Anthony's Astrophotography

Archive for the ‘General Blog’ Category

When I get a chance to drag myself away from work I sometime take the opportunity to visit a good friend who lives in Taromeo in the Blackbutt ranges to do some imaging of the night sky.

Living in South East QLD the warmer months tend to spell the end of our opportunities to do any quality imaging. Luckily however, the evening of the 13^th Oct 2012 proved to be one of the best evenings I have had the pleasure of imaging in. Seeing conditions had to be 9/10 and stayed that way for the whole night.

While I managed to get some great data on M31, M33 and the Rosette Nebula I was most pleased with my redo of the Horse Head Nebula. In late 2011 I had the chance to image the Horse Head and found it to be a real challenge when using a standard DSLR camera as the Hydrogen Alpha emissions are mostly blocked by the factory filters.

Not to shy away from a challenge I pointed my 90mm William Optics Megrez refractor and DSLR back over to the East and learning from last year’s experiences snapped away for many an hour gathering those faint photons.

All up I took:

• 15 * 300 Second Frames at ISO 800.
• 15 * 300 Second Dark Frames.
• 15 * Flat files
• 15 * Bias Frames

I took all of the above data and loaded it into Deep Sky Stacker for a final compiled image that was further processed in Photoshop. To be completely honest there was not much adjustment required to get the final product. I was very happy with the image and it shows that despite the challenges and frustrations sometimes experienced when things don’t work as I want, I have managed to see a significant improvement on my last attempt.

It goes to show you how much of a journey Astrophotography is and considering you can always go back and revisit an imaging target you have done before, you will never run out of things to take photos of.

I hope you enjoy.

Cheers

Anthony

Hi Everyone,

Some very exciting times ahead for Astrophotographers, for those that don’t know it was Sky Watcher (or Synta to be more precise) that brought us affordable mass produced astrophotography mounts with the release of the EQ5 and EQ6 Pro, forever changing the understanding of value for money mounts.

Well it seems they are poised to do it again and even better than before with their new range of mounts, the EQ6 Alt/Az mount and the eagerly awaited EQ8 mount.

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Hi Everyone,

As you know I attended the QLD Astrofest 2012 this year and managed to get some images. I did have some challenges with my mount as it was sticking a bit when tracking, this lead to many an hour of frustraions fixing, but I did in the end over come the problem.

While there are some more images to come below are some of the better ones I took. M20, M16, M33 and M31. M33 and M31 are new images for me and I am quite happy withthe result, I have redone M20 and M16 as these were taken through a GSO RC8 Carbon Fibre Telescope (Leant to me while at Astrofest) this is a much higher focal length scope than my William Optic Megrez 90 mm one (it was however a bit out in collimation).

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Hi Everyone,

As mentioned in a previous post I was asked to do some presentations for the Astrofest, these were well received by those that attended and thought I would post here if anyone wanted to review them.

Autoguiding – Beginners Guide To

Autoguiding – Deep Dive Into

I hope these are of benefit to you and help with your guiding endeavours.

Cheers

Anthony

Well it feels like a distant dream now from my great trip to the Queensland Astrofest 2012. I was so looking forward to it that I had my leave booked in for the event from February this year and simply could not wait for the 10^th August to get here; as I don’t own a time machine yet I just had to be human and wait.

Well the 10^th did arrive just as the sun rises each day I was ready with the car packed literally to the roof (in fact it was so full the tent was strapped to the roof racks on top). It’s quite a drive (about 2.5 hours from Brisbane) so I was a little worried I might get there less the tent, but I made it without issue.

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I have been flat out with work and family commitments lately so I haven’t been able to post anything new for a while. When I saw this picture I could not resist the tempatation to post.

Credits to the Author (I do not know who they are but will happily credit them if they tell me)

Hi All,

A quick note to let you know that registration is now open for the 2012 Queensland Astrofest, you can check out more details here. I have only been for one night last year but really enjoyed the atmosphere and I am going to spend the full 9 days there this year.

Cheers

Anthony

I am often asked how big things are in the night sky and I have always struggled with a good explaination as it really is difficult to visualise and explain. Well I think I have found the solution (no it’s not a worm hole or warp speed travel to go and see these things) and it comes in the form of some very well presented video’s from Khan Academy (http://www.khanacademy.org).

They have a range of video’s delving into topics such as Math’s, Finance, the Sciences and even cosmology, the ones I have seen so far were excellent for putting into perspective on the scale of objects in our Universe.

Specifically there is a 5 part series and it has the following films available for viewing:

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On Sunday the 6th May at about 1:00 PM AEST the Moon will be at full perigee (its closest approach to Earth at a distance of ~356,000 kilometers away), it will also be just past the point of full moon and the two coinsiding events result in a Super Moon.

So what does a Super Moon mean for us earthings? Does this mean massive storms, super tides that will flood our cities, riot as people go crazy from the full moon, warewolves attcking innocent people? No nothing quite that exciting, but if you get the chance to get out and have a look at the moon riseing or setting it will be a rewarding experience.

For those of us in Australia we will miss the exact time this happens as the moon will be below the horizon, however you can see the moon rise at around 5:00 PM and it should appear noticibly bigger than usual (in fact about 14% bigger and 30% brighter than normal).

Below is a video that explains the process and how these Super Moons come about:

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Light, Dark, Flat and Bias Frames. What are these and how do you create and use them to make your images better.

I struggled with these file types for a while when getting started so thought I would write up a small bit of detail about what they are and what they do. I hope this helps explain their purpose and their importance when processing quality images.

Light Frames – Light Frames are the actual images you have taken of celestial objects that contain the valuable data that you want others to see. The key objective is to get enough data (actual photon’s of light) to reduce the Signal to Noise Ratio. All the other frame types are used to reduce or remove the noise in you Light Frames.

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