Our Beautiful Universe - Photos and Videos

[chemisttree]

It just controls the camera. It is separate from the mount.

 

[collinsmark]

It just controls the camera. It is separate from the mount.

Just to avoid confusion, the ASIAIR Pro can control the mount, depending on the mount (even if @chemisttree isn't using that feature). It also has the ability to control an electronic focuser, if you happen to have an electronic focuser (and depending on the focuser [it may only support the ZWO EAF, presently]).

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My solution is a little different. It's not as graceful, but a bit more flexible. It's based around a mini-PC.

It also functions to some degree as a counterweight.

 

[bruha]

Thanks, still question--if connected to mount and a I (handy) move its, it can display azimuthal position and polar aligment.. ?

 

[collinsmark]

Thanks, still question--if connected to mount and a I (handy) move its, it can display azimuthal position and polar aligment.. ?

I'm not quite sure what you are asking. But I'll take a stab at an answer.

If you ever adjust your mount using manual controls, then no. Neither the mount or the device that is controlling the mount will know what the azimuth, altitude, declination, or right ascension are, once you change anything with the physical, manual controls. All bets are off, and you'll need to re-align your mount.

If you have a mount that is capable of being controlled electronically (such as a GoTo mount), you'll first need to align your mount. Then lock down the manual controls (if you haven't already). Once the mount is aligned (and the manual controls locked down), the mount and/or the device controlling the mount should be able to keep track of the azimuth, altitude, declination, and right ascension so long as they are only adjusted electronically by "slewing," tracking, and/or autoguiding, assuming the mount is capable of such things.

That said, a device such as the ASIAIR Pro, or something like my setup (a mini-PC running Windows 10 and such programs as SharpCap, N.I.N.A., Stellarium, etc.) can* aid in both polar alignment and stellar alignment. But once aligned, you can't touch the manual controls or move your mount/tripod. If you do, you'll need to start over.

*perhaps a better word is "may": The mount and device controlling it need to be compatible.

[Edit: Modern controllers (ASIAIR Pro included) have capabilities that make alignment much quicker and easier such as "plate solving" tools. If you ever loose alignment, they can help get you back aligned in a jiffy. My original point though is that if you ever adjust anything manually, you'll lose alignment and you'll need to re-align, whether that involves plate solving or not.]

 

[chemisttree]

I haven’t used it it with my Atlas. Mine is too old! It works with the new EQ-6 mount, though.
So I only use it to control the camera. A new EQ-6 is on my bucket list!

 

[DennisN]

My solution is a little different. It's not as graceful, but a bit more flexible. It's based around a mini-PC.

It's so nice to see that I am not the only one who likes to build stuff.
What kind of mini-PC is it`? And what OS is it running on?
Edit: Ah, I saw in your next post it uses Windows 10.

 

[collinsmark]

It's so nice to see that I am not the only one who likes to build stuff.
What kind of mini-PC is it`? And what OS is it running on?
Edit: Ah, I saw in your next post it uses Windows 10.

The mini-PC is from a company called "Minis Forum" (weird name, right?). I bought the one I got because it's small, light, powered by a 12 V jack, has USB3.0 ports, supports WiFi, and comes installed with Windows 10 Pro. There might be other mini-PCs or PC sticks that do just as well or better these days.

The Windows 10 Pro, combined with the WiFi support, allows me to Remote Desktop into the scope from a indoor, comfortable location.

It's also fits neatly atop the Pegasus Astro Ultimate Power Box V2 which provides power to the mini-PC, telescope, electronic focuser, camera cooler, and dew heaters; and also has USB 3.0 hub with plenty of ports.

I'm still waiting on some other astronomical equipment, and working on some other projects, which is why you haven't seen any deep-sky images from me recently. Hopefully in the coming months I'll have something to post.

 

[bruha]

Hello, and thank you for answer . (I understand that this device is not as useful for not electronically controlled mounth.)..

 

[Devin-M]

Last night I drove 40 miles into the mountains to my bortle 2 site, got polar aligned and began trying to focus. That’s when I realized the motor in my “star watcher star adventurer 2i pro pack” equatorial mount was randomly stopping every minute or so and also disconnecting from the phone app until I restarted it (even though the lights remained on). This kept happening so I wasn’t able to get a good focus with the Bahtinov mask. After pulling my hair out for over an hour in the 32f temps, I finally decided to try switching the AA batteries. To my relief, it began working normally. The batteries had been fresh but stored them in the mount for a week so I suspect some sort of trickle discharge over that time occurred. As soon as I got it working the clouds rolled in so I wasn’t able to take any pretty pictures. Later back at my house I did some more testing and found out the behavior will also happen if the camera isn’t very well balanced after pointing it at the target. I’ll post a couple test pics later which sort of illustrate the tracking quality. I was able to do a few 2 minute exposures of nothing in particular.

 

[chemisttree]

Last night I drove 40 miles into the mountains to my bortle 2 site, got polar aligned and began trying to focus. That’s when I realized the motor in my “star watcher star adventurer 2i pro pack” equatorial mount was randomly stopping every minute or so and also disconnecting from the phone app until I restarted it (even though the lights remained on). This kept happening so I wasn’t able to get a good focus with the Bahtinov mask. After pulling my hair out for over an hour in the 32f temps, I finally decided to try switching the AA batteries. To my relief, it began working normally. The batteries had been fresh but stored them in the mount for a week so I suspect some sort of trickle discharge over that time occurred. As soon as I got it working the clouds rolled in so I wasn’t able to take any pretty pictures. Later back at my house I did some more testing and found out the behavior will also happen if the camera isn’t very well balanced after pointing it at the target. I’ll post a couple test pics later which sort of illustrate the tracking quality. I was able to do a few 2 minute exposures of nothing in particular.

Does the mount’s app have a polar align function?

 

[Devin-M]

It let's me control taking the pictures (exposure length, count) from my phone through an intervalometer cable from the mount to the camera.

It’s also got another mode called astro timelapse where it tracks during the photo and then resets to the original position for the next photo for astro landscape timelapses.

I have to do the polar alignment by looking through the scope in the mount and adjusting the alt/az knobs.

 

[Devin-M]

Just got light pollution filter for my Nikon 300mm f/4.5...

 

[Devin-M]

single 2min exposure, 1000mm f/10 (500mm f/5 + tc-201 2x teleconverter), bortle 6, 1600iso, sky watcher star adventurer 2i pro pack equatorial mount, d800 full frame dslr, slightly cropped:

 

[chemisttree]

Have you tried drift alignment?

 

[Devin-M]

I'll look into giving that a try.

I did manage to get this 2 minute one also before I left the bortle 2 area which seems to have better tracking (though it's out of focus). It also shows how tantalizingly close I was to reaching my target...

single 2min exposure, 1000mm f/10 (500mm f/5 + tc-201 2x teleconverter), bortle 2, 12800iso, sky watcher star adventurer 2i pro pack equatorial mount, d800 full frame dslr (this is exactly how it looked straight out of the camera, no cropping or adjustments.) this was also the very last pic I took before the clouds rolled over:

 

[chemisttree]

That’s great tracking! It might be just seeing instead of focus. Twinkling stars look like they’re out of focus when you use longer acquisition times. The fact that this pic was obtained just before the clouds rolled in suggests to me that seeing was poor just before they showed up. That’s happened many times for me. The atmosphere is really unstable just before the clouds start to condense and your focus was probably as good as it could be.

 

[Devin-M]

Here we go... set up next to the dumpster in a bortle 5/6...

2min x 62 exposures (124 minutes total exposure time), 600mm f/9 (300mm f/4.5 + tc-301 2x teleconverter), bortle 5-6, rollei astroklar 72mm light pollution filter, 1600iso, sky watcher star adventurer 2i pro pack equatorial mount, d800 full frame dslr (slight cropping), 40 darks + 40 flats:

 

[chemisttree]

Very nice!

 

[Devin-M]

thanks! a couple of full-res crops...

 

[collinsmark]

I did some more testing and found out the behavior will also happen if the camera isn’t very well balanced after pointing it at the target.

This isn't too surprising to me. If the scope is not well balanced, the motors will have to work against gravity (and resulting friction) to move the scope. Simply put: a well balanced scope makes your mount's batteries last longer.

But there is the possibility of too much of a good thing here. Having a "perfectly" balanced scope can be bad. If the scope is "too" well balanced it can wobble back and forth on the gears, even if a tiny amount. This is called backlash. It will make your stars elongated along the right ascension axis.

The solution is to balance your scope almost, but not quite perfectly. That, and bias the imbalance such that the scope ever-so-gently wants to rotate toward celestial West. Balancing the bias to the West, instead of East, is preferred because your right ascension motor works toward pushing the scope to the west anyway, so this direction is the least stressful on the motor (theoretically). [But if it's slightly biased to toward the East instead, don't sweat it too much: this West vs. East thing isn't really a big deal. Just ensure it's not dead-center.]

[Edit: cleared up some east/west confusion.]

 

[Devin-M]

The problem is I can balance the camera on the right ascension axis but not the declination axis. Pointing the camera to the north star, I get it perfectly balanced on the right ascension axis, but then when I adjust the declination it’s no longer balanced on the right ascension axis, so after I adjust the declination and get it pointed ball-park toward the target I then have to rebalance on the right ascension axis, if that makes any sense.

 

[Andy Resnick]

Orion nebulae, 400/2.8 lens DX crop, about 7600s integration time:

 

[chemisttree]

Orion nebulae, 400/2.8 lens DX crop, about 7600s integration time:

View attachment 277558

Very green but good detail. I wonder what white balance setting would enhance the reds? Or is that due to a sensor insensitivity in H-alpha?

 

[Andy Resnick]

Very green but good detail. I wonder what white balance setting would enhance the reds? Or is that due to a sensor insensitivity in H-alpha?

Ha! I can't tell it's green b/c color-blind. I try and use the histograms to white-balance but clearly didn't finesse that operation well.

 

[chemisttree]

Wow, I can’t imagine how I would do that just by histogram data!

 

[Andy Resnick]

Here's another go at it: I went back to the original 32-bit fits file and adjusted the levels. The color is better corrected and now I can clearly see the Trapezium cluster (200% crop):

 

[bruha]

Hello, it is beautiful, as I now see, I managed catch just this cluster previously (shape is similar to me).
What is position of this cluster within whole Nebula..?
Thank you and lot of succes

 

[DennisN]

Orion nebulae, 400/2.8 lens DX crop, about 7600s integration time:

Here's another go at it: I went back to the original 32-bit fits file and adjusted the levels. The color is better corrected and now I can clearly see the Trapezium cluster (200% crop):

Beautiful! The level of detail is stunning.

 

[chemisttree]

Hello, it is beautiful, as I now see, I managed catch just this cluster previously (shape is similar to me).
What is position of this cluster within whole Nebula..?
Thank you and lot of succes

The trapezium is located in the bright core of the nebula.

 

[bruha]

Ou, thanks -it is explained that I can manage in not very good light pollution condition just these.,

 

[DennisN]

NASA has published a fairly significant e-book on smartphone astrophotography. It’s free!

Thank you! I've downloaded it. Perfect info for me, and it's probably a great read during cloudy times .

I've read almost the entire e-book (I skipped some parts), and I thought it was very good! It gave me quite some food for thought. And it was interesting to learn a little more about how camera sensors work. Thanks again.

 

[Devin-M]

I did some imaging of the Triangulum Galaxy a couple of nights ago... still working on processing it but here's what the North Star diffraction pattern looked like through the 72mm Bahtinov focusing mask when in focus... (cropped, nikon d800, nikkor 300mm f/4.5 + tc-301 2x teleconverter, 1600iso, 10 sec, sky watcher star adventurer 2i pro pack equatorial mount)

 

[Devin-M]

It was pretty tough to image since this was close to the horizon looking towards town in a Bortle 5/6 area & I was almost directly under a really bright street lamp...

Triangulum Galaxy - 2.73 million light-years distance

It was 3min x 41 exposures although my stacking software rejected 22 of them for satellites, wobble, etc... (so 19 x 3min = 57 minutes exposure time out of 2 hours total was used), 600mm f/9 (300mm f/4.5 nikon lens + tc-301 2x nikon teleconverter), bortle 5-6, rollei astroklar 72mm light pollution filter, 1600iso, sky watcher star adventurer 2i pro pack equatorial mount, d800 full frame dslr (image cropped), 25 darks + 40 flats. the darks are taken with the lens cap on (75 minutes) which maps out the non-random sensor noise and the flats are taken towards a light with a white plastic bag stretched over the lens on auto-exposure which maps out the light fall-off around the edges of the lens and the dust. focus was achieved by taking test shots through a 72mm bahtinov mask prior to the main exposures. 2 seconds delay after mirror flip up mode turned on to eliminate mirror flip vibration. photo sequence remotely triggered by the equatorial mount through a phone app. raw images were converted to 16 bit tiffs in adobe lightroom with all noise reduction turned off, then stacked in starry sky stacker on mac os, many more global adjustments made in adobe lightroom to the resulting tif (contrast, exposure, highlights, shadows, whites, blacks, noise reduction, color temperature, etc), with some final tweaks to the levels, curves, saturation, cropping etc in adobe photoshop. plate solving done with nova.astrometry.net/upload light pollution levels were determined via lightpollutionmap.info suitable atmospheric conditions were determined in advance via clearoutside.com and shot planning was done with stellarium.org:

Center (RA, Dec): (23.454, 30.608)
Center (RA, hms): 01h 33m 49.046s
Center (Dec, dms): +30° 36' 29.389"
Size: 71.8 x 47.9 arcmin
Radius: 0.719 deg
Pixel scale: 1.68 arcsec/pixel

Full frame looked like this:

Individual 3 minute exposures looked like this:

I’m not sure how much degradation occurred due to light from the street lamp nearly falling onto the lens if not for the lens hood (a second street lamp was partially blocked by a tree but shone onto the lens through the leaves)...

 

[chemisttree]

Thanks for the complete workflow description! Very nice.

 

[Devin-M]

Thank you. I think most of the glow in the full frame image is from the street lights, because I did flats. I can only point away from street lights from my house to the south and east, otherwise I'll have to set up some sort of streetlight blocking system.

 

[bruha]

Hi, sun green filter, (but not see much more than without filter

 

[Devin-M]

I just ordered one of these to try to balance my camera+lens on the declination axis of the equatorial mount... will see how it goes...

Flashpoint Single Focusing Rail Fine Control, for Macro Photography
https://www.adorama.com/mcfrss.html

 

[chemisttree]

...

Hi, sun green filter, (but not see much more than without filter

Looks like the focus is a little off.

 

[bruha]

Yes, (I thin problem could be that heavy mount stood on old wooden and shaking floor

 

[bruha]

Hi, I understand that this device .its just for camera use? (not for adjust camera with telescope)

have nice day

 

[bruha]

Hi still one image (mybe little beter), at least more alike I found on net...

 

[davenn]

Hi still one image (mybe little beter), at least more alike I found on net...

yes definitely better focussed

Hopefully in a couple of years we will start seeing the Sun looking like the second image

 

[bruha]

 

[Devin-M]

Sunflower Galaxy - 29.3 million light years
72min of 2hr exposure - 36 x 2min - 1000mm f/10 - Bortle 2
Nikkor-Reflex focal 500mm f/5 + Nikon TC-201 2x teleconverter on Nikon D800

Center (RA, Dec):	(198.965, 42.031)
Center (RA, hms):	13h 15m 51.710s
Center (Dec, dms):	+42° 01' 51.521"
Size:	32.2 x 21.5 arcmin
Radius:	0.323 deg
Pixel scale:	1 arcsec/pixel

 

[Devin-M]

also fyi, the macro focusing rail works very well for getting the camera and lens balanced on the declination axis...

 

[DennisN]

I saw a couple of nice public lectures from the Royal Institution yesterday about black holes.
They covered many different aspects. A couple of things that are staggering is e.g. to imagine such massive objects as supermassive black holes spinning at such astounding speeds, and also the amount of energy released (and power) when black holes merge. It is mindblowing .

There was a series of nice comparison pictures and animations in the first lecture at 35 m 42 s and onwards.

The Physics of Black Holes - with Chris Impey


Q&A: The Physics of Black Holes - with Chris Impey


Black Holes and the Fundamental Laws of Physics - with Jerome Gauntlett

 

[Devin-M]

This little dongle will be my savior...

With my 600mm f/9 and 1000mm f/10 setups, its practically impossible to tell sometimes where I’m pointing through the view finder because the picture is so dark with such high aperature #’s, so I got a USB to Lightning adapter for transferring photos directly from my DSLR to my iphone photo library. From there I simply upload a test shot for plate solving to:

http://nova.astrometry.net/upload

...and it tells me exactly where I’m pointed. No more shooting for an hour and a half only to find out I was pointing at a completely different area of sky than intended.

Last night I had brought out my laptop, downloaded a pic from camera to laptop then airdropped to phone then uploaded to nova.astrometry.net/upload but my computer froze (literally, no pun intended) and wouldn’t restart til plugged in (I was a 30 minute drive from home in a bortle 2). I was about to order an inverter for my car to power the laptop but then I thought, why bother if I can go straight from DSLR into the phone.

It was almost sheer luck I was able to successfully aim the 1000mm setup at the sunflower galaxy last night without using plate solving.

 

[Devin-M]

another upgrade to help w/ pointing... green laser w/ telescope mount attached via macro focusing rail:

 

[chemisttree]

another upgrade to help w/ pointing... green laser w/ telescope mount attached via macro focusing rail:

View attachment 278343

Hmmm... Not how I imagined you would use that!

 

[Devin-M]

I will have 2 macro focusing rails... one for the laser and one to balance the whole camera on the declination axis via the lens mounting point.