My last two sessions of Omega Centauri were combined and reworked into one image and here are the results. Both sets were taken with my TV-85. One set was taken from a dark sky site and the other was taken from an LP polluted site during moonlight.
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.
Here are two globular clusters, M13 and M4, that I took with an Orion 6 inch F/8 newt and a Rising Tech Sony IMX224 eyepiece cam.
I reworked the first M13 image and tried for better color. Here’s what I got:
An image of Jupiter, finally! Its been ages since I shot it with a high-res setup. The 6 inch, F/8 Newt I used was barely up to the task, but it did produce a usable image. Seeing was poor, but otherwise it was a beautiful morning with beautiful and very transparent skies.
For this imaging session of the Moon, I wanted to try shooting at 2400 mm focal length using a 2x Barlow with my 6 inch, F/8 Newtonian scope and Sony IMX224 eyepiece cam. This was done in preparation to get some shots of Jupiter I’ve been meaning to do. Conditions for this session were marginal, at best, however.
I had clouds galore and seeing was very poor. I only managed three captures before the clouds came in force and shut me down. At least I got a chance to try the rig on something easy before I attempt capturing Jupiter with it.
I left the mount setup outside and took in the scope and laptop, thinking that I could get Jupiter when I woke up the following morning. Unfortunately, the skies were no better than the night before and although I could see Jupiter, clouds were coming and going over it. So, no luck with getting Jupiter, just yet. Maybe next time…
A view of Tycho crater on the Moon taken Feb 26, 2018. It was taken with a 6 inch, F/8 Newtonian and a RT Sony IMX224 eyepiece cam. Best 25 frames out of 100.
First of 3 videos of the moon captured towards the end of February, 2018. Poor conditions, but I was just testing a rather long 6 inch, F/8 Newtonian on the Atlas EQ-G mount. Pretty shaky rig, but usable for moon and planetary imaging.
I purchased some rings and an extra-long dovetail bar for my Orion 6 inch, F/8 dobsonian and mounted it on the Atlas EQ-G. It has a really narrow view with a Sony IMX224 chip camera, but its sharp and there was not much distortion throughout the entire field.
The newt lets you shoot with no filters and you pick up everything, including IR, with the standard clear filter that Rising Tech cameras ship with. That’s great for galaxies. Although this first test shot was not a galaxy, I hope to try it out on some, soon.
The rig is sensitive to balance and wind being the tube is so long and is also very sensitive to vibrations. Since I was imaging next to a busy parking lot, I noticed lots of rejected frames in the SharpCap stacking program when the activity there increased. Even loud noises would disturb it. LoL.
Although conditions were not the best and the red zone light pollution I imaged through kept me from getting really deep, I did manage to do a few test shots before conditions deteriorated,
The above image was actually the second shot of the night, the first one being this unknown star field below that I shot to test the tracking. It was a little difficult to dial-in a star to get a 3-star alignment on the mount, so I just went with seeing how long I could track with PHD2 Guiding at the same old settings I used with the TV-85 on a random star field. 8 sec exposures yielded too many rejected frames, so I went with 4 sec for this one.
Before the clouds came back and ruined my session, I was able to get 60×4 sec sub-images at the relatively high gain of 3108 of this open cluster in Gemini, called IC 2157:
Anyway, if I can get the tracking to get me up to 8 seconds of exposure, I will be able to shoot some of those tiny galaxies that my Televue TV-85 just can’t do justice to.
As promised, here is the 2-panel mosaic of the M35/NGC 2158 area. Not too bad, but the seeing for Dec 11 was poor and I might re-shoot the NGC 2158 side to get a better rendition.
Here’s the gaudy version that I turned up the contrast on with a strong curves boost:
