Astrophotography: A beginning.

[Plamadude30k]

Those are pretty damn great. Even more incentive for me to get the astrotrac.

[ravnostic]

My God, man, how much more incentive do you need, Plama? 😀

[Plamadude30k]

Money.

[chupathingie]

^that. You’re looking at over a grand for the astrotrac, polar scope and heads. But it makes it SOOOO easy…

[ravnostic]

Just got back from my 2nd venture. Pictures shall ensue. Weathermen don’t know shit. If I knew it would remain so clear, I’d have planned for it and stayed all night. As it is, I got several objects I hope pan out in processing. Stay tuned!

[chupathingie]

wheeeee!

[ravnostic]

New one; I have to get to my ‘home’ location to review Andromeda–looks a little iffy on this monitor. But I’m pretty sure I nailed the moon as nicely as I can without stacking it. Huge file (1/2 meg); linking to avoid screwing up the thread.

http://fossilspringsaz.com/pics/2012/feb/26/moon20120226.jpg

😛 8) 😀 😉

[chupathingie]

purty! I wasn’t out early enough to get any of Andromeda, I’m gonna have to wait on that one. Which is fine, it’s such a huge, pretty target that I want to refine some techniques and routines before I spend a night on it. And it will be a full night, I want a lot of lights for that one so I need to start when it’s low in the east. So I won’t get a chance to really do much with it until august or september.

[lokisbong]

Very nice moon Picture!

[ravnostic]

Thanks lokis! chupa; It’s too big–I can’t fit it in my viewfinder. I get the main center, though. I haven’t got to them yet, but I have some I took with the piggyback 300mm rig that might pan out. Meanwhile, I’ve processed my favorite galaxy, and though the crescent moon was out and it’s only 9 frames (it got windyish so the other 11 weren’t good enough), I like my first effort.

For those who don’t know, the Whirlpool (TM) Galaxy is one of the larger ones–about 1/3 of the diameter of the moon. It’s located off the far end of the handle of the Big Dipper. It also happens to be my favorite. 🙂

[chupathingie]

oooooohhhh! me likey!

Some things require a telescope, and that’s one of them… I looked towards m51 the other night, wishing…
Do you have a remote for your camera? If not, one of these (or similar) is well worth the cash. Set it up, lock the mirror and let it go… if you put 40+ subs on that target, you’d get some seriously impressive results. It would bring out the dust lanes and nebula nicely.

[ravnostic]

Oh, great, chupa, go and make me want to spend even MORE money! At the moment, I’m working with the tethered regular remote shutter. All of these are 30 second exposures because that’s the max I have available without standing there counting in my head the seconds beyond. I sat in the car, listened to the radio, and viewed my sky watcher software for good subjects while the camera clicked away. As it happened, the card was full after some 12 frames, and I wanted to move on when I switched it. I should get more, though. And if the moon weren’t out, the sky’d be darker. I’ll have to wait for next month for that opportunity, though.

[orionid]

Sweet Jeebus. I’ll be in the corner kicking the cat.

[chupathingie]

Sweet Jeebus. I’ll be in the corner kicking the cat.

Yaknow, Guinness Draught isn’t all that unpleasant on the sinuses….

Rav, do what I did…cheap watch with a second hand. Do a bunch of subs, and DO DARKS. I can’t stress that enough… no darks or too few darks really make for disappointing results. Insufficient dark data actually adds noise to your finals, and to make it worse it’s patterned noise; you’ll see streaks that march across your final and there’s not much you can do to remove them.

I’m working on my routine yet. I have to come to grips with making proper light flats and bias frames. Light flats counter vignetting, and when you stretch levels vignetting becomes very obvious. Bias frames knock down “read noise”, which is the noise generated when your camera pulls the data off the sensor. It’s small, but even small noise sources become significant when you start shifting the histogram around.

The digging I’ve been doing the past few days has yielded a lot of interesting info. Find info about a couple of things for your specific camera… look for the ISO that provides the greatest dynamic range and the ISO that provides the greatest S/N ratio and shoot in between the two. If your tracking is good, lean towards the best S/N and go for longer subs. You’ll get much cleaner finals with a surprising low ISO, but tracking is only good for so much and you may have to bump it up some.

I know guys who guide manually; they’ll spend all night with their eye to the guide scope and their hands on the slo-mo controls. It’s nuts. Auto guiders correct for tracking error, but they also add cost… this ain’t a cheap hobby if you want to make it convenient, but you get some bragging rights for doing this stuff the hard way.

[kashari]

I don’t understand 98% of what you smart guys are talking about, but love the pics, they’re so amazing and I want moar! 🙂

FYI for any Nikon Astro’s, check the thread I just posted in the Software forum about the new ‘astro noise reduction’ filter in CNX2.

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