Ricks Astrophotography

Welcome to my astrophotography blog. I am new to this type of photography and will be posting information that I learn as I go along. I will do my best to explain how I take the photos that I post. Feel free to ask me a question about this subject. I will...

[astrofensch-blog]

My friend Gary and I met up at the HCAS observatory with the hopes of clear skies for 4 hours. We had been planning to get images of the Lunar X and V for a long time. Gary being an expert on the Moon was able to put together all of the dates and times that the X and V would form. Our first two opportunities of 2017 were a bust with rain. Finally in June we were expecting clear skies during the event. The shadow play only lasts a few hours. So you have to be ready and watching the weather. If you miss your window, you have to wait another month or more for the shadows to align again.

I had never seen the X or V before in person. Only what I could find with an online image search. From the images I found, it looked to be some what of a challenge to get a nice image. Both formations are on the small side. So if you want a nice cropped shot, you have to have a big scope, and great seeing. Our clubs 14in would be great, but Baltimore’s seeing conditions leave everyone disappointed.

We played around for quite some time before getting serious. This particular event was taking place during daylight. So for a few hours, the contrast was pretty bad. You could see the X and V but they did not have deep, dark shadows to make the formation “pop” in the eyepiece. Mostly we just tried to get good images with high powered eyepiece and our cell phones. Gary has a great adapter that holds your phone steady over the eyepiece.

When Gary was finished getting his images I put my Canon 60D onto the 14in and decided to make a mosaic of the entire Moon. At that focal length, it took 7 images to piece together the entire surface. My exposure was 1/60th of a second at ISO 400. I merged all 7 images into the one seen here with Adobe Photoshop CC. I did a 3px smart sharpen and 300%.

Can you spot the X and V? They are right on the terminator line!

[astrofensch-blog]

I revisited an old 32bit image of M27. Processed it a little bit differently this time round. I like it better than what I presented 2 years ago. 

[astrofensch-blog]

Messier 3 under bad seeing. I took 60 one minute images. Stacked in DeepSky Stacker and processed in Photoshop.

[astrofensch-blog]

Quick and dirty shot of Orion core. This was 60 one minute exposures with my Canon 60D. Stacked in DeepSkyStacker and processed in Photoshop. Guided with PHD and the Orion Magnificent Mini AutoGuider Package.

[astrofensch-blog]

Hey, what do ya know, another Moon shot! This is a mosaic made from 28 videos. Captured in BackyardEOS with my Canon 60D. Processed in Photoshop.

[astrofensch-blog]

Blue Snowball. I took this a while back but just found it while going through some astro images. I thought I would share. It’s a stack of 25 one minute images. Stacked and processed in Photoshop.

[astrofensch-blog]

Double star Albireo! Albireo is mag 5.45 and it’s companion star HIP 95951 is mag 5.10. They are orbiting each other about 390 light years away from us. I love the color differences.

[astrofensch-blog]

Captured Jupiter with my 6in Celestron schmidt cassegrain. Used a program called BackYardEOS to obtain uncompressed video frames straight off my Canon 60D camera. I processed the photo in Registax. Shot 3000 frames and stacked the best 300.

[astrofensch-blog]

I've been taking images now for about 4 years with my telescope. I've been using the same camera, a Canon 60D the entire time. I've taken plenty of images of the moon, but not like this one. All this time I have been framing up the moon and firing away about 40 RAW 18MP images. Stacking them manually in Photoshop and then sharpening. I usually end up with an image that looks good at around 2-3MP. Any larger than that and it's just not sharp because of atmospheric conditions. The image is also only sharp in the middle of the moon. As you move towards the side you loose focus due to my telescopes curved mirror. 

Things changed last week. I finally bough BackYardEOS, a program that controls Canon cameras through your laptop. One of the features it has is it can turn your Canon camera into a pretty darn good planetary imaging camera. It does this by recording a video from your sensor. But not the entire sensor. just the center most part, around 1024x680 pixels. And it can do this at a frame rate around 30fps and will save all of that data as an uncompressed AVI file (Registax compatible). This will give you a great "zoomed in" video of whatever object you aim your scope at. Because I am capturing light that is traveling through MILES of atmosphere, it is subject to a lot of random movement. The atmosphere is moving, different temperatures at different layers, and also has mixed amounts of moisture. All of this adds up to making your image blurry. Taking videos is the only way around this. Because you are capturing 30 fps you are bound to capture images when the atmosphere stood still for just a 1/100th of a second. I chose to take 1,200 frames per video, that way I would increase my likelihood of getting good images with minimal blurring. I decided to test this out on the Moon this Monday night and I was shocked at the results.

My settings were as follows;

Tv: 125/thAv: f/10 which is 1500mm for my 6in Cassegrain ScopeISO: 40025fps1200 frames captured per video.

Just one video was not going to cover the entire moon because it was cropped in so much. So I had to record 15 separate videos. Using the telescopes hand controller I would center on the cameras sensor, the area to image. Then wait while BackYardEOS would capture 1200 uncompressed images and save it as an AVI file. Then using the hand controller again, I would re-aim the scope at the next area to image. It ended up taking me 15 videos working my way around the moon to capture the 1/2 moon.... and each video was 2.3 GB in files size. (Uncompressed video makes large files) So I ended up capturing 35 GB of uncompressed AVI files! All for one final image. Crazy... I know!

I packed up and went inside. All of the videos opened in Registax and processed very smoothly. I had Registax pick the best (most sharp = least atmospheric blurring) 150 frames from each of the 15 videos for stacking. (Stacking refers to combining/averaging pixel values together to increase signal and reduce random sensor noise.) Once I had all 15 videos finished I was left with 15 - true 16bit uncompressed tiff files with extremely low noise. I opened up Photoshop, went to File/Automate/Photomerge and chose the 15 images. Photoshop took about 2 minutes to organized and stitched together all 15 frames into one master image of the entire Moon. I then just had to do a smart sharpen and this is what I was left with! (Smart sharpen is used to further reduce any atmospheric blurring.)

Advanced note: Because all 15 images were taken from the very center of my telescope (remember the videos are cropped from the center of my sensor) they are all the same focus and sharpness from the best part of my telescope mirror. This technique kind of turns a cassegrain scope into a nice Flat Field Astrograph. Notice how sharpness is maintained all the way to the edge of the moon. This also increases resolution. This image is 9.4MP and still sharp!

[astrofensch-blog]

Finally got back out last weekend. It’s been nearly 6 months since I did some astrophotography. I was a little rusty to tell the truth. I’m not very happy with the results either. Just can’t get the color I was looking for. I used my CLS (light pollution) filter to cut down on city lights but it really through my color off for some reason. It’s till nice to see dust lanes though. Captured from my back yard in Essex MD. 25 - 3 minute exposures @ ISO 800 f/4.

[astrofensch-blog]

I love Orion! Last winter vs this winter. Same gear, same location. Hard to believe I was able to make that big of a change! This time I shot at f/2.8 instead of f/4.0. That alone let a ton more light through. I only increased the exposure from 180 to 210 seconds and I took 30 frames instead of 20. I think the biggest changed that help me get the really faint stuff was how clear the night was. ClearSkyChart gave it straight 10′s on cloud cover, transparency and seeing. I’ve never imaged on a night that clear before, I think it really helped.

This was taken with my Canon 60D and 70-200 2.8L @ ISO 800 and around 150mm from my backyard in Essex, Maryland. I used my Astronomik CLS Light Pollution filter. Data was stacked in Deep Sky Stacker and then processed in Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop.

[astrofensch-blog]

Messier 45 The Pleiades. This was 92 minutes from Bel Air Maryland. I snapped 23 four minute exposures at ISO 400, 200mm, f/3.5 and No light pollution filter. Stacked in Deep Sky Stacker and edited in Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Photoshop. At 200mm focal length the cluster is quite small, so this has been considerably cropped. I chose this focal length because it enabled me to shoot at f3.5 which would give me over 8x as much data in the same amount of time. My alternative would have been 400mm @ f8. Not only would the lens pass 1/2 as much light though at f8, but it would also be spreading the nebula out over 4 times as many pixels. Thus resulting in 8x less light hitting each photo diode on the camera sensor. Now to my advantage I had great weather this night. It was party to mostly cloudy all over Maryland and for whatever reason, the entire time I was imaging I was under a hole in the clouds giving me exceptionally darker skies since the clouds everywhere else were holding down the light pollution. I did not use dark, bias, or flat frames to create this. 

The Pleiades is an open star cluster containing middle-aged hot B-type stars located in the constellation of Taurus. It is among the nearest star clusters to Earth and is the cluster most obvious to the naked eye in the night sky.

[astrofensch-blog]

Well here is my first attempt at a Lunar eclipse. I had a great time observing and imaging this. I was extremely amazed at how dark the moon became. It was as if the moon wasn’t in the sky at all. You could see many stars and a few even made it into some images. Through my binoculars I could see the full moon and many stars surrounding it. Thats unheard of during a normal full moon. I had hoped to image the entire event but was forced to start late because of cloud cover. I hope to try again for the next eclipse. Goal will be to produce a time lapse of the entire event. Normal full moon for me requires an exposure of ISO 100 and 1/200th of a second. At the darkest point for the eclipse I was set at ISO 800 and 8 seconds for a proper exposure through the scope. That should tell you how dark the moon ended up getting!

[astrofensch-blog]

So here is my multi object image from last weekend. We’ve got tons of stars. Buried with in them you can make out the Heart and Soul nebulas riding next to the Double Cluster. This is a wide field shot with my 70-200 lens set to around 150mm and f/4. This was a tough one for me. I have so much light pollution from my back yard that these two nebulas were really hard to bring out. I even used my light pollution filter (which helped greatly) but it was still hard. To get noise down enough I knew I needed images with good signal to noise ratio. I went with 5 minute exposures at ISO 400 and took 27 of them before calling it a night. Even with the noise down, I still had to do a lot of PS work to get those nebulas to pop out. I’m happy with the results for my terrible skies.

[astrofensch-blog]

Stayed up until 4am last night imaging in the backyard. Really was a beautiful night. When the moon rose it was shining down on a layer of low lying clouds and looked beautiful. I wasn’t able to photograph it because I was still gathering data in Cassiopeia of the Heart/Soul/Double cluster area. Look for that to be posted shortly. After I finished with that I slewed over to the moon and fired off 30 images with my 6.3 reducer on. So this image was at 945mm focal length @ f/6.3  ISO 200 and 1/80th exposure. I stacked them in Photoshop CC by opening all of the images together, aligning them, then converting them all to a smart object. Finally changing the smart object stack mode to Median. I then used smart sharpen to help clear up the atmosphere blurring. I used 4px and 400%. Increased the saturation by 100%

This is my first image of the moon after the full moon. I rarely see the moon lit from the left.

[astrofensch-blog]

Perseid meteor shower from last weekend. This was 5 images each 60 seconds long. I wasn’t pointed in the direction that the meteors were coming but I wanted to get the milky way in the shot. I didn’t have a lot of time to stay outside because clouds rolled in. I was lucky enough to get two strikes within the 5 minutes I was imaging. I used my Canon 60D and 24x70mm lens set at 24mm, f2.8 and ISO 800. No auto guiding was needed since it was such a wide field shot. The mounts tracking was fine.

[astrofensch-blog]

This is now my 3rd attempt at this beauty. M27 was my second ever deep sky object that I tried to photograph. Way back then I was without auto guiding and also no light pollution filter. I was only able to get 45 second exposures and not all of them were useable. That image is the darkest version. When I began using my auto guider 2 summers ago I decided to try again with longer exposures. I know that I was able to get 3 minute exposures for my second attempt but can’t remember or find how many. The longer exposures definitely helped capture more detail and reveal the fainter parts of the nebula. I had time this past week to image again, this time with my light pollution filter. The filter helps to reduce the orange glow from city lights and allows me to bring out the red hydrogen gas better. I pushed my exposures to 5 minutes and took 24 of them for a total of 2 hours of gathered light. The resulting image is one of my best so far. Enjoy!