Author: Roland Roberts
Choices, choices, choices (in imaging processing)
One of the wonderful problems that has become more apparent with digital imaging with modern optics is high quality images with lots of stars. Back the dark(room) ages with film, it seemed that most images didn’t really pick up that many of the fainter stars. I can make up some really smart sounding reason for …
Rosette Nebula (NGC 2238)
It was the end of the night really, and as the Earth rotated, my real target had moved behind the neighboring apartment, but the night was still dark (well, as dark as it gets is Brooklyn, which is not very), so I pointed to the Rosette as a good target for imaging with the narrowband …
M15 with Bad Collimation
So…a while back I dropped my AstroTech RC6. That was a very sad day. It landed partially on the USB plug for the filter wheel which destroyed the jack. I had to desolder the jack and solder in a new one (which now works again, yay!). But the scope itself took a hit and was …
Sagitta from Jones Beach
It wasn’t a very clear night, and this was a back-up target for the not-so-transparent skies. I had planned to take a set of images testing the procedure for doing a mosaic. Around 9pm, the sky looked decent with hints of the Milky Way overhead. Unfortunately, that didn’t last. So instead of a mosaic, I …
Ten Mile River Scout Camp Astronomy
This year our troop went to Ten Mile River (Camp Aquehonga) twice. It’s a long tale and I’ll spare you. I normally help out and co-teach the Astronomy merit badge class but during our second week (actual week 4 of the camp), attendance was very light and no one had signed up for the classes. …
M13 Test Image
This was really an equipment test after replacing the Dec motor on my CEM25. But before I called it quits, I decided to do a single 120 second cropped exposure using my ASI2600MC on the RedCat 51. No calibration frames, just some denoising in PixInsight to get a pretty picture.
Orion Mosaic
Well, not much of a mosaic, just two panels stitched side-by-side and they had a lot more overlap than was necessary. My main goal was to simply get a good image of Orion. I had one attempt more than 10 years ago, taken on a very cold night in Narrowsburg, NY (-5F!) with film. It …
Taurus Region
Another one from Cherry Springs, this time centered on Taurus. I realize the orientation is a bit odd, but it’s part of the meandering set of frames I hope to eventually turn into a mosaic. Rigel is the bright star in the lower right, with the nebulosity around Orion’s “head” of Sharpless 264 showing clearly. …
Capricornus from Cherry Springs
This was taken early in the evening and at the start of the exposure there were some trees in the lower left corner of the frame which, after processing, have left some “interesting” colors. But I was reluctant to crop the image to remove this as there are other things happening due to a bit …
Lacerta from Cherry Springs
This was supposed to be Lacerta. Well, it is Lacerta, but the constellation is lost in the Milky Way. The North America nebula (NGC7000) can be seen in the lower left, Cepheus is in the center to lower right with the circular H-alpha region containing the Elephant’s Trunk nebula (IC1396) marking the left end of …