location. So, I decided to stay in town and try some short-exposure imaging with the Toupcam color planetary/guider cam I have.
I also wanted to try out an adapter I purchased for the Orion Star Shoot so that it can work with the Orion Ultra-Mini, 130mm, F/4.3 guider scope I’ve been using. This worked better with PHD2 than I thought it would. It seemed more accurate than the Toupcam with less dropped frames. In fact, I’ll probably leave this as the permanent guider setup.
For the Toupcam, I used a two inch extension on the TV-85 at F/7, but I still had to let the cam and extension hang halfway out the focuser to even reach focus. But, it was stable enough to try some simple targets like the Orion Nebula.
I used a software program called SharpCap for acquisition, dark subtraction and stacking. It worked well enough for M42, but it had trouble with stacking dimmer objects like M46, an open cluster with plenty of stars in it. I used IRIS to stack the individual frames manually for that one.
M46 Open Cluster, 60 x 8 sec, 350 gain, Toupcam AR0130 Color, TV-85 at F/7.
The last two images were tests of a relatively dim galaxies, like NGC 4565 and M64. I only got 16 frames for NGC 4565, so it is not too special. But, it shows the galaxy well enough to recognize what it is. Like the previous image, it was also stacked manually in IRIS.
NGC 4565, 16 x 8 sec, 350 gain, Toupcam AR0130 Color Cam, TV-85 at F/7.
For my M64 dim galaxy test, I accumulated 38 frames @ 8 sec each. It was also a test of using a video file format called .SER that was designed for astronomical imaging. It is like a video file. After I downloaded a SER viewer/player, which also let me export the frames out as TIF format, I was able to bring the data into IRIS and stack.
M64 Black Eyed galaxy. 38×8 sec, 350 gain, AR0130 Color Cam, TV-85 at F/7.
The Pleiades, Feb 25, 2017. 31×300 sec @ ISO 1600, TV-85 at F/5.6, Canon T3, Atlas EQ-G w/EQMOD.
It was a beautiful evening and I just had to shoot the Pleiades (M45) from my new dark sky site. They just looked too good from there.
I wanted see how much I could pick up with the unmodified Canon T3. It is definitely a camera that is sensitive to blues and cyan. It does comets and galaxies well enough. It is not as good as a modified camera on nebulae, unless its a reflection nebula like M45.
This is about 2.58 hours of integration – about the minimum needed to bring out that faint background nebulousity I’ve always tried to get. It is difficult to decern the true background if there are any gradients, unfortunately. There were a some here and I tried my best to minimize them. Towards the end of the set, M45 moved into the muck and a little LP from a small neighborhood to my northwest. Plus, the zodiacal light was contributing a gradient, too. It was interesting to see that, though. 🙂
Below is the normal orientation for M45 with some noise reduction thrown in. I didn’t do any to the first image. That was pretty much how it came out after stacking.
The Pleiades, Feb 25, 2017. 31×300 sec @ ISO 1600, TV-85 at F/5.6, Canon T3, Atlas EQ-G w/EQMOD. Normal orientation.
And finally, the gaudy, maxed out version:
The Pleiades, Feb 25, 2017. 31×300 sec @ ISO 1600, TV-85 at F/5.6, Canon T3, Atlas EQ-G w/EQMOD. Gaudy maxed out version.
The Orion Nebula on Feb 22, 2017. 1×360 sec and 5×120 sec @ ISO 1600, TV-85 at F/5.6, Canon T3, Atlas EQ-G w/EQMOD.
Man, dark skies are the best! I have a better image here with just 6 subs than with my last attempt I did using 56 sub-images taken from the middle of a metro area. You just can’t beat a good dark place when it comes to astrophotography.
M42 – 11×60 sec @ ISO 200 plus 45×120 sec @ ISO 100. TV-85 at F/5.6, Canon T3, EQ-G w/EQMOD.
An additional 45 sub-images were added to the previous version of this image, which was 11×60 sec @ ISO 200. So, this is 101 minutes of exposure integration.
M45, the Pleiades. 10×120 sec @ ISO 100, TV-85 at F/5.6, Canon T3, Atlas EQ-G w/EQMOD.
It is surprising that you could get the Merope nebulousity in the Pleiades to show up under severe light pollution (LP) with just 10 minutes of exposure. It was definitely transparent this night, so that helped. Processing was no fun, however. Nasty red LP took its toll.
Update Feb 5, 2017:
I did a guiding test on Feb 3rd and used M45 as my target. I shot lots of sub-images with 15 and 30 second exposures. I took the best 74 and combined those with the above data is this is what I got:
M45 – 74×15 sec @ ISO 1600 added to 5×120 sec @ ISO 100 or about 28 minutes of integration.
It certainly smoothed out that muddy-looking background LP remnant splotchy-ness appearance. Not too bad for shooting from a location next to shopping center parking lots. lol
Images of Comets, Nebulae, Galaxies and Star Clusters
