2014 First AP modified camera
Stephen Boyd had kindly allowed me to continue to borrow the 8" f/4 Newtonian that I’d had since April 2012, so the pressure was off to select a new OTA and spend my AP budget there. However, fellow AP friend Jean-Marie Locci was finishing his work assignment in Australia and moving to Moscow in May. I finally addressed the "next OTA" question mid-February by buying his 8" PowerNewt and selling him back the 80mm Apogee APO I bought from him originally in 2010. He missed it and I will now too. It was a portable and very capable starting place for Astrophotography!
I had ended 2013 by deciding to purchase a Canon 70D DSLR and have it modified for deep-sky Astrophotography, a Baader BCF filter replacement of the standard Canon imaging chip's filter. Mastering this with the PowerNewt was the initial task for the year.
Aims for this year were similar to 2013, but with the hope that the new camera and OTA, plus some more predictable weather, might give more dark sky opportunities to get some better Gum catalogue images and wide field milky way shots. New Moon weekends during winter were however very poor and I ended up with only one field trip for the year, but a good one, to the Kennedy Range and Mt Augusts National Parks for about a week in September.
An area that also intrigued me was to try some mosaics and some HDR images. This was to challenge me to improve my Photoshop skills and possibly even have a look at PixInsight that is gaining more traction for the common Astrophotography software kit bag. I failed to achieve this however :(
My continued involvement with Perth Observatory's Volunteer Group (POVG) also expanded into experimentation with their public viewing telescopes to determine for myself their longer focal length planetary capability, but more significantly the potential for expanding POVG activities into basic Astrophotography if suitable methods can be found. In the end, the very continuance of Perth Observatory was at risk at end of 2014 and 2015 will be a year for POVG to see if they can step up and run its public outreach.
Unless stated otherwise, images are from my home location in Willetton, 12 Km south of the centre of Perth, Western Australia.
My favourites shots can also be found on AstroBin http://www.astrobin.com/users/scottastrophe
Messier M42 - NGC1976 - Orion Nebula & NGC1977 Running Man Nebula - AP modified 70D First Light - 1/1/2014 (Processed stack)
I generally post based on the date of the evening I start imaging rather than the local time of the image. This one occurred after midnight, so I'm calling this 1/1/2014 and is my first night object with my new Astrophotography modified Canon 70D. See also cropped version.
The 'Great Orion Nebula', M42 or NGC 1976, is located in the sword of Orion and is one of the brightest nebula in the sky, and perhaps the best known. It is a young star formation region with very hot high-UV stars ionising and 'lighting' the nebula.The brightness of these young stars make this an astrophotography challenge as the central regions are very bright in comparison to the tenous outer nebula and over exposure becomes a problem. High Dynamic Range (HDR) techniques must be used to produce an image with a 'flattened' brightness range, more akin to the way the human eye perceives a wide range of brightness.
HDR attempt - DeepSkyStacker 3.3.3b51 Stacked 80% of
14 Images ISO 800 @ 10 Sec, 36 DARK @ 120 Sec, 32 BIAS, 20 FLATS
17 Images ISO 800 @ 120 Sec, 36 DARK @ 120 Sec, 32 BIAS, 20 FLATS
Post processed with Adobe Photoshop CS5
Telescope - Apogee OrthoStar LOMO 80/480 with Hotech SCA Field Flattener, Hutech IDAS LPS-P2 filter, Canon 70D Baaded BCF modified DSLR field 106' x 159' , Ambient 17C. EQMOD EQASCOM with Ascom 6 for mount control. BackYardEOS 3.0.3 for Image acquisition. Mount - Skywatcher NEQ6 Pro. Guidescope - Orion ShortTube 80 with Starlight Xpress SuperStar (Mono) CCD Auto Guider and Stark Labs PHD auto guiding software.
messierm42 orion nebulangcngc1976 m42 orion nebulangc1977 running man nebulagalactic nebula
