2017 Refocusing
Aims for 2017 were to use New Moon dark sky opportunities at Perth Observatory or elsewhere to try some wide-field milky way shots as well as more faint nebulous objects.
I continued to have hopes, not progressed in the last 3 years, to try some mosaics and some HDR images in order to challenge me to improve my Photoshop skills and possibly even have a look at PixInsight, that is now an an entrenched Astrophotography software toolkit item. I did managed to experiment with EQMOSAIC for mosaic navigation and Microsoft Image Composite Editor (ICE) early in the year. No HDR and a Pixinsight trial expired before I could trial it :(
I continued my involvement with Perth Observatory's Volunteer Group (POVG) for Perth Observatory's public outreach programmes including coordinating the 4-person private 'star adoption' tours and involved in the Training of new volunteers with reference material and hands on training for equipment.
Unless stated otherwise, images are from my home location in Willetton, 12 Km south of the centre of Perth, Western Australia, though I used this far less now as it is unsuitable for faint objects using one-shot colour DSLR.
My favourite shots can also be found on AstroBin http://www.astrobin.com/users/scottastrophe
Messier M7 - NGC6475 - Ptolemy's Cluster - 3/6/2017 (Processed stack w/o FLATS)
First light for 0.6x Long Perng Reducer with recently acquired Skywatcher ED80 reducing it to f/4.5 FL=360mm. No FLATs applied to show edge/corner drop-off. Compare to version with FLATs.
The corners also show notable flare in the star mages, so whilst the extra field is appreciated from the 0.6X Focal reducer, flatness is lost compared to .85X or .8X options available.
DeepSkyStacker 3.3.4 Stacked 80% (4) of 5 Images ISO 800 @ 30 Sec, 25 DARK @ 120 Sec, 32 BIAS, 17 FLATS, Post-processed with Adobe Photoshop CC 2017
Telescope - Skywatcher ED80 80/600 with Long Perng 0.6x Reducer, No filter, Baader BCF modified Canon 70D DSLR field 141' x 212' , Ambient 15C. EQMOD EQASCOM with Ascom 6 for mount control. Backyard EOS Pro 3.1.8 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.
MessierM7 Ptolemy's ClusterNGCNGC6475 M7 Ptolemy's ClusterOpen Cluster
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Kim McAvoy
on January 27, 2017Great shots so far!