Nighttime Skies Above Upper Pottsgrove Pennsylvania
This in one of two videos on how easy it is to use artificial stars to collimate an SCT. I use the Hubble Optics Artificial Stars Flashlight @ https://hubble-optics.com/artificial-stars.html If you use a mount to steady your telescope, you need to turn tracking off. I use CPWI so it is simple to turn it off … Read More “How to Collimate using artificial stars” »
I tried making this video a couple times. It was too light, too much wind or my voice was muffled. Hopefully this one came out good… This video is a step by step guide on how set up and use a StarSense Autoguider. I set it up on an AVX mount, however, it would be … Read More “Setting up the StarSense Autoguider” »
I have viewed this star many times. I like using it to focus, it’s perfect for it. On Friday 3/29/2024, I had planned on shooting a nebula or galaxy all night while I was sleeping. I ended up on Sombrero Galaxy. I choose this to make sure I was focused. This image is 40 15 … Read More “Arcturus” »
When I first started down the path of Astrophotography, I read and tried a lot of different ways to stack the image/frames I generated with my telescope and camera. It seemed like a lot of people were talking about having free software for every step they took. When I ran across some photos processed using … Read More “Stacking with PixInsight” »
You just spent 8 hours imaging a Deep Space Object (DSO) only find out that you have elongated stars after stacking your images. This handy little tool will allow you to view all the subs (frames) like a movie so you can identify and remove the bad frames. Allowing you to only stack the good … Read More “PixInsight Blink Tool” »
It was a dark but windy night here in SE Pennsylvania. Around midnight I was searching for something to image all night long. I ultimately decided, one the M104 the Sombrero galaxy. At 12:20 AM, I started with 30 second images at 150 gain. It was very windy!!! Today, I used the Blink tool in … Read More “Sombrero Galaxy – Hyperstar4” »
I was testing things out of the upcoming eclipse. I think this turned out pretty good. This is 39 1/1000 of second frames. I processed in PixInsight just to pull out the yellow.
Last night I set the telescope on the Beehive Cluster around 1am. This morning I woke up at 6 am and stopped SharpCap from imaging. Around 7:30 am I used Weighted Batch Processing script in PixInsight on and started combining the 622 images taken. When I compare the image below to the first one I … Read More “Beehive using HyperStar 4” »
