Starry Starry niiiiiight

DrDamn

SRR I clocked the moon and bright “star” next to it the other day. Did not realise it was Venus though 🤦

Jogort

DrDamn very good time for planet sighting just now, Venus & Saturn are close together, Jupiter, Mars are also quite visible

Gammerz

I knew it was a planet but was surprised it was Venus because it was quite high in the sky - it’s usually closer to the Sun and horizon…

Brave

The star Tejat although I was more interested in the stellar dust behind it.

I’m beginning to understand some more basic but important aspects of the hobby. Simple things like what part of the sky, in my little suburban neighbourhood with some posh flats in the way, do I have the best chance of staying with a target for the longest.

I’ve figured out I have a little arc of sky from SE to SW and I can obviously get a lot more time with higher targets.

I’ve bought an app called Stellarium with an AR mode that really helps figure it out. I can point my phone at that patch of sky and fast forward through time and pick my targets for that night.

I still messed up a bit last night and ran out of time for a couple of mosaics. But I did manage to get this. Still not up to any reasonable standard but I’m starting to look into stacking software now.

Jogort

Brave nice shot.
Stellarium is brilliant and it’s free on PC. I think you can even link it to the Seestar, I can with my main scope so I can see in Stellarium where it’s pointing.
Yeah getting a good idea of your viewing window helps, I was doing a mosaic on Andromeda the other night and started to get some trees poking in late into the mosaic. Thankfully it had filled the mosaic already and was just adding extra.
I imagine you have it set up save the individual fits files not just the final image. You can then go and stack in the app yourself and remove any bad images beforehand. Or use in external software like deepskystacker (free and easy) etc.
The good thing about keeping the individual files is you can keep adding data over several nights to bring out more detail in the final stack.

Brave

In Siril I tried to bring out a little more of the dust and allowed Siril to tell me what colour Tejat should really be. It’s a red giant so I’m guessing it’s pretty spot on. I’m going to spend the next decent clear night entirely focussed on it so I can get a bit better signal to noise. i can’t stand any noise in my main work, so that’s proving to be an issue with astrophotography 😅

Jogort

That’s looking cool.
Haha the dreaded noise, not sure if they work with siril but the RC astro plugins are awesome, they have a 30 day free trial. The noiseXterminator is amazing.

Brave

I’ve decided to ditch mosaics for now and focus on getting good exposures on single targets without them. Mosaics tend to lead to noisier images as each section of the image gets less overall exposure.

That, combined with the fact that I figured out that the Orion Nebula pops above the rooflines for a couple of hours led to my first acceptable image. It’s almost straight out of camera, minimal tweaks inside the Seestar app, so I’ll experiment with Siril tomorrow and see what more I can bring out of it.

That was the first truly magic moment. Right from the first exposure I was really taken aback by how bright and beautiful the nebula is.

I also had a go at a nebulous star pair called o Per Cloud which I think would have worked nicely but I made the mistake of plugging in an external battery halfway through and for some reason that stopped the session. And then I had major trouble getting it to find it again.

So lesson learned, plug the power bank in from the very beginning.

I might also be looking at a Dwarf 3 telescope as I like the added flexibility it seems to offer. They’re out of stock just now though. 😉

Brave

This is the star pair. Top one is called Omicron Persei A. Home of Lur 😉

The Seestar app tends not to bring out the nebulosity that I know is there. It does the same with the Pleiades as well. Next clear sky I’m going to point the scope at it for five hours and see if it can bring it out. I think Siril will help too, but it’s dim and noisy compared to Orion. So I think it just needs more time.

Jogort

Pleiades is a difficult one to get all the blue as it’s reflection lit, any strong moon light will make it very hard. Go again with a new moon and you’ll probably get more success.
Couple of cracking photos there, agree on the mosaics and they’re especially slow if the target is up and over 80 degrees as the Seestar will get a lot of star trailing and field rotation so will reject a lot of images for the stack.
That’s where Equatorial mounting it is a game changer, apparently planning mode is coming in the next week or so and EQ mode in the next full app update.
Yeah have been reading about the dwarf and comparisons to the Seestar, doesn’t seem to be much between them but it has EQ mode already

Brave

Oh. I didn’t realise Eq mode was coming. That might change things. That and planning mode were two big reasons for looking at it. Although I’d quite like to be gathering light from two targets at a time given how infrequent clear skies are here.

Edit: that said I’m not sure I’d want to tilt the Seestar. The design of it makes it very top heavy I think. Might have to dig out a much sturdier tripod.

Jogort

Brave seen lots of photos of people using the Seestar in EQ mode already, seems to stay stable enough if you point it over a leg. There’s a windows thing someone has created on GitHub I think called Seestar_alp, so you can run it from your pc and control way more than you see in the app, also has the ability to use EQ mode so lots are using it like that already.

Jogort

Actually, planning is on the latest update now

Brave

Jogort sweet!

Brave

@Jogort am I missing something fundamental or is it bugged?

Look at the angle indicator for my target in the sky atlas compared to the angle indicator in the scheduler interface?

Brave

Ok my bad. Unless I’m missing something you still need to use Stellarium to plan it out. The sky atlas will really only show you where the object is now.

According to Stellarium Delta Cygni does drop that low at that point. 80 degrees is where it’s at now.

Edit: ok wow. Plug the thing in and you could get almost a good 12 hours of light gathering this time of year.

Test schedule below.

Jogort

Brave yeah looks like sky atlas is current time and planner shows the timeline through the night. A shame you can’t update/change the time in the sky atlas like you can in just about every star gazing app I have does.
Stellarium really is the top dog for it though.

Jogort

Brave I’m sure Scottish weather would have something to say about that length of schedule 🤣🤣
It’s missing a lot of functionality in the plan compared to dedicated PC software like N.I.N.A. but it’s certainly a good start, they should have the know how from their own asiair systems so I expect it to improve a lot.

DrDamn

Brave I was thinking I can’t really afford one of these, but … where is it you live again? 😉

Brave

Jogort looking like there’s a chance of clear skies from 8ish all the way through to dawn on Saturday. But that’s like 3000x too far ahead for an accurate prediction round here 😄

Brave

DrDamn was thinking I can’t really afford one of these

ONE OF US, ONE OF US…

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