Myth: You cannot image from inside cities because the light pollution will make things impossible. TL;DR: Modern software and filter technology is game-changing for imaging in the city, even for broadband targets! Long form: Let’s take a bit of a deep dive into this. For many, many years it has been accepted truth that you …
Read more “Mythbusting: Broadband imaging from INSIDE city limits”
I intended to do a comparison of a couple of different Light Pollution filters but the weather hasn’t exactly cooperated. All I’ve got so far is 3 hours of data on M27 with a Hutech IDAS LPS-D2, my newest filter. I want to compare that as closely as possible with the older LPS-P2 to see …
Jan 7/8, 2020Allen, Texas (Bortle 9)No LP filter (nuts!)60x 2 minutes (2 hours total integration time) William Optics RedCat51QHY 168C Cooled CMOS color cameraiOptron CEM60EC mount, unguided
Taken from my back yard in Allen, TX. Bortle 9 skies.
I finally got another monochrome camera after years of shooting color CCDs. I’m still re-learning the ropes, particularly using narrowband filters for very specific frequencies of light associated with ionized states of hydrogen, sulfur and oxygen. I’ll probably end up doing a lot of hydrogen and overlaying red, green and blue broadband filters over that …
Messier 27 1,300 Light Years away Image data collected over two nights on August 4th and 5th. A total of 6 hours of data, 73 exposures of 5 minutes collected on a QHY 8L CCD cooled to -15C. Scope is a Celestron EdgeHD @ f/10.
Seeing turbulence in the air) wasn’t great. Stars were twinkling away with the best of them which does compromise image quality fairly significantly. Still, I wanted to get M27 again since I re-calibrated the settings for my camera and learned a bit more about exactly how far is too far with a CCD. This is …
Shot through massive light pollution over staggeringly huge The Village At Fairview outdoor mall complex. This started as an add-on session to my first attempt at narrowband imaging and turned out much better than I hoped for. Of course this would be much more grand out in the country but that’s not what this site …
Barnard 33 – The Horsehead Nebula in Orion If you find Orion’s belt, the eastern most star is Alnitak. Just a bit South and West from that star is this region, cataloged by Edward Emerson Barnard in 1919 in his book of dark nebulae. This cloud of dust is #33 on his list so we …
Read more “Getting on the Narrowband wagon – Horsehead Nebula”
I shot this back in January. This should be a good place to start for the next round of winter images. 🙂