Pelican Nebula – narrowband

Posted 27/10/2020 by Andrew Thornett

My second ever photo in narrowband – HA-OIII-SII.

On this occasion, I decided to photograph the Pelican Nebula……I used plate solving to get into the nebula but did not realise that this meant I was right in the middle of it and hence my image below (which is based around the star HD198896) does not show much of the well known edge of the nebula – still, it is a riot of colour!

SII – Red
Ha – Green
OIII – Blue

Sky Watcher Equinox Pro 80mm OTA
EQ6
Altair Astro 183M camera
Baader 7-8.5nm narrowband filter
PixInsight/Photoshop CS6

Andy

First proper night with the GT81

Posted 27/10/2020 by Jim Owen

So i decided to take the plunge and get a triplet, this was the first proper night with the new toy. As it was a very moonlit night i decided to shoot a nebula, and chose NGC 7635 – Bubble Nebula. One area i need to work on is my star masks, but im generally happy with this pic, but as always room for improvement.

Amazing photo

Posted 17/10/2020 by Angela Rodgers

Saw this amazing photo of the ISS passing in front of the moon.

Yesterday morning I captured an incredibly brief and rare event, the ISS transiting the 4% illuminated moon during the daytime. #astrophotography #space #opteam pic.twitter.com/hAxYOsMZSo

— Andrew McCarthy (@AJamesMcCarthy) October 15, 2020

ZenithStar delivers again

Posted 15/10/2020 by Jim Owen

Quick snap of the Veil Nebula. I will need to add to this, it looking ok so far.

Some Marseses…

Posted 14/10/2020 by Neil Wyatt

… as Gollum might put it.

Reprocess of my data from 13 September,

From Thursday last week:

And the day after, Friday at Rosliston, the seeing wasn’t as good and Mars wasn’t as high in the sky:

All with the same equipment, so sometimes it’s just down to the conditions… Andy’s to be congratulated for getting recognisable images on his first go under such poor seeing.

M31 – First light with the Zenithstar

Posted 14/10/2020 by Jim Owen

First test image with the Williams Optics ZenithStar 61 doublet. Instead of using my dedicated astro cam this was taken with the full frame DSLR.

Saturn from RAG observing session 0/10/2020

Posted 13/10/2020 by Andrew Thornett

My first image of Saturn – again my technique needs to improve. Not a lot of details, but at least it shows rings!

Sky Watcher Equinox Pro 100mm OTA

ZWO ASI 174 MM camera

Andy

California Nebula

Posted 13/10/2020 by Jim Owen

First time using the ZenithStar and my Altair 294c 23 x 300s Sub frames with tri band filter.

Photographing Mars during RAG observing session

Posted 10/10/2020 by Andrew Thornett

With Neil Wyatt’s help, I have managed to take my first photograph of Mars – I am very excited!

ZWO ASI174MM camera
Sky Watcher Equinox Pro 100mm OTA
HEQ5 Pro mount
I used Pole Master to polar align.
I learnt that SharpCap to take the photos – I discovered this is better than FireCapture & ASICapture.
The image on SharpCap needs to be quite bright – so change settings so histogram about 75% – initially I took video which wasn’t so bright & then AutoStakkert would not recognise the planet.
I also need to use 5x Barlow to reasonable image scale.
To focus – need to focus on star first as difficult to focus on planet.

Andy