Our Beautiful Universe - Photos and Videos

[Keith_McClary]

clusters are within M31

NGC 206 - The Great Star Cloud in Andromeda ?

 

[Devin-M]

NGC 206 - The Great Star Cloud in Andromeda ?

Interesting link. It shows huge clusters of stars can look like individual stars at that distance...

 

[Keith_McClary]

Speed Bump by Dave Coverly for October 31, 2021

 

[bruha]

Hello, I attach image of Alcyone with neighboring star within Pleiades (eyepiece camera SV EBONY and Newton scope 1000 x 200 mm).

 

[collinsmark]

The Silver Sliver Galaxy (NGC 891). This galaxy is about 30 million light years away in the constellation Andromeda. It's an unbarred spiral galaxy, and would look very similar to our own galaxy, The Milky Way, if we could view our own galaxy edge-on from a distance.

It's sometimes called the "Outer Limits Galaxy" because it was the first of several galaxies rolled during the closing credits of the original Outer Limits television series.

It was discovered by William Herschel (who made all sorts of discoveries) on October 6, 1784.

Silver Sliver Galaxy (NGC 891)

Integration:
Astronomik Hα: 231×90sec = 5.78 hours
Optolong L-Pro: 641×60sec = 10.68 hours
Astronomik R: 109×60sec = 1.82 hours
Astronomik G: 109×60sec = 1.82 hours
Astromomik B: 110×60sec = 1.83 hours
Total integration time: 21.93 hours
Bortle Class 7 skies

Equipment:
Meade 10" LX200-ACF on an equatorial wedge
Optec Lepus 0.62 focal reducer
filters (see above)
ZWO ASI1600MM-COOL monochrome camera

Software:
Nighttime Imaging 'N Astronomy (N.I.N.A.)
PHD2 guiding (goes without saying)
PixInsight
Topaz Labs Denoise AI

Success in astrophotography is the sum of all problems encountered, all problems identified, and any solutions that happen to be found. Even if a problem doesn't have a solution, I still consider it a success because it might point to a solution later on down the road. That, and because thinking about it any other way is maddening. There are always so, so many problems when attempting astrophotography that if you don't embrace the problems themselves you are doomed to lunacy and despair.

Mid-way through this project I found a solution/workaround to a problem that has been haunting me for months (triple success!). As anybody following my posts will know, I have been battling guiding and tracking errors (success!). I thought it was probably my old LX200 mount. It turns out it wasn't: it was N.I.N.A. stomping all over PHD2's pulse guiding commands.

I now have experimental proof of this. I'm not sure if the root cause is with N.I.N.A., PHD2, or my ASCOM driver, but whatever the case, it seems that when N.I.N.A., polls the mount asking "are you still here? And btw., what's the current Altitude, Azimuth, Right Ascension, and Declination?" it stomps on PHD2's guiding commands, making many of those pulse commands useless. (Success!)

The workaround (success!) is after the target is all centered and framed up nicely, is to disconnect the mount from N.I.N.A., and then start guiding with PHD2 such that PHD2 is the only thing connected directly to the mount. N.I.N.A., can still be connected to PHD2, the focuser, filterwheel, and whatnot; but just not the mount. Then start the imaging sequence.

Using this workaround means that I have to give up slewing to new targets automatically in the middle of a session, but that's OK, because I usually stick to a single target for several days anyway. I can still do all the plate solving and stuff before the sequence starts (just not mid-sequence). Dithering is not affected, since N.I.N.A. doesn't need to be connected to the mount in order to dither; it just needs to be connected to PHD2. Also, PHD2 keeps track of the mount's declination automatically, so N.I.N.A. not being connected to the mount does not adversely affect guiding.

Discovering this workaround was a big deal to me. (Success!) Before, my guiding/tracking errors, while usually tolerable, would sometimes veer off into ±4-5 ARCSEC peak, every few minutes for no apparent reason. But then when I disconnected N.I.N.A. from the mount before starting the sequence, "High-Ho Silver," the guiding is almost always within around ±1 ARCSEC peak, with an RMS error of only around 0.5 ARCSEC.

It's as if Andromeda and the Lone Ranger had some sort of evil lovechild that gobbled up the guiding errors. All praise the Andromeda & Lone Ranger demon spawn!

My silver-haired compatriots will recognize the Lone Ranger as the fictional masked hero of the American old-west, who, together with his horse "Silver," would defeat the villains, save the day, and leave a silver bullet as his calling card. The Lone Ranger harkens back to fictional time where even the bad guys wore masks.

So in summary, the Silver Sliver Galaxy was a very successful project. And to boot, while imaging this galaxy, not a single werewolf attacked for some reason (not necessarily a success!).

 

[Devin-M]

Flying Bat Nebula - Ha-RGB Composite - 300mm f/4.5 on 35mm sensor
12x20min (4 hrs) 6nm Ha Filter @ 6400iso
60x1min (1hr) RGB (no filter) @ 3200iso

100% Crop

Orion + Assorted Nebulas Ha Filter - 24mm f/2.8 on a 35mm sensor
12x5min (1hr) @ 6400iso

100% crops

 

[Devin-M]

https://www.speakev.com/cdn-cgi/image/format=auto,onerror=redirect,width=1920,height=1920,fit=scale-down/https://www.speakev.com/attachments/img-4-bw-jpg.152184/

 

[DennisN]

A team has announced they have directly observed an exoplanet (in infrared):

Article 1: Infant Planet Discovered by UH-Led Team Using Maunakea Telescopes (keckobservatory.org)
Article 2: Jaw-Dropping Direct Image Shows a Baby Exoplanet Over 400 Light-Years Away (ScienceAlert)

Quote from article 1: "A direct image of the planet 2M0437, which lies about 100 times the Earth-Sun distance from its parent star. [...]"

 

[bruha]

Hello, I attach Andromeda galaxy from yesterday made by my friend (camera on drive mount)

 

[Andy Resnick]

The Silver Sliver Galaxy (NGC 891). This galaxy is about 30 million light years away in the constellation Andromeda. It's an unbarred spiral galaxy, and would look very similar to our own galaxy, The Milky Way, if we could view our own galaxy edge-on from a distance.

Thanks for posting this one! I was unaware of NGC 891. The weekend was moonless and clear over here, I was able to devote some camera time imaging this object in between M31 (trailing away) and M45 (rising):

800/8 lens, D810 DX format, 2.2 hours @ ISO 125:

and a 1:1 crop:

Something very unexpected (to me), this region of sky is *full* of galaxies, some examples follow:

 

[DennisN]

For those who use cameras and lenses for astrophotography:

I just read two blog articles which I found interesting:

How To Easily Focus On The Stars (Astro Pills)
- in which he among other things describes how to make a cheap focusing aid (for lenses with shorter focal lengths) from a frying pan splatter screen . He also provides some focusing tips if you don't have or get your Bahtinov masks to work for you.

Budget Astrophotography With Legacy Lenses (Astro Pills)
- those of you with more knowledge may already know all of it, but personally I found the section about Chromatic Aberration Index and Which Legacy Lenses Should You Get? very interesting and useful.

 

[bruha]

Hello, I attach next Andromeda attempts-original and Gimp corrected.

 

[DennisN]

Hello, I attach next Andromeda attempts-original and Gimp corrected

Attempt? I would call it a success!
I like the right one, A, the most.

I've been thinking about trying to do Andromeda too soon, but I want to get out of the city for that. And it's been very cloudy here lately too. But hopefully I will get a chance to do it soon.

 

[bruha]

So lot of succes
-this one was made from balcony house(Prague suburb) by camera Sony
135 mm focal length with drive mount.

 

[Devin-M]

Moon
1800mm f/12 1/640th sec 1600iso aps-c sensor crop

 

[Devin-M]

Saturn
1800mm f/12 50x 1/320th sec 6400iso 100% crop

 

[Devin-M]

last night with the new 1800mm f/12 telescope:

 

[bruha]

Hi your moon is beautiful .
I attach still one Andromeda image corrrected in special astroediting software.

 

[Devin-M]

Thanks to some helpful suggestions from @collinsmark with regard to "wavelet sharpening" and atmospheric dispersion correction I was able to clean up the Saturn image a bit and get it considerably sharper:

 

[bruha]

Hello, here is moon attempt from yesterday. (nowadays is moon almost full).

 

[PhysicoRaj]

How To Easily Focus On The Stars (Astro Pills)
- in which he among other things describes how to make a cheap focusing aid (for lenses with shorter focal lengths) from a frying pan splatter screen . He also provides some focusing tips if you don't have or get your Bahtinov masks to work for you.

That's a cool idea sticking the screen on an existing Bahtinov, turns any star into a Gamma Ray Burst

 

[DennisN]

Here are two great instruction videos I've found recently.

They are particularly useful for those who use cameras without trackers for astrophotography, but there is other interesting info in them too. He is a very calm and good presenter, in my opinion.

Among many other things he shows how to calculate maximum exposure time (shutter speed) for various focal lengths in order to not get star trails (both the "NPF rule" and "rule of 500"). For NPF calculation for many different cameras and focal lengths there is a French page here, and the app PhotoPills can also do it. He also describes calibration frames (bias, dark and flat frames).

He also does some post-processing editing tricks in I did not know about at 1:14:13 and onwards.

They are long videos since they show the entire process, from start to finish, which I think is good.

Orion Nebula WITHOUT a Star Tracker or Telescope, Start to Finish, DSLR Astrophotography (Nebula Photos)
Another video: ANDROMEDA GALAXY with only a Camera, Lens, & Tripod (Nebula Photos)

 

[Devin-M]

I was able to more than double my resolution compared to the last video with a few tricks...

.

My camera is a Nikon D800 with a 36 megapixel full frame sensor, but it only shoots video full frame in 1080p (doesn't crop the image), which means you lose 4/5ths of the native resolution before the video is even saved to the memory card.

I got around this by shooting 7 shots in RAW mode (equivalent to 8k), aligning them and then importing to iMovie, and playing them in a loop at 15 frames per second. This still gives the appearance of video from the random noise & atmospheric wobble. Once in imovie I did some digital zooms and there you have it. I think I lost half my resolution when fully zoomed in because imovie doesn't support 8k so everything was essentially downscaled to 4k by imovie prior to the digital zooms and prior to uploading to youtube.

 

[Devin-M]

Re-process of a couple of milky-way photos (shot with a 14mm lens on a full frame camera sensor with equatorial mount)...

(looks best on a 4k television... most computer monitors won't show 4k video without downscaling)

 

[Devin-M]

I caught 3 frames @ 1800mm f/12 1/1000th sec 3200iso in RAW format during an ISS flyover last night. It was over Redding, California, USA at about 6:46p local time on 11/19/21. I converted just the green channel of the individual frames to a short video.

I'm not sure if I'm seeing any actual details or if it's all artifacts...

 

[Devin-M]

I caught 3 frames @ 1800mm f/12 1/1000th sec 3200iso in RAW format during an ISS flyover last night. It was over Redding, California, USA at about 6:46p local time on 11/19/21. I converted just the green channel of the individual frames to a short video.

I'm not sure if I'm seeing any actual details or if it's all artifacts...

Using some noise reduction and histogram stretching techniques in Adobe Lightroom I was able to obtain these color versions (0.463 arcsec/pixel):

 

[Devin-M]

Jupiter:

 

[Devin-M]

Saturn:

 

[bruha]

Hello,
its interesting images, its quite similar to my results. Which gear you use for these..?
thank you and lot of succes

 

[DennisN]

Some new fun and pretty affordable gear (homemade and second hand):Home-built Star Focusing Aid

I got inspired by the page I posted before about building a star focusing aid from some kind of perforated screen.

At home I had a couple of very thin perforated plastic screens which are for ventilation holes in computers and other electronic equipment (you put them in front of holes to protect the equipment from some dust and other things getting in). I'm pretty sure such screens can be easily found online (I think I got mine from AliExpress a couple of years ago).

I cut out two quadratic pieces of cardboard (120 x 120 mm) and then cut out quadratic holes (60 x 60 mm) in each of them, put them on top of each other and merged them with duct tape. I used two pieces of cardboard to make the frame more solid. Why quadratic and not circular? Well, it was easier to cut quadratic pieces and the shape really doesn't matter.

Then I put a cut-out plastic perforated screen in front of the 60 x 60 mm hole and secured it with duct tape.

It's not pretty, but it seems to work. I've tried it with a 400 mm tele lens on remote lights and it produces dotted diffraction spikes as a focusing aid. It will be put to test in the field on real stars.

I will also drill a couple of holes in the frame, put in and secure some small rods in the holes and connect a rubber band or something to the rods, so the focusing aid can be put in front of on any lens (up to ca 120 mm in diameter, though the perforated screen is smaller of course). Thanks to the material used, the focusing aid also got extremely lightweight.

Here's the "one size fits all" focusing aid:

(only the highest quality cardboard and duct tape were used to produce this premium product )


Fast Lenses

Here's a lens I won yesterday on a Swedish auction site (for $173) which I'm really excited to test.

Samyang 12mm f/2.0

It's a Samyang 12mm f/2.0 ultrawide (ca 95-99 degrees field of view, IIRC) and also pretty fast lens, which is said to be great for low light photography and thus wide photography of the night sky. The same lens is also marketed under the brand "Rokinon".

I am very excited to test this lens at dark sites in the near future.

Two reviews of the lens:

• Rokinon 12mm f/2.0 NCS CS Review (Lonely Speck)
• Rokinon (Samyang) 12mm f/2 Review (ShotKit)

Another lens I've been looking for is the Canon nFD 50mm f1.4, which is a pretty fast 50mm, also good for low light conditions. I found one in excellent condition on Ebay from Japan for $90 (+$21 shipping), which I ordered yesterday.

Canon nFD 50mm f/1.4

Teleconverter

I also won this teleconverter recently on a Swedish online auction, and I got it dirt cheap. I payed $1 for it (+$6 shipping). It's a 2x teleconverter for Canon FD lenses, which doubles the focal length.

Canon FD Teleconverter (2X CFE TELEPLUS MC6)

 

[ondrejbruha]

Photo from the Bohemian Higlands with the milky way core.

- Sony A7 + Tamron 24/2.8 + Sky Watcher Star Adventurer mount
- Foreground is panorama from 3 images, sky is panorama from 3 images (each stacked from 9 expositions).
- Edited in: Photoshop, PixInsight and PTGui

 

[Devin-M]

Looks like the moon, but actually an overexposed crescent of Venus...

Hello,
its interesting images, its quite similar to my results. Which gear you use for these..?
thank you and lot of succes

Thanks... it's a Meade Maksutov-Cassegrain LX85 1800mm focal 150mm (6") aperture f/12 w/ Nikon D800 on a Star Adventurer Pro 2i (overloaded 2-3x past the weight limit I should add)... I'm getting 0.463 arcsec/pixel with that combination and I've been running the numbers on Astrometry.net and Stellarium and I think it must actually be closer to 2180mm f/14.5, for some reason...

 

[Keith_McClary]

perforated plastic screens which are for ventilation holes

What pitch (holes per cm) is good? Would window screen work? I learned:

Standard screens have a mesh size of 18 by 16, meaning there are 18 squares per inch from the top left corner to the top right corner (also referred to as warp) and 16 squares per inch from the top left corner to the bottom left corner (also referred to as fill).

(I can't find that meaning of "fill" in my Oxford.)

 

[DennisN]

What pitch (holes per cm) is good? Would window screen work?

I don't know, maybe . I just did it with the perforated plastic sceens I had, i.e. trial and error.
But since you asked I just measured the holes on my screen and they are about 0.9 mm in diameter (ca 9-10 holes per cm).

The holes in the splatter screen the other guy used (on this page) looks a bit larger to my eyes.
I guess they are about 1-1.5 mm in diameter.

 

[Devin-M]

the Moon (11/19/21):

2180mm f/14.5 Maksutov-Cassegrain w/ Nikon D800, 1/1250th sec, 400iso, 50% crops, single shot, raw mode, edited Adobe Lightroom & Photoshop

 

[DennisN]

the Moon (11/19/21):

Very cool! It looks like you took them from orbit. Which mission are you on?

 

[Devin-M]

Phantom Galaxy - Distance: 32 million light years

22x 3.5 min (1.28 hrs) @ 6400iso 2180mm f/14.5

 

[collinsmark]

Phantom Galaxy - Distance: 32 million light years

Nice. The Phantom Galaxy (Messier 74) is a difficult target (very low "surface brightness" for a Messier object). -- I'm presently working on that target too, but I still have several more nights of data to take. Image to come in the nearish future.

 

[Devin-M]

Nice. The Phantom Galaxy (Messier 74) is a difficult target (very low "surface brightness" for a Messier object). -- I'm presently working on that target too, but I still have several more nights of data to take. Image to come in the nearish future.

Thanks. I think my biggest challenge last night was the wind. I think only 1 out of 22 of my 3.5 minute sub-frames wasn’t affected. 8 of them were so bad the software couldn’t align them but I went ahead and stacked the other 16 even though they were pretty bad and I think that’s mostly the reason it came out so blurry. I think the Star Adventurer 2i Pro is “the little tracker that could” when conditions are perfect but its very susceptible to wind and can take up to 2 minutes to stop wobbling once it starts.

 

[Devin-M]

This is what the 3.5 minute subframes (x22) looked like from the wind:

 

[DennisN]

Wow, what a photo!

"A Moon Dressed Like Saturn"
(Image Credit & Copyright: Francisco Sojuel)
Source: https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap200316.html

 

[JohnPi]

You know guys, I'm really amazed what way humanity has done to reach that development level we have now. Sputnik-1 was the first satellite in space. It spent 3 months in space, completed over 1400 Earth's orbits and traveled 70+ million km! I'll just attach a small documentary video, you should definitely see it!

 

[Devin-M]

 

[DennisN]

View attachment 293229

I see Orion and the Pleiades (at least I've learned something from being out in the cold nights. A couple of years ago I would not recognize the Pleiades ).
Are you shooting the Orion nebula?

 

[DennisN]

I've been annoyed at the consistently bad weather lately, particularly since I'm very keen and excited to try my new gear. As consolation I did a parody clip to let off some steam.

I know this meme has been done to death, but the astro/stargazing community all over the world is in desperate need of a parody. At least I had fun doing it.

Here it is, premiering on PF:

 

[Devin-M]

Are you shooting the Orion nebula?

Orion Nebula:

These were with 30 second (x120) exposures at 1600iso, 2180mm f/14.5 on a Nikon D800 full frame dslr under moonless bortle 6 skies, no filters. View in WorldWideTelescope

 

[bruha]

Excelent image of O.nebulae, especially last one.!:)

 

[bruha]

 

[bruha]

and Hitler clip is super as well.. (it seems that this part of movie is generally used for parody maker --I see
two more parody clip with this already..

 

[DennisN]

and Hitler clip is super as well..

I'm glad you enjoyed it. I had fun doing it. It's been cloudy here for weeks now, and I was tired of seeing the grey skies.

(it seems that this part of movie is generally used for parody maker --I see
two more parody clip with this already..

Oh yes, there have been many, many parodies done over the years using that scene.
Before I did mine, I searched for an astro parody of that scene, but it seems it had not been done before.