This one is a miracle!
First off, I hadn't planned on capturing it. My goal on Friday night was to set up my gear as I have gotten an offical telescope I can use for my Astro. I needed to see where it focuses at, so my only intention was to get it all set up. Find where the focus was, so I would have an idea of how to balance all of the gear.
2nd, I have never shot before from SoCal at my place here. It's super bright Bortle 8/9 conditions. I am only like 4 miles from Disneyland, and yeah, when you look up at the sky, if you are lucky you might be able to see the moon, but stars? It's more like just a police helicopter passing by.
3rd, I have a backyard that is a patio deck, and it's only like 4'x8' and filled with pots of plants. So not really room to set up if I wanted.
4th, I am surrounded by 3 story tall townhomes, and a few 50 foot tall trees.
5th, the view out on the deck is maybe only 15% of the sky.
With my older gear, I couldn't use a light pollution filter, so even with all of those above restrictions I never even gave it much thought as I knew I wouldn't have a shot just because the light pollution is so bad. But now, I can use light pollution filters and so I can at least think about it.
Well, with the new scope, an Askar FRA500, an early Christmas gift in hand, I was itching to get it assembled with my current gear so that I could make sure I had the right adapters, etc. And then on this scope, the focus racks part of the scope in and out, making it longer or shorter, which then changes the balance. I needed to make sure that when it was properly focused, could I then balance it, or would I need to get a longer vixen dovetail bar to mount it to my iOptron Gem28 Astro mount?
So I assembled it, and found that fortunately my ASI2600mc Pro astro camera had come with lot's of attachment accessories, so I was able to connect it to the new scope. I then found it did seem to balance, but without having focused the scope/camera I wouldn't know for sure. I went outside (it was dark) and looked up. The patio faces to the North, and maybe it was my imagination, but I thought I could pick out polaris just above the roof top of the townhome behind me.
I got excited thinking, maybe I could pull this off after all. But the next issue was I currently only had about a 2 foot area in the patio I could stand as I had said it was covered in potted plants and a few outdoor shelf units filled with plants. Well, I shoved all of the pots over as far as possible, stacked a few more onto the shelves, and I finally had a 3x4 foot area I could squeeze my Astro tripod in... I had plants literally whispering in my ear as I assembled it. Astro tripods are think 1.5 to 2" legs that are a 2 piece. Normally you keep it without the legs extended to keep it more stable. But I needed to extend the legs in order to get my scope tall enough to see over the 6 foot fence surrounding the patio deck.
(Sorry this is turning into a novel)
After everything was connected and plugged in, I went to polar align it, and to my shock, my Polar Scope actually could see stars around Polaris, and I could polar align it! After that, I liked high up and I found a couple of stars that are normally super bright in the sky, and they were looking a bit dull, but I could see them. So I aligned my gear on one of them, and slowly kept turning and turning the focuser on the scope not having any idea how far I needed to go. I turned it in 1/8th inch movements, bit by bit, by bit. Being careful to not pass up the focus, I wasn't sure how touchy it would be. Finally after about 5 minutes I got it out to about 4" and my first large blobs (out of focus) stars began to appear! I was again excited. So I spent another 5 minutes, fine tuning the focus. I then put the scope back into it's home position, so I could now try to properly balance it. After a few minutes, I was able to balance it! So another success!
That's really all I had in mind to do. I wanted to see if I could connect the scope to the camera, see if I could get it in focus, and see if I could get it to balance. I was really happy!
But then I got a little greedy... I thought... well could I actually image something? I had my most aggressive light pollution filter already installed. I opened up the SkyGuide App and pointed it at the sky to see if there were any nebula's in the small window of the sky available to me? Well, low and behold, the Heart Nebula was in an open area in the sky!
I entered it into my ASIAir Pro astro controller, and it swung my gear to it, and it found it!
I took a 3 minute preview image, just to see if I could actually see it. With all of the light pollution here, I still wasn't expecting much. But after 3 minutes, sure enough, there was the Heart Nebula on my ipad screen (that I use to control the Astro controller).
I turned on my Guiding, to see how the guiding would look. Now the guiding.... it did not guide well. I really needed to calibrate the guiding so it would work well. But I just didn't have enough sky available I thought. The 3 minute exposures showed only the tiniest of movement in the stars without guiding, so I decided to just go down to 120 seconds since that should still be sharp without guiding.
Now the problem is I would be severely underexposed, Astro camera's have a Gain setting which is similar ISO in a regular camera. My ASI2600mc Pro is supposed to be always shot at Gain 100 for maximum dynamic range. The idea is to keep it at 100 Gain, and just adjust the shutter speed to control the exposure. I couldn't do that since my guiding wasn't working. So I did something I had never done before, I turned up the Gain on the camera. I went to it's max which is 300. The problem with turning up the gain would be less dynamic range and also more noise in the image. I took an image and the exposure looked good, the stars looked sharp, and I had pretty decent nebulosity of the Heart I thought.
So I set my astro to take 20 exposures at 120 seconds. I didn't want it to go too long as I wasn't sure how long I had before the Heart Nebula would disappear behind a tree. As it was, I was able to get 40 exposures at 80 mins. By the time it was done, it was 5am.... I hadn't planned on being up all night, but I think it was totally worth it.
But then I decided I couldn't go to sleep unless I knew for sure. So while I was disassembling the gear, I was downloading the images onto my laptop so I could do a quick stacking and a quick edit just to see if I really, truly had enough detail to work with. And sure enough, it looked pretty good! Now that would lead to a good couple hour early morning nap for me.
After getting up, I went and did proper processing on it, and wow! A miracle! I never ever figured I could capture anything in SoCal. I don't think this will be a habit, as I would rather drive the 2 hours out to Joshua Tree where I can set up and see the whole sky, with pretty dark skies. But in an emergency? This was so cool to know.
Now I know I have been posting a few images of the Heart Nebula lately, and this one really still just has minimal capture time at 80 minutes. But I thought I would share my latest adventure.
40 Lights @ 120 secs and Gain 300
20 - Flats
5 - Darks
ASI2600mc Pro
Askar FRA500
iOptron Gem28 astro mount
Deep Sky Stacker - Stacking
Pixinsight - Processing
Photoshop - Finishing touches
Processed to the Hubble Pallet
All comments are welcome,
Jim
First off, I hadn't planned on capturing it. My goal on Friday night was to set up my gear as I have gotten an offical telescope I can use for my Astro. I needed to see where it focuses at, so my only intention was to get it all set up. Find where the focus was, so I would have an idea of how to balance all of the gear.
2nd, I have never shot before from SoCal at my place here. It's super bright Bortle 8/9 conditions. I am only like 4 miles from Disneyland, and yeah, when you look up at the sky, if you are lucky you might be able to see the moon, but stars? It's more like just a police helicopter passing by.
3rd, I have a backyard that is a patio deck, and it's only like 4'x8' and filled with pots of plants. So not really room to set up if I wanted.
4th, I am surrounded by 3 story tall townhomes, and a few 50 foot tall trees.
5th, the view out on the deck is maybe only 15% of the sky.
With my older gear, I couldn't use a light pollution filter, so even with all of those above restrictions I never even gave it much thought as I knew I wouldn't have a shot just because the light pollution is so bad. But now, I can use light pollution filters and so I can at least think about it.
Well, with the new scope, an Askar FRA500, an early Christmas gift in hand, I was itching to get it assembled with my current gear so that I could make sure I had the right adapters, etc. And then on this scope, the focus racks part of the scope in and out, making it longer or shorter, which then changes the balance. I needed to make sure that when it was properly focused, could I then balance it, or would I need to get a longer vixen dovetail bar to mount it to my iOptron Gem28 Astro mount?
So I assembled it, and found that fortunately my ASI2600mc Pro astro camera had come with lot's of attachment accessories, so I was able to connect it to the new scope. I then found it did seem to balance, but without having focused the scope/camera I wouldn't know for sure. I went outside (it was dark) and looked up. The patio faces to the North, and maybe it was my imagination, but I thought I could pick out polaris just above the roof top of the townhome behind me.
I got excited thinking, maybe I could pull this off after all. But the next issue was I currently only had about a 2 foot area in the patio I could stand as I had said it was covered in potted plants and a few outdoor shelf units filled with plants. Well, I shoved all of the pots over as far as possible, stacked a few more onto the shelves, and I finally had a 3x4 foot area I could squeeze my Astro tripod in... I had plants literally whispering in my ear as I assembled it. Astro tripods are think 1.5 to 2" legs that are a 2 piece. Normally you keep it without the legs extended to keep it more stable. But I needed to extend the legs in order to get my scope tall enough to see over the 6 foot fence surrounding the patio deck.
(Sorry this is turning into a novel)
After everything was connected and plugged in, I went to polar align it, and to my shock, my Polar Scope actually could see stars around Polaris, and I could polar align it! After that, I liked high up and I found a couple of stars that are normally super bright in the sky, and they were looking a bit dull, but I could see them. So I aligned my gear on one of them, and slowly kept turning and turning the focuser on the scope not having any idea how far I needed to go. I turned it in 1/8th inch movements, bit by bit, by bit. Being careful to not pass up the focus, I wasn't sure how touchy it would be. Finally after about 5 minutes I got it out to about 4" and my first large blobs (out of focus) stars began to appear! I was again excited. So I spent another 5 minutes, fine tuning the focus. I then put the scope back into it's home position, so I could now try to properly balance it. After a few minutes, I was able to balance it! So another success!
That's really all I had in mind to do. I wanted to see if I could connect the scope to the camera, see if I could get it in focus, and see if I could get it to balance. I was really happy!
But then I got a little greedy... I thought... well could I actually image something? I had my most aggressive light pollution filter already installed. I opened up the SkyGuide App and pointed it at the sky to see if there were any nebula's in the small window of the sky available to me? Well, low and behold, the Heart Nebula was in an open area in the sky!
I entered it into my ASIAir Pro astro controller, and it swung my gear to it, and it found it!
I took a 3 minute preview image, just to see if I could actually see it. With all of the light pollution here, I still wasn't expecting much. But after 3 minutes, sure enough, there was the Heart Nebula on my ipad screen (that I use to control the Astro controller).
I turned on my Guiding, to see how the guiding would look. Now the guiding.... it did not guide well. I really needed to calibrate the guiding so it would work well. But I just didn't have enough sky available I thought. The 3 minute exposures showed only the tiniest of movement in the stars without guiding, so I decided to just go down to 120 seconds since that should still be sharp without guiding.
Now the problem is I would be severely underexposed, Astro camera's have a Gain setting which is similar ISO in a regular camera. My ASI2600mc Pro is supposed to be always shot at Gain 100 for maximum dynamic range. The idea is to keep it at 100 Gain, and just adjust the shutter speed to control the exposure. I couldn't do that since my guiding wasn't working. So I did something I had never done before, I turned up the Gain on the camera. I went to it's max which is 300. The problem with turning up the gain would be less dynamic range and also more noise in the image. I took an image and the exposure looked good, the stars looked sharp, and I had pretty decent nebulosity of the Heart I thought.
So I set my astro to take 20 exposures at 120 seconds. I didn't want it to go too long as I wasn't sure how long I had before the Heart Nebula would disappear behind a tree. As it was, I was able to get 40 exposures at 80 mins. By the time it was done, it was 5am.... I hadn't planned on being up all night, but I think it was totally worth it.
But then I decided I couldn't go to sleep unless I knew for sure. So while I was disassembling the gear, I was downloading the images onto my laptop so I could do a quick stacking and a quick edit just to see if I really, truly had enough detail to work with. And sure enough, it looked pretty good! Now that would lead to a good couple hour early morning nap for me.
After getting up, I went and did proper processing on it, and wow! A miracle! I never ever figured I could capture anything in SoCal. I don't think this will be a habit, as I would rather drive the 2 hours out to Joshua Tree where I can set up and see the whole sky, with pretty dark skies. But in an emergency? This was so cool to know.
Now I know I have been posting a few images of the Heart Nebula lately, and this one really still just has minimal capture time at 80 minutes. But I thought I would share my latest adventure.
40 Lights @ 120 secs and Gain 300
20 - Flats
5 - Darks
ASI2600mc Pro
Askar FRA500
iOptron Gem28 astro mount
Deep Sky Stacker - Stacking
Pixinsight - Processing
Photoshop - Finishing touches
Processed to the Hubble Pallet
All comments are welcome,
Jim
and yes the more data you have the higher your SNR will be.
