It’s a frustrating time at the moment. The weather is warm but quite cloudy. Clear nights are few and far between however I managed to get 3hrs on the Dumbbell. I couldn’t quite get enough data to bring out the faint nebulosity in the “wings”. I’ll revisit as soon as I can.
I had another amazingly clear night last night so I stayed up very late to get more data on the Crescent Nebula. The night was very calm, the moon had set and seeing was good. I was managing 10min subs without star trailing or overpowering the camera. In total I managed to get 2hrs worth of subs. I could have got more but at 3am I was ready for bed. I also managed to get another 3am session a few weeks later to bring the total integration time to ~5hrs
I had an amazingly clear night last night so I stayed up very late finishing my Leo Triplet capture. When it went too low in the sky, I decided to move onto another target. on a whim, I decided to get a few hours on M101 Pinwheel Galaxy so I could compare against my previous effort. The results are blow. Processed with Siril using its new bayer drizzle and SPCC colour correction
It’s the middle of galaxy season and I’ve managed to grab some photons from the Leo Triplet over the last week or so. I figured this target would be ok for my field of view and it was, just about. I had to crop this quite a lot but I think there’s just about enough detail there to make it worthwhile. I’m reasonably pleased with the effort. Processed in Siril using bayer drizzle and SPCC.
It’s been ages since I got any clear sky, and now it’s galaxy season. This is not great for me because my equipment is relatively wide-field and most galaxies show up like tiny blotches in the middle of a bunch of stars. However, I’m keen to make the most of it so I thought I’d do Markarians Chain. I decided to approach this by taking lots of short exposures (60 secs) with regular dithering and stacking them with drizzle to try to extract some extra detail. On paper, this should have worked well but not so much in practice. Perhaps my sky isn’t dark enough, or my equipment is just not good enough, or perhaps I just didn’t spend enough time on it, but it’s not quite what I wanted. On the plus side, I did find that -20c gives less noise than -10c so that’s my new standard. I also experimented with the beta version of Siril with its new SPCC colour correction and proper bayer drizzle, and I spent some time to perfect my dark/flat/biases library. Hopefully this will pay off in better quality images in future. For now, here’s an annotated Markaians Chain
