Astrophotography

[ROX]

Awesome photos.

If you would be so kind, please give us a a nice educational in service on how you did that...equipment, camera, type telescope...etc.

It would be very cool to learn how you did that!

An old friend of mine Jim Young used to work an an observatory (he was one of the first to get one of the more famous photos of Hally's Comet) and has a sweet astrophotography website:  http://www.w7ftt.net/photos.html

The Hally's Comet photo was on his "special edition" QSL card.  I am very lucky to have one.



ROX

[CptTrips]

Can you ever get some of the satellites without Jupiter overexposing?

You can, but its tricky.  At the scale where you can include all the Galilean
moons are in view, Jupiter is REALLY bright in comparision.  It can be done.  Sometimes, imagers just do a composite shot, one that is optimized for the planet disk, one optimized to bring out the moons, and then combine them.

Wab

[CptTrips]

Neat stuff wab, what are you using to get the photos?  I have been thinking of doing something similar for awhile, but I want to know how far back it will set me cost wise.  Skies have been clear lately, and I've been getting some cool views of Mars.

My setup is a 12" Meade LX200 with a Skynyx 2-1m monochrome camera and a Skynyx 2-0c color camera.


For a start rig (assuming Solar, Lunar, planetary mainly), an 8" SCT, Toucam (webcam, see scopetronics.com) with adapter could keep you busy a couple of years.  You can get a free version of a program called "K3CCD" to control your image capture.  A program (free) called Registax will sort and stack the frames for you.  Another program (free) called "GIMP for Windows" can provide most of your other photoshop like needs.


Regards,
Wab

[CptTrips]

Awesome shots Wabbit.. 

 Here's a picture of the moon I took through my scope..

Thats sweet.  I love Lunar photography.  Its so overlooked.  There is soooooo much material there to photograph.

I took some lunar shots last night (Sat).   I need to so some heavy processing.  I'll post if they come out worth looking at.


Clear Skies,
Wab

[CptTrips]

Very cool pictures.

Hey in a couple more years, can you show us some pictures of Nibiru?

Hello, West of the Rockies, You're on the air....

 

[CptTrips]

Very nice, Wab!

Are you using CCD cameras?

I got all the hardware to mount my DSLR to my 8" Dobsonian, but the weight was impossible to manage.  I'll have to get a tracking unit to be able to hope to just get them in focus.. let alone something like you have.

 

A good dob can't be beat for no hassle visual use.   Any kind of photography would be a lot more challenging.

But look on the bright side.  No one should have just one telescope. 

Wab
 

[CptTrips]

Awesome photos.

If you would be so kind, please give us a a nice educational in service on how you did that...equipment, camera, type telescope...etc.

It would be very cool to learn how you did that!

I use a 12" Meade LX200 with a Skynyx 2-1m monochrome camera and a Skynyx 2-0c color camera.
Those are planetary cameras.  For deep sky stuff I use a modified (IR filter removed) Canon XTi.

You don't necessarily need that expensive of cameras.  I've seen really impressive stuff done with a Toucam webcam.  Essentially you are capturing a whole bunch of short exposures over a minute or so period.  This might give you a couple of hundred frames.  A lot of those frames are garbage.  The bubbling atmosphere distorts the image.  But maybe 3 out of 10 frames capture the image are pretty good. You can use free software (Registax) to sort and grade and discard the bad frames.  Now you have a lot fewer frames but they are the best of the bunch.  However, they are very noisy because they are such short exposures.  Registax will also align and "stack" or average these frames together for you.  The noise pixels tend to get scattered around the frame randomly between different frames so that when you average them together, the noise tends to cancel out.  The pixels representing the image will be consistent between frames so they will tend to get reinforced by the averaging.
In the end, you have suppressed the noise and strengthened the signal (image).  This allows you to use some aggressive enhancement techniques.  If you hadn’t stacked the frames, you’d end up enhancing the noise as much as the image.

Check this thread for some more dicussion of the topic:
http://bbs.hitechcreations.com/smf/index.php/topic,219824.15.html

Clear Skies,
Wab

[Steve]

Very nice Wab, thanks for posting the pics.. cool stuff.         

[moot]

You can, but its tricky.  At the scale where you can include all the Galilean
moons are in view, Jupiter is REALLY bright in comparision.  It can be done.  Sometimes, imagers just do a composite shot, one that is optimized for the planet disk, one optimized to bring out the moons, and then combine them.

Wab

Do you think it would be do-able if you caught only a section of Jupiter, with a string of satellites along the rest of the pic ?

[CptTrips]

Do you think it would be do-able if you caught only a section of Jupiter, with a string of satellites along the rest of the pic ?

Oh its doable.  You'd probably need to do some non-linear brightness curve stretching.  (e.g. Increase the brightness of dimmer parts without letting already bright parts get any brighter.

Wab

[CptTrips]

It would be very cool to learn how you did that!
ROX

To illustrate the power of stacking, here is an average quality frame from the monochrome run:



Compare that to the aggressively processed stack of the best 600 frames out of the 6000 frame run.




Wab

[Lye-El]

Pretty cool!

[gunnss]

You need to come here to New Mexico,

We have a campground called Jemez Falls.  This campground righ at 9000 feet, and has a hill on one end that is free of trees.  All the local amateur astronomers set up there in order to sky watch.  With the really low air pressure in the lack of ambient light is truly a marvelous area to Star watch.

Regards,
Kevin

[Cthulhu]

If you squint, you can just barely see the Rook horde inbound from the far side of Ganymede.

[mensa180]

Thanks Wab, at least I have one of those programs, photoshop!