SHOOTING SCHEDULE

 

Finally, winter is slowly releasing its icy grip on me. While the weather is still quite cold, the overnight temperatures are slowly creeping up towards and above the freezing point. This means that my equipment will finally start working properly again. And that means, new picture-taking opportunities!

 

Over the past couple of years, I've been taking pictures of pretty random objects. I have a few favourites, but everything else was basically a target of opportunity. And with that, I managed to get some pretty good shots overall.

 

That said, I was ill-equipped to shoot some of these targets. I went several months without my prized 8" Meade LX90 while it was off for repair (all last summer). I was limited to using my SkyWatcher 120mm refractor instead.  While this little refractor is an awesome scope in every sense, it shows significant chromatic aberration with longer exposures when there are bright stars in the field of view. I learned a lot while using this scope, and will probably continue using it for specific applications. But this year, my real work horse for high resolution imaging will be my LX90.

 

Even when I got my LX90 back last August and mounted the optical tube on my Celestron AVX mount, I was still limited to exposures of 90 seconds or less due to my inability to track accurately for longer than that. I got some really nice images out of it, particularly when using my 0.63x focal reducer, but I was still limited by short exposure times.

 

Now I have a guide scope and camera. I can take exposures of whatever length I need. Since getting the auto-guiding setup, I've only managed to use it twice. At that point, it got so cold that none of my equipment was working right, so I had to partk it for the winter. But in those two sessions, I managed to take what I think is a pretty stunning image of The Orion Nebula - what I consider to be my best image ever. I also managed to get a nice shot of the Flame and Horsehead Nebulae. Clouds rolling in cut that last session short, but I was very pleased with the data I got. One thing I was displeased with in these 2 images is the large blue ring introduced around bright stars by my Meade focal reducer. I've now replaced this focal reducer with a Celestron model that should work without producing this blue ring.

 

Flickr link: https://www.flickr.com/photos/crunchmeister/15176103644/in/photostream/

 

Flickr link: https://www.flickr.com/photos/crunchmeister/16073321612/in/photostream/

Now that I'm fully geared, it means that the universe is now open for business! As a result, I've compiles a "short list" of the different objects I will make a priority this summer:

 

• M51 The Whirlpool Galaxy - I will finally be able to attempt to get a high resolution, long exposure image at f/10. Other than my original astro image discussed in my last blog entry, I've only ever successfully photographed this galaxy in wide field using my f/5 refractor. While the images were nice, the resolution was nowhere near where it needed to be to really show the finer detail I wanted to see.
  
• M81 & M82 Bode's Galaxy and Cigar Galaxy - Widefield long exposure @ f/6.3. I got my first shot of this pair last summer using my f/5 refractor. The image is a bit fuzzy due to poor seeing, but I was quite pleased to be able to capture this pair under light polluted suburban skies.  I also managed to get another shot of the pair later in the fall using my LX90 @ f/6.3. But I was limited to 90 second exposures due to not having guiding.  The results were nice, but I know I can do much better than this.
  
• M16 The Eagle Nebula - For this target, I need to get both a widefield f/6.3 of the entire nebula and also want a high power view of the core at f/10 to clearly capture both The Pillars of Creation and The Spire. My 2 attempts at this nebula last summer were using my f/5 refractor. I got some decent shots, but the chromatic aberration dure to the multitudes of bright starts in the field of view kind of ruined the overall image.
  
• M57 The Ring Nebula - Need to get a good, high res image of this at f/10. I've gotten a couple of decent pics of this with each of my scopes. But I'll finally be able to capture the image I want.
  
• M8 The Lagoon Nebula - Need a nice f/6.3 shot of this. I was thrilled to get a semi-decent image of this last summer with very short integration time and light polluted skies. I need to improve on it and shoot it from a dark site this time.
  
• M27 The Dumbell Nebula - This is a beautiful planetary nebula. I got an hour worth of short exposures last summer @ f/6.3. This year I need to hit it with long exposures at f/10 to really capture the fine detail and clearly capture the central star.
  
• Jupiter - This has been a pretty elusive target for me. At the peak of its visibility last summer, all I had was my small refractor, making planetary work rather useless. I managed to get some shots through my friend's 8" SCT, but by then, the giant planet was very low on the western horizon at sun set, making it less than ideal to shoot. I got 1 successful image of it last fall that I'm happy with, but it was still low on the horizon at the time. I know I can do MUCH better than this. I also plan to create a time lapse video of it over the span of a couple of hours.
  
• Saturn - the same situation as Jupiter. By the time I got my LX90 back, it was too low on the horizon to get any clear shots of. Although a few of my attempts at it did yield some acceptable results.

So this is the short list. These are all objects I've captured before, but never quite to my liking. And of course, this isn't the full list. I look forward to capturing as many objects as possible in the coming months. And as summer rolls around, I really need to put my 14mm f/2.8 fish eye lens to good use and capture the Milky Way like I was never able to before.

So that's all for now. Thanks for reading.

My Original Astro Photo Revisited and Reprocessed

Hi everyone. First off, I have to say it's nice to be writing this. It's been over 3 months since my last entry, and almost as long since I've been out with my gear. Winter has been rough, to say the least. Mountains of snow and bitter cold have prevented me from going out with my gear.

Winter is when the skies are the less turbulent. Many night I looked at the Clear Sky Chart to see excellent seeing and transparency - far better than normal conditions I get around here. Unfortunately, I'm also looking at nights where the temperatures are dipping to -20º C or colder.

It's easy to dress for the cold and stay warm. And when imaging in less than hospitable temperatures, I usually sit in my car with the heat or A/C on and wait out the imaging session. But the cold really does play havoc on my gear. Electronics don't like cold. And the more digital and high tech my setup gets, the less it likes the cold. My hand controller's display pretty much stops working at temperatures below -5º C, so I'm not even able to do my basic mount alignment. My laptop doesn't like the cold either. The display tends to get wonky and it generally performs very poorly. And there's also the issue of batteries. My camera's batteries which can normally give me 3 hours of continual shooting will barely last 30 mins in that kind of cold. Even my deep cycle marine battery that I use to power my scope, laptop and other accessories fails to hold up in this kind of cold.

So as per usual, December to March are pretty much months where I have to feed my astronomy fix by simply looking at images other people have posted. But now that the weather is warming up, I'm getting my gear squared away and getting ready for some great shoots. Finally having an auto guider set up will allow me to shoot some targets that I had previously attempted, but never managed to get to my satisfaction.

One such target is M51 - The Whirlpool Galaxy. This object is one of my favourites, and holds a special place with me as it was the first deep space object I ever photographed back in September 2013. I didn't own any type of camera other than a point and shoot at the time and knew nothing about photography. I had a telescope, and my friend Kevin had a Nikon D60 and a T-mount and scope adapter. So we connected his camera to my 8" Meade LX90 and proceeded to attempt to shoot M51

The results were mixed. We did manage to capture our target, despite many mistakes being made along the way. At the end of the photo session, we had 50 useable 10 second exposures of M51, and some questionable calibration frames (accidentally switched to a lower ISO setting for the darks and bias), But nonetheless, we had captures something.

The next step was a real trial by fire. I basically knew about post-processing. I watched several tutorial videos on YouTube on how to stack images in DeepSkyStacker and editing in Photoshop. I didn't really understand what I was doing, but I was mimicking what I was seeing. And at the end of it, I got an image of M51. It wasn't great, but nonetheless, both Kevin and I were ecstatic about the result. We didn't think we'd actually captured anything useful at all at first, so it was nice to see we had succeeded. It wasn't a great image by any stretch of the imagination, but all things considered, it certainly wasn't a failure. It showed that we were at least on the right track. And important lessons were learned along the way.

My very first deep sky image

Earlier this evening (which will be yesterday by the time this is published), I was sorting through old data and found my original images. I decided to try stacking it again and running it through Photoshop using the tools and experience I had built up over the last 30 or so months since this image was originally taken. I wanted to see just how bad or good that original data was.

After about 45 minutes of playing around, I was pretty impressed with the results. The background was far noisier than I had expected, but I wasn't surprised considering the sky conditions at the time and the fact the calibration frames were bad. But I like the result. Now that I know how to colour balance my images, I was able to make it look a lot more natural. I also didn't burn the cores of the galaxies out when stretching the histogram. And I managed to pull a lot more detail and contrast out of the spiral arms and the surrounding clouds of stars and dust  - details that were invisible in the original image. But the part that surprised me the most though was that we managed to get this kind of detail with only 8½ minutes of integration time.

Reprocessed data from my original M51 image

All in all, this image is what it is - my first attempt at astrophotography. It was shot under poor seeing conditions and light pollution with a low end DSLR by a couple of guys with no experience. Not too bad considering it's faint galaxy 35 million light years away. I'm quite impressed with how good it actually turned out now that I see it processed properly. And it motivates me to capture this object again soon.

Experience and equipment were limiting factors at the time this image was taken. I've since taken much better images of M51 using my 120 mm, f/5 refractor while my larger scope was out for repairs, but long to get high resolutions, long exposure images of it using my 8" SCT. I tried on a couple of occasions last summer after I got my big scope back, but failed due to tracking issues and dew problems. By the time I got my kit together in late summer, M51 was far too low on the horizon to photograph, So I had to scratch M51 off my 2014 target list.

This year, I'm ready. My mount is ready. I have my autoguider which will allow me to take long exposures with perfect tracking. And I have my dew heaters to keep my primary and guide scope optics dry. This year I will finally manage to revisit M51 and capture images that will do it justice.

So until next time, clear skies and keep you eyes to the sky.