October 2005 Astro Images

In addition to the 102mm Celestron refractor I am now using, I also have a 120mm F/5 Orion refractor. Both are Synta, actually. The 120mm is bigger than what I imagined it would be! When I mounted it on my C-8, I could not get it to balance well at all. If I can figure out the right balancing for it, I might be able to use it as an even higher resolution imaging lens. Here is the first image with it, which I struggled taking:

M45, the Pleiades on 10/03/05. Canon Digital Rebel, Baader Fringe-Killer and Lumicon Deep Sky filters on a 120mm F/5 refractor piggy-backed on my C-8, guided with Guidedog and a Toucam Pro webcam. Exposure was 9x120 second at 800 ISO. Stacked in IRIS, color balanced in Photoshop.

Mars now dominates the night sky. As the weather has improved for the month of October, so has the view of the red planet. It is easy to see detail on it's surface now that it is closer to Earth. I imaged it early on the morning of October 5th, and combined three, 2 minute AVI movies in Registax to give 1800 frames. Then 1100 of the best were automatically chosen and stacked for the image below:

Mars on 10/05/05, 09:03 UT (4:03 am CDT.) C-8 2000mm, Celestron Ultima 2X Barlow, Toucam Pro webcam. K3CCDTools was used for image acquisition. This image was generated with 1100 frames out of 1800 total and stacked in Registax with wavelet processing. Paintshop Pro was used for unsharp masking, interlace filtering, color balance adjustments and to rotate and crop. South is up in this image for a change. :-)

My favorite nebula of the summer is setting earlier and earlier now that October is here. Before it gets in an unfavorable viewing position at my location, I wanted to capture an image of it with my new refractor. I think this image of the Swan is my best piggy-backed photo of it so far:

The Swan Nebula, M17 on 10/06/05. 102mm F/5 Celestron refractor and a Canon Digital Rebel, Baader Fringe-Killer and Lumicon Deep Sky filters all piggy-backed on a C-8, which was guided with a Toucam Pro and Guidedog. Exposure was 18x120 second sub-images at 800 ISO stacked in IRIS. Color balanced, cropped and resized in Photoshop. Neat Image for noise filtering. Then, back into IRIS for Richardson-Lucy deconvolution on RGB layers, 2,3 and 5 iterations, respectively. Final color balance and Noel Carboni's Astronomy Tools for noise reduction, star size and contrast adjustments in Photoshop.

Here is an image of the North American Nebula region, which also includes the Pelican Nebula to the bottom right of the frame. I had trouble getting this image the way I wanted it. I think the 36 minutes of exposure I used is just not enough for this dim, but beautiful nebula.

The North American Nebula and the Pelican Nebula, on 10/06/05. 102mm F/5 Celestron refractor and a Canon Digital Rebel, Baader Fringe-Killer and Lumicon Deep Sky filters all piggy-backed on a C-8, which was guided with a Toucam Pro and Guidedog. Exposure was 18x120 second sub-images at 800 ISO stacked in IRIS. Color balanced, cropped and resized in Photoshop. Neat Image for noise filtering. Then, back into IRIS for Richardson-Lucy deconvolution on RGB layers, 2,3 and 5 iterations, respectively. Final color balance and Noel Carboni's Astronomy Tools for noise reduction, star size and contrast adjustments in Photoshop.

One of my goals is to get a great picture of M33, which is a dim but large spiral galaxy in Triangulum. I have tried a few times, but something always seems to go wrong. I either shoot it out of focus, off center or the other night it wasn't even in the frame! LoL! On 10/8/05, everything was going beautifully for the first 5 frames, then clouds rolled in. I waited all night for it to clear up, but it never did. Just my luck!
On the following night, I managed to get 14 more 3-minute frames. This is almost an hour of total exposure, but it seems to be not quite enough. Anyway, here is the in-progress work and it is a stack of the 19 exposures:

The Pinwheel Galaxy, M33, on 10/08/05 and 10/9/05. 102mm F/5 Celestron refractor, Baader Fringe-Killer and Lumicon Deep Sky filters and a Canon 300D all piggy-backed on my C-8, which was guided with a Toucam Pro and Guidedog. Exposure was 19x180 second sub-images at 800 ISO stacked in IRIS with bias, flat and dark calibration. Richardson-Lucy deconvolution on individual RGB layers, 1, 2 and 3 iterations, respectively. Color balanced, cropped and resized in Photoshop.

My cheap little refractor I just purchased is put through a test of imaging the moon. I used just the Baader Fringe-Killer filter for this image and had the scope mounted on a regular tripod. Not too bad for a scope in this price range.

The Moon on 10/11/05. 102mm F/5 Celestron refractor, Baader Fringe-Killer and a Canon 300D mounted on a photo tripod. Exposure was 6x1/80 second sub-images at 100 ISO median stacked in IRIS. Wavelet processing, unsharp mask and adaptive filtering. Color balanced, cropped and resized in Photoshop. Finally, an RGB separation and unsharp mask applied at increasing intensity to the green and blue layers in IRIS before recombination.

Another opportunity to image Mars presented itself on 10/14/05. I was outside adjusting the collimation of my telescope earlier that evening. I decided to leave the scope outside and stay up for a bit and see what the adjustments did for Mars when it got higher overhead. Here is what I got:

Mars on 10/14/05, 05:55 UT (12:55 am CDT.) C-8 2000mm, Celestron Ultima 2X Barlow, Toucam Pro webcam. K3CCDTools was used for image acquisition. This image was generated with 745 frames out of 1200 total and stacked in Registax with wavelet processing. Photoshop was used for unsharp masking, interlace filtering, color balance adjustments and to rotate and crop. South is up. For a comparison of the above image to one by the Hubble Telescope, click here. :-)

Ok, all you Toucam planetary imagers take note: apply the "RAW mod" to your cams! I did it last night to mine before imaging Mars and it seems to have made a world of improvement to my images. You can find out about a cam in RAW mode by clicking here. You can download the raw mod macros and the installation program that installs them from this site.

I think this is my best Mars image so far. If you want to see another comparison of this image with one from the Hubble Telescope, click here.

Mars on 10/16/05, 07:00 UT (2:00 am CDT.) C-8 2000mm, Celestron Ultima 2X Barlow, Toucam Pro webcam in "RAW" mode. K3CCDTools was used for image acquisition. The top image was generated with 500 frames out of 1782 total and stacked in IRIS with wavelet processing and unsharp mask. The bottom animation was made with 12 images generated from capture data over the course of several hours, starting with the first image. Photoshop was used for unsharp masking, color balance adjustments and to rotate and crop. South is up.

Get the popcorn. I got a movie for you. LoL! Here is a short clip of the rotation of the planet Mars over the course of several hours. Note the dust storm in progress (bright area near center of planet) starting near the Chryse region and heading towards Solis Lacus:

Mars on 10/19/05, 04:35 UT (10/18/05, 11:35 pm CDT) through 10/19/05 7:45 UT (2:45 am CDT.) C-8 2000mm, Celestron Ultima 2X Barlow, Toucam Pro webcam. K3CCDTools was used for image acquisition. This movie was made with 7 images taken at regular intervals through the time period outlined above. South is up.

A single frame from the above animation. Note how bright the dust storm appears in this image. Compare it to the image taken on 10/16/05 further up on this webpage.