October 12 2005 - Moon

This image i completely forgot about since they werenot the greatest ever But since i lost my data, these were on my girlfriends computer and found them the other day so i have something else from my 2005 astrophoto days. This is the best image i had from that night (yes i know its not great). Its of the moon taken with my 5" MCT". I never really took note on exposures and on processing of these because i wasnt happy with them so i was going to throw them out. The info i know is that they are taken with my canon G3 and my newly aquired scopetronix maxview 40 EP which provides much wider feilds of view then the regular 25mm i usualy use for my astrophotos. I need more clear nights and more time to experiment more with this new EP which has shown some promising results. Time will come in about a month when i finish school and the clear nights will i pray that they come soon! PS the image is actualy ALOT larger then what it appears in the blog. Blogger always resizes the images which is too bad because i cant show the full sized images.

August 3 2005 - M2, M3, M15, M34, M71, M103

M2: 90 second exposure @ ISO 400 (6x15secs), Orion Starmax 5" f12 mak cassegrain, canon G3 digital camera. I am not totaly happy with this shot so I will try it again. More stacked frames and better tracking and focuse should improve this image.



M3: 90 second exposure @ ISO 400 (9x10secs), Orion Starmax 5" f12 mak cassegrain, canon G3 digital camera. This is so far one of my best shots of m3, unlike last time i had much better conditions and that backyard security light was not on!



M15: 135 second exposure @ ISO 400 (9x15secs), Orion starmax 5" f12 mak cassegrain, canon G3 digital camera. A little overexposed in the center, so I will have to try 13 second exposures next time. otherwise I am happy with this shot. in comparison to my 80mm, i like the shots taken with the 80mm because of the widefield (see shots below) but my 5" tends to resolve more stars in the cluster itself.



M34: 70 second exposure @ ISO 400 (7x10secs), Orion 5" f12 mak cassegrain, canon G3 digital camera. This is a very nice open cluster throught the views of both my 80mm and 5" telescopes! Tracking errors did not allow me to take longer exposures as trailing was evident.



M71: 135 second exposure @ ISO 400 (9x15sec) Orion starmax 5"f12 mak cassegrain, canon G3 digital camera. Again this faint globular cluster seems to be at the limit of my canon G3. Darker skies, a faster telescope and a DSLR would allow me to get a much better picture. Next time I will try my 80mm which is a slightly faster scope then the mak which is originaly meant for planetary views more then deepsky.



M103: 105 second exposure @ ISO 400 (7x15sec). Orion starmax 5" f12 mak cassegrain, Canon G3 digital camera. This is my first shot of this cluster. Its not too interesting but since I am trying to get as much messier objects as i can with my G3, i took this shot. Perhaps my 80mm may give a much wider FOV thus make it look nicer. As well tracking was not all there as is noticed in the slightly trailed stars.

July 29 2005 - M3, M11, M15, M29, M56

M56: 225 second exposure @ ISO 400 (15x15secs). 80mm f10 celestron refractor, canon G3 digital camera. This is my first ever M56 shot and to tell you the truth i did not even think that my tiny 80mm slow f10 telescope would even capture this rather faint globular cluster but low and behold mty camera amazed me once more time. It is not a NASA picture by all means but I am just happy i could resolve the brighter stars of the cluster.



M29: 70 second exposure @ ISO400 (7x10secs). 80mm f10 celestron refractor, canon G3 digital camera. Well nothing too exciting with this open cluster.



M15: 120 second exposure @ ISO 400 (12x10secs), 80mm f10 celestron refractor, canon G3 digital camera. i think this one would come out better in my 5" telescope but I like this one for the wide field aspect of the picture.



M11: 180 second exposure @ ISO 400 (12x15secs), 80mm f10 celestron refractor canon G3 digital camera. Atlast! some sucess with this baby! i have treid this cluster many times both with my 10" Lx200 and my 5" starmax and the pics came out so bad i didn't even bother processing them but this one came out much better. i guess the wider FOV of my 80 mm does the trick here!



M3: 165 second exposure @ ISO 400 (11x15sec), 80mm f10 celestron refractor, canon G3 digital camera. This was my first image of the night. Just as i had my scope polar aligned and had my camera all ready and so on, my neigbour who lives on the upper levels of the house kindly decided to turn on his security light! Let me tell you it was so bright that i could read my starmaps with out my red flashlight! i could even read the small words! So as you can imaginge, barely being able to see the stars it took me about 15 minutes to locate the cluster. Once i did, i took these images and needless to say, the original raw images had a TON of sky glow caused by the light which was only about 10 feet away from me! So Ill have to try this cluster yet again under better conditions! Lucky for me, he did turn it off about an hour later and I was able to see many things. one highlight of this night was the very very bright and colourfall shooting star which at the end it kindof made a small explosion and left a nice smoke trail! Very nice indeed

July 27 2005 - Processing of M27

This is how I process a typical image and the improvements that are made if you stack a raw image.
1. Starting from the left picture. This is a single raw 15 second frame. As you can see it has alot of noise, it apears very grainy and the nebula is barely visible. But the good thing is that this single image as well as the other single raw images have enough data that by stacking and processing we can bring out what we want to see and try and leave behind the undesired noise. Normaly the more raw frames you take the better it is.
2. The second frame from the left is the result of when you stack the images together. If you look closely much of the noise and the grainyness has been elliminated. Ofcourse there is still alot of noise and the nebula still appears rather dim. The next step is to try and bring out the nebula. This can be done several different ways like stretching. I did this one another way I just multiplied the image by itself to get a much brighter image wich shows some more detail in the nebula. Unfortunatly when you do this, the noise also gets brighter and the effects of vignating get very bad.
3. The third image from the left is the resulting picture when you make it brighter.
4. Thee final step is to try make the background dark while keping the nebula and stars bright. This is VERY hard to do esp on this image since it suffers from vignating (the uneven background). What tends to happen is that if you want to entirly get rid of this ugly bacground, you loose almost all the detail of the nebula. I tried a new way of doing it and that was by taking the original brightened image darkening the background just enough but not enought to get rid of the detail then i would save that image. after saving the image i took the average of that new image and the original to form a third image. In the third image I again darkened the background and repeated the steps until finaly I isolated the nebula to the best of my ability. this step took about 10 steps to get to the final image. Ofcourse I did loose some of the faint nebula detail but the darker background makes for a more appealing picture.

July 24 2005 - M13, M27, M57

These are my first serius attemps at deepsky shots with my 80mm f10 telescope. I expected my 80 mm telescope to do better on nebula then my 5" becuase of the faster fratio and so i found that m27 shouwed up better. As for M13 I still find my 5" to be slightly better and M57 well I don't know, it apears smaller in my 80mm but i can see the central star (ifyou look closely) while on my 5" i couldn't see the central star. Its hard to tell. Only more testing will give me a better idea which telescope performs better for deepsky shot. the stats are as follow:

M13: 80mm f10 celestron refractor, 240 sec exposure @ ISO 400 (16x15secs)
M13: 80mm f10 celestron refractor, 160 sec exposure @ ISO 400 (16x10secs)
M27: 80mm f10 celestron refractor, 285 sec exposure @ ISO 400 (19x15secs)
M57: 80mm f10 celestron refractor, 285 sec exposure @ ISO 400 (19X15secs)

July 19 2005 - M13 and M92

These Shots were taken on July 19 2005 with my 5" mak cassegrain telescope.



Image of M13. This image is composed of 23 x 10 sec exposures for an equivalent of 230 seconds at ISO 400. I chose a lesser exposure this time to minimize star trailing. Instead of using the 15 second exposures I decided to take much more 10 second exposures which will reduce the noise levels. As well a dark frame was used with these.



M13 close up - 22 x 10 sec exposures (220 sec equivelent) at ISO 400.



M92 - This is my first real image of m92. Image is composed of 10 x 10 sec exposures (100 sec equivelent) at ISO400 and dark frame used.