… in my world, there is Photography, Astronomy, Electronics, Software Engineering, 3d printing and much more
After 2 weeks, the sun has some beautiful activity to observe. Apart from a quite small sun-spot, there is nice prominence activity as well as a filament.
Image data:
Date: 2021-02-20 12:30 – 14:10 UTC
Location: Graz, Austria
Telescope: 102mm f/7 APO with 4x Tele-Centric
Camera: QHY183C @ -30C
Filters: SolarSpectrum 0.5A @ 60.5C
Here is another result from last weekend of fine weather. This is the Cone Nebula and Christmas Tree Cluster in NGC 2264, a beautiful H-alpha region.
The image is a 2 1/2 hours pure H-alpha recording. Therefore presented in black and white.
Image data:
Date: 2021-02-12 – 2021-02-14
Location: Graz, Austria
Telescope: 102mm f/7 APO with 0.79x flattener (equals to 564mm focal length)
Camera: QHY183C @ -30C
Filters: Narrow band H-alpha filter
Guiding: MGEN-II with off-axis guider
Exposures: 15x600s Ha
This is the next image captured last weekend. I recorded 114 individual exposures of 120s, from which I could use 43 due to clouds crossing in the night.
I annotated the image with the galaxies visible. Among them are:
M86 (mag 8.8)
NGC 4438 (mag 10.0)
NGC 4388 (mag 10.9)
NGC 4440 (mag 11.8)
NGC 4402 (mag 11.9)
and the faintest ones visible are
IC 3386 (mag 16.0)
IC 3349 (mag 17.7)
IC 3363 (mag 17.7)
PGC 40723 (mag 17.7)
Image data:
Date: 2021-02-11
Location: Graz, Austria
Telescope: 102mm f/7 APO with 0.79x flattener (equals to 564mm focal length)
Camera: QHY183C @ -30C
Filters: Baader UV-IR Cut + IDAS LPS-D2
Guiding: MGEN-II with off-axis guider
Exposures: 43x100s RGB
During the last few days there were really promising clear nights. I recorded several data sets from my urban location (under these conditions, going up the mountains would have been a treat!). Now, as there are clouds again, I am processing the captured data. Here is the first result from the Leo Triplet (M65, M66 and NGC 3628).
I still have not yet received my color filters. So here I have a combination of luminance (UV-IR-Cut), H-alpha and O-iii data.
Image data:
Date: 2021-02-12 – 2021-02-14
Location: Graz, Austria
Telescope: 102mm f/7 APO with 0.79x flattener (equals to 564mm focal length)
Camera: QHY183M @ -30C
Filters: Baader UV-IR Cut + IDAS LPS-D2, narrow band Ha, Oiii
Guiding: MGEN-II with off-axis guider
Exposures: 41x100s Luminance, 20x300s O-iii (2x binning), 30x300s H-alpha (2x binning)
Sky-Quality: 19.4-19.6 mpss
Again a series of images of the currently active regions of the sun. All images taken in the mid-morning of 2020-11-30.
Unfortunately, these will be the last images for several days, as a persistent cloud system arrived that day…
On Thursday 2020-10-22 in the evening, I captured image sequences of Mars (see seperate post). During one of the infrared test sequences (I wanted to compare noise levels at +2C vs. -20C) I saw a brief dark shadow passing the disk of Mars. First out, I thought it might have been a bat. But later on, when I analyzed the video, I found out, that the shadow was a satellite transiting Mars 🙂
The transit started at 2020-10-22 18:27:45.498 UT. The satellite left the disk of Mars at 18:27:45.687. So the duration was a very brief 190 Milliseconds! As I recorded with 178 frames/second, I could capture 27 individual images of the transit.
I definitively was very lucky to have registered the shadow during capture time. Otherwise I would never have seen this event in post processing…
Optics used: 10″ f/5 Newton with 2.5x Barlow (effective focal length was 3125mm)
Recorded with IR-650nm pass filter on QHY183M camera at +2C with 178 fps
Saturday night (2020-11-21) I recorded LRGB data of comet C/2020 M3 ATLAS. Upon inspecting the image data, I detected a spinning movement of the comets nucleus. To show the movement, I combined the 34 individual LRGB images (240 seconds each) to one stack with the comet forming a curving trail.
During the course of 142 minutes, the comet moved 470 arcseconds (3.3 arcseconds per second).
Finally, in the evening of 2020-10-08, there came a cloud free night with the moon rising not too early. Although the seeing conditions were not really faborable (high jet stream speed and rather bad layers), I had to go planet hunting.
Jupiter and Saturn were rather low, but still well placed from my home location. Mars was already well up in the sky when night fell. Inbetween there were Neptune and Uranus. Both of them not quite spectacular with persisting seeing conditions.
And finally I took a shot of the beautifully lit mountains on the Moon. The picture shows Montes Apenninus at the lower right, Montes Caucasus to the right (almost lost in the shadow) and Montes Alpes around Mare Imbrium. (North is up)
This time, I used my 10″ f/5 Newtonian with a 2.5x Barlow lens, to test oversampling capabilities. Well… The seeing conditions would rather call for no barlow at all, but I had to test the combo 🙂
All images are created from 4 separate, RGB+IR filtered video (SER) files with QHY183M camera. Each video consists of 500-10000 individual frames, from which 6-10% of the best were stacked.
The resulting resolution is 0.158 arc-seconds per pixel, which is a 3x oversampling of the 10″ scope (0.464 arc-seconds Dawes limit); Except the Moon, which is scaled to 33%
See the results processed AutoStakkert!3, Registax and Photoshop here:
Finally, after a couple of days, clouds did break up for an unobstructed view of comet C2020/F3 NEOWISE. This time, I left the city area for a quite dark spot (21.3mpss / Bortle 4) at 1600m above sea level. At around 11pm, the comet got clearly visible with naked eye. With binoculars, the comets tail got some structure.
While my cameras did collect images, there was enough time to marvel on the summer milky way and several of the treasures in constellations Sagittarius and Eagle (Lagoon nebula, Eagle nebula, Butterfly cluster, Trifid nebula, …)
As a bonus, there have been lots of meteors to enjoy!
Yesterday night, before going to bed, I took a brief look at the night sky. Fortunately, the forecast clouds did not yet appear. So I took my binoculars and went up to the top most window of my condo’s stair case, which is facing north.
I could not spot the comet with my bare eyes. Though with binoculars, the comet was a pleasant sight, even though it was low in the suburban light polluted sky. At this moment, the comet was a mere 5.5 degrees above the horizon.
So I rushed back down the stairs and grabbed my camera and a tripod. I intentionally did not use one of my tracking mounts, as I expected the comet to reach the adjacent roof top within a short period of time.
Within a few minutes I could capture a set of images to process. Here are the results, all captured with Sony A99-ii and 70-200mm/f2.8 tele lens at 200mm:
It is obvious that the 30x4s ISO1600 exposures are far better in noise than the 115×2.5s ISO12800 exposures. Apart from that (ignore the color cast and gradients, which result from bad calibration data), a lot of information may be pulled from the stacked images.
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