Blog
| 2024-12-28 | >First clear night in a long time. Mangaed to get everthing set up, but then had an equipment malfunction early in the evening. It was too cold to do anything about it so I shut things down and did the best with the data captured. It resulted in this latest image of the M 31 Andromeda Galaxy. |
| 2024-10-14 | Time passes quickly and I have had little time for imaging. I purchased a William Optics Redccat 51, a high quality 51MM refractor with a 250MM focal length. It resulted in this latest image of the LDN1238 Dark Nebula. As I have said I will always post the bad with the good. In the middle of the image you can see the Bubble Nebula, which was taken in much higher resolution. It gives you an idea of the diffence in scale of these two telescopes. Because of the smaller aperture I will need to take much longer (multi night) images to get the detail I am looking for. |
| 2023-12-29 | I have been making telescope changes, adding 3d printed parts to assist with image quality. It resulted in this latest image of the Flaming Star Nebula. I also added images of Saturn and Jupiter that I took but had not yet posted. Jupiter is with a 4x barlow giving me a focal length of 5520mm, which is at the very limit of what my mirror can resolve. I 3d printed a ring to hold the outside edges of the secondary mirror spider vertical, and to ensure they were in perfect alignment. It also provides an additional support so I can tigthen them much further without distorting the tube. This helps to hold collimnation much better, and also acts as a baffle just above the focuser hole that keeps out extranious light. I also 3d printed an extension to the front of the telescope that also helps to mask extranious light, as well as helps to prevent dew from forming on the secondary mirror. My first test did not go very well after reassembling everything. While setting the secondary mirror I had to move it about 1/2mm, I thought at the time is that going to cause an issue? Well it did, causing a double virtical spike instead of a single one around bright stars as can bee seen in this image. To fix I had to put the mirror back to true centre, and adjust the focuser to align with where it was. The results are in images since this post. |
| 2023-11-25 | It has been a while, but finally back to being able to generate a few images and bring the site up to date on what is going on. This is just a quick note on my latest image for the Bubble Nebula. Looking to update the site with some other images and content that has happened in the last year that I am behind on. |
| 2022-04-28 | I have completed processing the M81 galaxy and the M51 galaxy from the images I took recently. |
| 2022-04-28 | I had 3 nights I could do some imaging. For the first night I changed processing techniques to try more images of shorter durations and captured additional joint images of M81 and M82 together. I tried to merge the two but the results were quite different and the images did not merge very well. I had also been looking at my backspacing to the paracorr. In order to ensure it was as good as could be, I aquired a filter drawer that would get as close to 55mm as possible. In addition I also changed some parameters on my guiding camera to use 16 bits instead of 8, bin2 to increase SNR and gain 35 to ensure I would not oversaturate stars as a result. The resulted in a 50% increase in tracking accuracy, now averaging .5 arc seconds, but I also saw it go as low as .32 arc seconds for periods of time. This is a very good thing, as correcting the paracorr back focus distance provided an improvement in star size, about 40% smaller, and as a result smaller tracking errors were then showing up. The third night, I decided to capture M81 and M82 seperately, in the center of the field, with the hopes of generating sufficient frames to overcome the noise of imaging in Edmonton. I have completed processing M82 galaxy. It is quite small so I needed sufficient detail to make it a decent size. |
| 2022-03-29 | I reprocessed the M81 - M82 galaxy image yet again, replacing the others. It is acceptable given the source data. |
| 2022-03-26 | I reprocessed the M81 - M82 galaxy image. Still not great but more appealing. I also added recent images to the home page to colour it up a bit. |
| 2022-03-21 | It has been a very long time since I have been able to capture any images. I have been spending my time on learning the software and ways to improve the physical setup. I have aquired an atmospheric dispersion corrector, that will help with planetary imaging, additional counter balance weights for the mount and assorted connectors and wiring to make a proper harness for all of the telescope to have a proper cable management system. The weather was bad all winter, either too cold, or too cloudy, so the latest image I have taken was of the M81 and M82 galaxies which are both in the same field of view during the full mooon. Not the ideal circumstances within the city. I was trying some new things, and unfortunately athough the image is crisp, due to better tracking, and in focus, it is plagued with sensor noise due to the way it was dithered, making it very difficult to process. From a processing point of view I have taken what I have learned and redid the image processing of the Pelican Nebula. Have look! |
| 2021-08-06 | The skies have been very smokey but I have managed to capture a few images. I also had a chance to try my 4X barlow. They include the Crescent Nebula, and some images of the Moon, Jupiter and Saturn. |
| 2021-07-15 | Looks there will be no images for a while as the smoke from fires is now preventing any evening imaging. Hopefully it clears up soon. I have also added a legend for the annotated images. |
| 2021-06-27 | I had two good nights in a row so I set up in a different spot and was able to see the original target I had planed to image, the Cocoon Nebula. I had some difficulty getting everything set up and ready for imaging, maybe it was the previous late night followed by an early morning and a busy day. Even with the almost full moon out, the images still came out ok but some of the star colours are washed out. This may be it for a bit again as I wait on weekends, holidays and clear skies. |
| 2021-06-26 | I took the equipment to the lake where we have Bortle 4 skies to try things out. After setting everything up and getting down to taking pictures I did not have much time left, and my original target was slightly obscured so I had to find an alternate target that turned out to be the Pelican Nebula. This is too big to see in a single frame so I selected just a section that just happens to look like a Deer's head in profile. This was the first time imaging with the new focuser / rotator, and it has made an incredible difference. The darker skies also improved the picture quality immensely, and I was able to skip a lot of the image processing steps. |
| 2021-05-30 | Finally had a night to try the new equipment. Worked on getting the proper spacers for the camera to be able to focus withing the travel limits of the new focuser. The auto focusing now works like it should with the zero backlash inherent in the new focuser. It was able to achieve 30 - 40% better focus than I had been able to do before. With the clearer image other processes worked better as well. I was just about to improve the calibration between the guide camera and the main camera, which I am now able to do with the more accurate focuser, when a raft of clouds moved in for the rest of the night, so unfortunately no actual imaging. I had taken note of a couple of things that needed adjustment, so I have also readjusted the secondary mirror and recollimated the telescope, and adjusted the off axis guider prism postion to remove a small shadow that was appearing in the main camera. I then ran a number of tests and now all looks good for the next time I am able to do some imaging. |
| 2021-05-18 | I updated the equipment page. I have recently aquired and installed a high precision focuser / rotator on the Sky-Watcher telescope, along with the flocking of the internals of the telescope tube, and creating a mirror mask to reduce optical aberations in the images. Hope to try it out soon. |
| 2021-04-18 | I changed the image links to open in new windows. I added an Information section at the beginning of each object with wiki links if they exist. I added a Process page under Astrophotography that describes what it takes to create these images. I added an older image for the bright nebula section SH 2-188. |
| 2021-04-09 | Took images of the galaxy M 101. |
| 2021-03-17 | Took images of the planetary nebula PK164+31.1. |
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