Astrophotography

EDIT 20-05-2014:

I just did some post processing work and this is what I could get out of the 2500 Mars frames I had:

$Mars with xbox webcam through 90mm achromatic refractor.$

Mars with xbox webcam through 90mm achromatic refractor.

Although the image is still of fairly poor quality, I guess I like it. You would too, if you consider that this is what one of the better frames looked like:

Typical frame my xbox webcam took through the telescope

Last night I imaged Saturn using my modified xbox webcam. This time I didn’t use my barlow as I found it significantly reduced the quality of the image. I guess that’s what you get for 25 euros. Also, as adviced by many on stargazerslounge.com, I took a lot of videos to get a total of about 3000 frames. Of these I stacked the best 1000 in AutoStakkert!2, used wavelets in Registax v6 and did some post processing in CS6. One thing I noticed the last time I imaged with my xbox camera, is that the red image is over illuminated and even blurry. This is probably due to the infrared filter I removed. So I guess I should put an IR/UV-cut filter on my wish list (which is quite full of astrophotography stuff 😉 ). Final Saturn picture is below. I also took thousands of frames of Mars and I will process these later.

Saturn from last night, stacked, RGB aligned, applied wavelets, adjusted contrast and used smart sharpening.

I re-processed Saturn after I flipped it to get its correct position: seen from above. (The setup I have gives an upside down view on camera) I think the position of Saturn with respect to its rings is better visible in this image.

Rotated and alternatively processed Saturn

Yesterday evening, for the first time in weeks, the night sky was clear. So I pointed my telescope towards the sky to take one last good image of Jupiter before it disappears behind the horizon for almost a year. Because the windows laptop I often use for capturing with my xbox camera was used for other purposes, I decided to give my iPhone a last chance.

I omitted the barlow this time to get more light and less aberration and screwed my iPhone on a 9.5mm eyepiece. This way I captured about 50 images of Jupiter, about 20 of Mars and 4 of the moon. Using my iPhone earbuds volume buttons I had a remote shutter release and could image without touching the iPhone or telescope. The whole imaging went quite smoothly.

But then I tried to save the photos from the app I used to the camera roll. This, my iPhone only agreed to do with a handful of photos and I ended up with 60% of the original number of frames. Later, on my laptop, I noticed that of the 60% frames I had left, half was useless. Nevertheless I tried to stack the remaining photos for Jupiter, Mars and the moon. This also went terribly because there was too much distortion in the pictures to be able to align them. Even the 4 images of the moon seemed to be a problem. Eventually, I got 15 frames of Jupiter to align and stack. But the resulting image was downright disappointing.

Below are some examples of the best frames I got this session. One thing I learned from this: no more iPhone astrophotography for a while.

One of the better Mars frames out of a terrible image session

On of the better Jupiter frames of this terrible session

Do you remember the micro observatories website I wrote about earlier? They have these telescopes that are remote controllable and free to use for anyone on the internet. Well, I requested a couple of more images and while most of the images were rubbish, I got a very nice image of the Whirlpool Galaxy. After mild processing the result (image below) was pretty awesome 🙂