What are you up to?

Doing an all-southern sky (well at least the bits that are accessible in May from -45 and above the mountains) with a Sigma Art 40mm lens.

Brian Boyle:
Doing an all-southern sky (well at least the bits that are accessible in May from -45 and above the mountains) with a Sigma Art 40mm lens.

Ah, interesting. I have my partners SDLR at the moment. I was looking at it thinking "It would be pretty cool to take a long wide angle exposure...". I'll definitely have to give that a try.

I've been capturing data on galaxy NGC  3521 (the Bubble galaxy) with my main rig (a 10 inch aperture CDK - Corrected Dall-Kirkham on a 10Micron Eq mount), while also getting some images of Comet Pons-Brooks just after dark with my little ZWO Seestar S50 smartscope, from our Bay of Plenty location. Image below of the comet off the little Seestar with minimal extra processing, just an increase in contrast, saturation, and some noise reduction. Seestar stack of 6 minutes of 20 sec exposures. Both the dust tail and plasma tail nicely visible.

That is very impressive!

I've seen a few reviews and it's definitely the direction astrophotography will head in.

I did enjoy the ballet tonight, but I arrived home, rushing to get my equipment set up, just as low clouds and fog rolled in. You have to be social occasionally... ;-)

It looks like I'll get a few hours after dark tomorrow, so I'll clue myself up on Pons-Brooks and give it a try tomorrow.

Bubble Galaxy? I had that on my target list, but I gave it a miss as it looked like a difficult target to get good images of.

I checkout out your gallery. Wow. Hehe. Very impressive. I'll have a proper look later.

I should add for the last 9months I have been busy putting together an application to have Kawarau Gibbston recognised as an international Dark Sky Park.  
Delighted to say that our success in gaining this certification was announced this morning…

I've been capturing data here in our rural backyard in the Bay of Plenty over the past 3 weeks or so on the "Bubble" nebula, NGC 3521in Leo and have captured/stacked 25 or so hours of data, stacked with Astro Pixel Processor, and processed that into this final image with Pixinsight. Captured with my 250mm/1450 mm Beamtech (Aussie made) CDK250 Corrected Dall Kirkham cassegrain OTA on my 10Micron GM1000 HPS mount and a ZWO Asiair Plus device. Full details at this link.   https://www.astrobin.com/k9t9dd/C/#  I've also stacked lots of data on this same object at the same time with my little ZWO Seestar S50 smartscope and need to stack/process that now too

Hello all, new to the group here and also to astrobin!! Based in the might manawatu, started doing DSLR nebula imagery but have moved straight onto a 2600mm (like a challenge) 

I'm slowly getting there with uploading finished images!! There's a few DSLR images I need to find and upload but for now my recent image of The Fighting Dragons of Ara in SHO palette is my current project!! That revision you see on my astrobin page is 4hrs 15minutes worth and I've just pretty much doubled my image data so now have 8hrs in total!! Shooting again tonight for more data so will see what I manage to get but the 8hour lot has been stacked and I'm about to colourise it in SHO and see what I can do!! I may not post it until the final revision!!

Kinda lucky this winter has been pretty mild and theres been a good bunch of cloudless night!!

Hope everyone's ticking along well

Clear skies!!

- Sam

Hi Dan,

Yeah both those images are from a 62ED, won it in a Sky Watcher giveaway over Xmas/New Years haha

I used to be based in Woodridge/Newlands up until a couple months ago when I moved to Otaki!! Have to say the weather up here is much more consistent for the better!!

How do you rebuild your mount to get better guiding?? Like I'm averaging around 1-2" rms error even with a "almost perfect" PA??

Cheers
- Sam

Hi Dan,

Man that's guttering about the covenant on that land in Alfredton!! That would have been a primo area for this hobby as it's not really that far from Eketahuna for basic living things!! Have carted a few loads of Macrocarpa logs out of there to Wellington port, nice quiet area and I did have the same thought one day when I was out there!! Pirinoa would be another good area, though I haven't had a decent look at the light pollution for south wairarapa!! I prefer the western side of the ranges like manawatu/kapiti etc

An AM5 is on my list for my next mount and probably going to keep my SWSA GTi as a wide field (600mm and under) mount but for now, I might look into upgrades to get better guiding!!

I've come across a similar situation with the guiding you mentioned after a meridian flip!! I always let it recalibrate after a flip and I generally get slightly better guiding, 1-2" rms before and .8-1.2" rms after but it never last and it goes back to bouncing between 1-2" rms!! It doesn't really bother me too much, yeah I may have to throw away a few extra frames but it does mean in post processing I have to rely on BlurXterminator to clean up the stars and make them nice and round as I generally include frames with ever so slight elongated stars!!

With the 62ED I do employ the .9x reducer/flattener which cost a little bit extra!! Compared to my DSLR lenses I was using before hand it's alot sharper but that could also be due to a much better performing dedicated astro cam compared to a DSLR!! Didn't pay a cent for the scope but regardless, I'm happy with the results I'm getting, just with I had one with more focal length!! I am looking at getting the Sky Watcher Evostar 80ED (600mm f7.5) and the Evostar 100ED (900mm f9) but until funds are available, I'm stuck with the 62ED

Here's a question for ya though, I see on YouTube from astrophotographers on there that they go to star parties etc and I saw there was one in aussie not long ago but they all tend to be in the states (go figure) but is there anything similar that happens in NZ or is it another case of us being too small a country??

Cheers,
Sam