Science Daily: Uranus
- NASA's Hubble, New Horizons team up for a simultaneous look at Uranus October 11, 2024
- Key to rapid planet formation August 1, 2024
Analyzing Images
So, this is a post, but I might convert it to a page for reference at some point. I’m exploring how to analyze my imaging train for aberrations and what I can do about it. ASTAP has a couple of built-in tools that make this easy. The question is what constitutes an aberration that is …
Weather, Weather….
It’s been nearly six months since the weather was decent around the new moon. I had all these plans and just need a couple of good nights to finish off a project with decent data. I guess I’ll start looking at what I have to see what I can get out of it. Really, I …
NGC 7000
This is the object that got me hooked on astrophotography. Well, sort of. I started a long time ago with a Pentax 35mm film camera and a CG5 mount and tried to take a picture of Cygnus. It was horribly underexposed, but one of the frames had just enough exposure to make out the North …
Leo Triplet, Luminance Mosaic Test
This was shortly after (I think) some work to improve the collimation on the Ritchey-Chretien. I don’t know why I didn’t concentrate on a single target, but I jumped around from several last March, so once again I have mediocre data on all. Object M65, M66, NGC 3628 Camera ASI1600MM-Pro, Luminance Only Lens/Scope AstroTech RC6 …
M36 with Marginal Collimation, a Misbehaving Mount, and Poor Seeing
And if that title wasn’t enough to pull you in… The seeing in Brooklyn is always bad. I’m on a flight path to LaGuardian. So 3-arcsec is typical. And did I mention I’m in Brooklyn, NY? So the light pollution is always bad. Which make star clusters reasonable targets. Object M36, Open Cluster Camera ASI1600MM-Pro, …
M36 with Marginal Collimation, a Misbehaving Mount, and Poor SeeingRead More
Triangulum Dust Clouds
I subscribed to Adam Block’s online tutorials and have been working my way through them. It’s a long, slow process. He’s incredibly thorough, sometimes painfully so, though I supposed that’s better than the opposite (skimming over things so fast you can’t follow along). So while I’m nowhere near finished with the tutorials, naturally I had …
M33 and Triangulum Region
This was a “filler” project; I was setting up to image further east, an object that was still below the horizon, but had time to kill and realized that M33 and the core of the rather small Triangulum constellation would fill the frame of my Canon T6i with the 85mm Rokinon lens. So, why not? …
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 …