Starry Starry niiiiiight

Gammerz

Equinox is a good time to see Northern Lights

Gammerz

Brightest and hungriest black hole ever detected

SRR

Turns out when I was mucking about with my phone in Menorca a couple of weeks ago, I unwittingly managed to get some shots of Orion. I was really just looking at the beauty of being able to see stars. Remember living in central London, it’s always a shock…lol. Phones nothing fancy (pixel 7a), and just rested it on the balcony table and took some shots. Didn’t know what I was looking at, but thought that cluster together has to be something. Not by any means Jogort standard, but I was quite chuffed and amazed what phones can do now.

Brave

SRR You even got his wang!

Jogort

Brave not mine…..🤣

DrDamn

Brave the bright bit of his wang is the Orion Nebula - M42 - @SRR you shoulda done a zoom and enhance …

Jogort

Some stunning northern lights on show last night apparently, I’m at work unfortunately though 😑

SRR

DrDamn

Ooohh. Just been mucking about with that.
Cheers.

Jogort

So haven’t had my scope out in far too long, managed a wee hour the other night when it was clear….and bloody chilly.
Just from the garden so go for a nice easy target at this time of year is the Orion Nebula, same as @SRR
I did buy a new dedicated astrocamera, ASI533MC Pro which is a damn good beginner cam that without being stupid money. This was my first light with it, next will be a better mount and then possibly a triple lens refractor telescope. The blue/purple fringes you see on the stars are due to my telescope only having two lenses so 1 colour always doesn’t quite align perfectly. A triple lense refractor scope gets rid of this but they are obviously a good bit more money. For a cheapo scope & mount combo that I bought, I’m delighted with the results.
This is after stacking and processing in PixInsight (dedicated astrophotography editing software) which I’m a total beginner with.

Alex

Think you might need to give permission for people to view the images on google drive.

Jogort

Alex Oh thanks, I thought I had, hopefully shows now

Brave

Just running my Seestar for the first time in the 4 hour clear sky window before the snow comes (maybe, clouds will come at least). I’ll post up the results later. It was remarkably easy to get going and find what I wanted to see. Exactly what I wanted. No faff, no second degree required.

I’ve just used the default settings for now so I don’t expect it to be a wondrous image, but it’s already looking interesting as it beavers away stacking images live on my phone.

Jogort

Brave I’ve read a bit about them, they are cracking little bits of kit, max of 10s exposure though is that right? So just hundreds of exposures stacking. I see some on pixinsight groups talking of stacking thousands of images.
Also its just recently had the ability to do a mosaic added I believe which makes for some great imaging choices.
The editing side of it is your bread n butter I expect though, look forward to seeing what you get with it……I am very tempted 🤣

Brave

Jogort I think you can do longer exposures but you’d need to align the telescope properly. For the moment I don’t need to go down that rabbit hole yet. I have enough expensive tripod heads 😉

I’ll dive into stacking software at some point, but want to get to grips with what it does on its own before I get stuck in.

Edit: also the mosaic function was what convinced me to go for the s50. I could still capture larger galaxies etc. and also get super detailed close up sun and moon images.

DrDamn

Brave was that stacked by the SeeStar App or externally? Very nice either way.

Jogort max of 10s exposure though is that right?

It can do 10, 20 or 30s but the longer exposures don’t work as well as it doesn’t have an equatorial mount.

Brave

Andromeda Galaxy.

A little too much light pollution (from our kitchen window) but still not horrendous.

Jogort

Very cool, I’ve not done much of Andromeda. It’s nice watching the live stack build up throughout the session. I do that with stellarmate OS running my setup.

Brave

DrDamn yeah. I just decided to let Seestar do everything just now. I want to understand what the basics can do before I start pressing extra buttons and using third party software. Although I know I’ll get stuck in to that at some point.

It has a built in dual band filter for light pollution but I purposely didn’t use that either (I think). Which is why I’m not 100% happy with the image. It’s cool but I know I can do a lot better. I want to see the difference between each setting so that I can be a bit more thoughtful about their use.

Apparently there are adapters for two inch filters which would improve things a lot. And I’ve already found a reasonably cheap filter should I want to dive deeper but that’ll need considerably more clear nights before it’s warranted.

It’s already pretty crazy given that it got that result with light streaming out of my kitchen and my wife triggering the neighbours unnecessarily bright and long lasting security light when she went out to put something in the bin. 😔

There’s supposed to be a couple of hours of clear sky again tonight so I’ll do the same thing tonight but try and locate the dual band option 😉

DrDamn

Brave very helpful of Andromeda to be that way up for you so it fits in the frame too 🙂

Jogort

How long was the total exposure of the final image? You’re already in the rabbit hole just by starting with it 🤣
These were a couple of short exposures with my old planetary camera on my scope
I think the second one was the start of a stack but clouds came to spoil the party

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