Deep Space Photography Part-2

 

It’s so easy in some ways it almost feels like cheating.

So much has changed since we tried astrophotography with huge leaps in telescopes and cameras as well as software. Our normal routine now is to place the telescope facing north, take a 2-second image making certain the camera sees stars. The closer to Polaris the better. The camera, mount and software will basically tell you where to set everything; up or down, left or right. We can do this from our backyard in under 5-minutes; away from home takes longer.

The next step is to tell the telescope where to go – what’s our target for tonight. Once there, begin the process of guiding calibration which generally take several minutes. The next step is to check autofocus which can take upwards to 5-minutes. Once all this is done the next step is autorun. Setting autorun is the processes of telling the camera the duration of each shot. We generally use 300-seconds (5-minutes) and the number of images to capture; we generally capture for at least 4-hours or more.  All this time the telescope, camera, and mount are locked onto the target, tracking its movement snapping images. No star trails, no movement blur. Four-hours equal 48-sharp images that will be stacked and processed in Pixinsight.

The main software program we use for stacking and processing is Pixinsight and 3-RC-Astro plugins. Pixinsight and RC-Astro isn’t cheap however it is a onetime buy in and works very well. There are free programs out there however free isn’t always mean better. We don’t know Pixinsight well enough as yet to go into any depth thus we recommend a search on YouTube (that’s how we learned).

The only image shared today is M1, aka “Crab Nebula”.  We captured the M1 over a period of 4-nights. We were fortunate to have several clear nights and decided to do a test.  The first night began February 18^th with the second February 21^st.  The third was February 23^rd and the fourth, February 24^th. A total of 19-hours at 300-seconds each were captured.  The first 48-captures were stacked in Pixinsight which took 6-minutes 35-seconds.  The final stack of the entire 229-FITS took 29-minutes, 28-seconds.  The first 48-images totaled 2.33-GB while the 229 totaled 11.11GB. These were all captured from our back yard well after the moon had set with a near dark sky just north of Tucson, our Bortle rating is somewhere between 5 and 5.5.  The moonset was early afternoon and sunset was approximately 6:15 PM.  We sat the telescope up around 6:45 to 7 PM, setting the polar alignment, go to target, set the guiding the check autofocus. We used the previous night’s shooting “go-to” for precise alignment.  

M1-"Crab Nebula" 

The following is a general list of equipment, software and computer(s) used by us to process not only our deep space images but those of our landscape, nature and wildlife.  The main studio computer might be considered by some as a bit of overkill however it works for us.

Equipment/Software

Askar SQA55 telescope

ZWO ASI2600MC Air wireless smart camera

ZWO AM3 Harmonic equatorial mount

ZWO TC40 Carbon fiber tripod

ZWO PE200 Pier extension

ZWO EAF (electronic auto focuser)

ZWO CAA Camera Rotator

Antial Triband 2” filter

Samsung Galaxy S9 FE+ Plus 12.4” 128gb Android Tablet (began using this with the Seestar S50)

ASIAIR software on the Samsung

ASIStudio on our laptop

Pixinsight software for processing

RC-Astro – BlurXTerminator; NoiseXTerminator; StarXTerminator

Capture One

Adobe Photoshop

Topaz Labs including Photo AI

Battery power

Studio Computer:  DigitalStorm Workstation

Intel Core i7-14700KF (5.6 GHz Turbo) (28-thread) (20-Core) 3.4 GHz (14^th Gen)

ASUS ROG Maximus Z790 Dark Hero Motherboard

128GB RAM

NVIDIA T1000 4GB - (just ordered a Nvida RTX 4070 Ti 12GB as an upgrade)

We also have 2-Crucial T705 NVME drives for photo processing and 1-drive as the main

We run the nights activity on a Samsung Galaxy Tab S9 FE+ Plus 12" tablet running ZWO ASIAIR Android app.  

  

Recommendations:

Visit STARIZONA for everything you need for deep space images.

We’ll be the first to admit our computers are not for everyone. Large and pricey yet super-fast when processing large image files.

If you need a new computer, you may wish to visit DigitalStorm.  We found ourselves in need of a new workstation in our studio and are very pleased we found DigitalStorm.

 

More to come….

 

Sandy & Don