Another go at Saturn

I thought it was time to switch back from the DSLR to the LPI CCD camera and have another go at planetary imaging. After tea I had a look outside, and had noted the relatively clear skies throughout the day so thought it worth a go.

Having got the equipment outside, and selected polar alignment, I watched as polaris, and actually nearly the whole sky began to cloud over. By the time I was ready to try aligning there were no stars left to align on! So I went in and watched some TV and had a cup of coffee. An episode of Torchwood later, and the sky had cleared nicely.

I hooked up the LPI and the laptop, and tried Mars to begin with. A couple of attempts but it wasn't really showing up as more than a slightly orange blob.

So I switched to Saturn, which is now much higher in the sky. After a bit of fiddling around, and attempting to use the LPI to both image and guide, and a couple of software lockups, I succeeded in getting something.



Not too bad, in fact it was looking good enough that I thought it would withstand a bit more magnification. So I went inside and got a 2x barlow lens and slotted it in.
It was definitely larger, but focusing was really difficult.

After a bit more fiddling around, and using registax on the results and a bit of tweaking this is sort of the final version, even showing a moon.


This has to be the best Saturn image I have to date, which is nice!

Constellations

It was very windy last night, so I didn't try any telescope shots. There was a lot of broken cloud about and it kept obscuring different parts of the sky. However with the camera on a tripod hooked up to the laptop I thought it worth a few shots. With it fully wired up, once you are focused and aligned you can just leave it to get on with 25 shots of 25 seconds and go into the warm.

I started with the plough, as it is nicely aligned and easy to see. Had a go at Saturn in Leo, but clouds and aircraft conspired to wreck that.

Cassiopeia looked reasonable so I took quite a few of that and stacked them. I need to get better at post processing though.

Another go at the orion nebula

I tried some rather short exposure settings on M42, but decided this time to try some 25s exposures with the DSLR mounted at prime focus on the telescope. I wasn't sure that the telescope would track well enough. Also Orion is just above the house and descends below it through the night, so not an ideal location either. Anyway - worth a try.

It turned out that many of the images had elliptical stars, or were smeared out, but there were a number within the 25 taken that looked ok.

I used DSLRshutter program to take them which worked pretty well. I also experimented with nebulosity for focussing without much success.

Anyway - after throwing lights, flats, darks and biases at deep sky stacker, it pronounced that only one of the images was worth stacking... its probably right but it could have broken the news gently!

Anyway, its probably my best shot of M42 to date, but still not much compared with anyone who's any good!



Step by step, its getting a bit better.

More equipment

I got a zoom lens for the DSLR, and tried a few shots of th night sky with that. The results were not bad. These were taken from a tripod rather than a telescope mount so you can't do long exposures of the stars start to streak. Setting high ISO numbers and short exposures is the compromise.

Here is the Orion nebula taken.


and here is the Pleiades taken similarly.



and one with the shorter lens of the plough again



Then a couple of days later I tried the camera connected to the telescope again. I had it equatorially mounted and it seemed a little smoother. A number of the photos came out streaky though, so it was a question of picking the best to stack. So here is the orion nebula (M42) again looking a little better.


Its starting to look better. I'm not sure about the focusing though, and I'm not sure they are as straight as they could be. However the success story has to be the remote release I bought that connects to the laptop and the Delphinius software that allows you to setup a shooting schedule and go inside for a coffee while it takes and downloads 20 shots or more.

The shuttle and the ISS

The shuttle docked with the ISS and made some passes overhead during reasonable seeing conditions. I managed to get some reasonable trails from this event, although really you wouldn't know what it was other than a bright spot. I didn't attempt to get a telescope on it, it was moving pretty fast, but did have a look with binoculars.
You can see it rising above a tree in this trail, although there is also a confusing contrail moving horizontally.

And here it is setting, going past Mars. Two images overlayed.

How things stack up

I had attempted to stack a number of the orion images together - but ran into some lack of knowledge with my attempts to drive DeepSkyStacker. It was doing unspeakable things to my images and they looked far worse than when I started out the process.
After some discussions with the author I learnt a little more about using the program, and after some trial and error got something that was better than what I started out with.


Hurrah!

Wide sky pictures

I've been looking around for a while for a way to attach the camera on top of the telescope, and so allow photographs to be taken through the camera lens. This allows some wider field photography, where you can capture constellations and stuff. There were a couple of places that sell these sort of attachment for my telescope in the U.S., and some places in the UK but all out of stock. Also they seem reasonably expensive at about £80 or so.

So - when in a DIY shop yesterday, I spotted some velcro attachment straps. These are long enough to wrap about the main body of the telescope, and strap a small bendy tabletop tripod that came free with the camera onto the main tube. It looks like this:


So - I tried a little constellation photography.

This shows the effect of light pollution quite well! After a little cleaning up


I doubt it will win awards, but its a start!