deep sky object

When I started this site, I just began taking my first astrophotos. The image below was my first attempt to capture the Orion Nebula with my iPhone.

First try at m42 with iPhone

After this first attempt, I improved my astrophoto skills by practicing with planetary imaging. But still, I couldn’t squeeze any more out of the iPhone than this:

Final try at m42 with iPhone

I decided it had been my final try at iPhone deep sky imaging. I tried my luck with both xbox live and ps3 webcams, but the xbox live cam didn’t pick up anything special and I still haven’t got the ps3 cam to do long exposures.

After I bought my DSLR I could do untracked 0.8 second exposures without too much trailing, but the 0.8 second exposures aren’t that exciting really. It’s my new motorized tracking mount in combination with my DSLR that makes all the difference. When last week the thick layer of clouds showed the tiniest opening, I immediately set up my telescope to take advantage. Unfortunately the opening was so small, that by the time I had everything up and running – which didn’t take that long – a milky but slightly transparent blanket covered the skies again. To make things worse, some serious winds shook my telescope tubes every now and then.

Bright as the Moon is, I could just lower the ISO values and take a decent picture of it through the clouds. To give you an idea of the amount of clouds present, I’ve also added a few images taken at higher ISO values so that you can see the clouds passing in front of the Moon.

Moon at low ISO values

Clouds in front of Moon 3

Clouds in front of Moon 2

Clouds in front of Moon 1

Despite the once more disappointing skies and the feisty gusts of wind, I decided to try finding the Orion Nebula. After a while I succeeded in doing so and started taking 20 second exposures between successive wind gusts and through the clouds. The majority of the images showed massive trailing and were useless. Some however, were not that bad and after 30 minutes or so I had 4 or 5 decent shots.

After stacking and some post processing, I was suprised to find that I had also captured the Running Man Nebula, which isn’t as bright as the Orion Nebula itself. All in all, the small stack of photos, taken at seriously bad conditions, ended up in my best photo of the Orion Nebula yet. I can’t wait to test my setup under really good conditions 🙂

M42 taken with DSLR and tracking mount through a thin layer of clouds

Sometimes astrophoto processing can be quite time consuming. The last couple of days I spend quite some time behind my laptop to get the best results out of my raw astrophotos. First of all a Saturn photo from Tuesday the 1st of July.

I still haven’t figured out how to remotely make video recordings with my dslr attached to a telescope. Instead I shot about 120 photos, which is not a lot of frames, but I got bored of clicking the shutter button soon. The image below is the result of a 65 image stack. Whenever I find out how to make videos with the DSLR attached to a telescope, I will be able to push the enhancement sliders a lot more and hopefully to resolve some more detail. Until then, I’m very happy with my best Saturn so far:

Saturn through a 90mm reflector with fairly good seeing

The evening of the 2nd I got my full gear out again and went searching for some cool deep sky objects. One of the easiest to find is the Ring Nebula (Messier 57). Just like the Dumbbell Nebula from earlier, this is a planetary nebula. It is an illuminated bright shell of gas enclosing the center star. Why it appears as a ring instead of a ball hopefully becomes clear from the image below:

Why spherical planetary nebula appears as a ring

The upper line contains much more light from the nebula compared to the lower line, which only crosses through a thin layer of gas.

That said, I present to you, my first image of the Ring Nebula:

The Ring Nebula (M57) through a 130mm telescope with light pollution filter

On the upper right the double star Sheliak shows some cool diffraction spikes. A double star? Yes. The two are simply too close to be distinguishable. I will try to show you a cool double star soon.

Up next: the Andromeda galaxy (Messier 31). I promised to try and capture a good shot of the Andromeda galaxy through my telescope. Well, it turned out to be a difficult target. Someday when it is a little higher above the horizon, I will make a ton of photos and stack them to be able to resolve some detail. A stack of 32 frames just doesn’t have enough information and this is the best I could get out of it:

[I really didn’t like this picture so I tried some more. I stacked the result of the 800ms and 1300ms images together and stretched levels in nebulosity and processed further in Adobe Camera Raw. Still not perfect, but I like it a lot more (Note that this is just the core, the outer dust lanes of the galaxy are too faint to be captured in such a short exposure time) :

Bright core of the Andromeda Galaxy

I hope you don’t mind that I deleted the previous image 🙂 ]

And last but not least: Another Dumbbell Nebula. This time shot through a light pollution filter. I used a very questionable adapter built from paper and duct tape to attach the light pollution filter while still being able to focus at infinity. Questionable or not, this way I avoid spending 200 euros on a dedicated filter.

The Dumbbell Nebula (M27) through a 130mm telescope with light pollution filter

The image below is a combination of the frames from the previous session and the frames from the image above.

Best 41 frames of all the photos I got of M57 stacked together.

Also, another terrestrial photo post is coming up somewhere this week. Not as large as last time, but I definately got some cool images, so stay tuned!