First image with a new 60 MegaPixel camera with Andromeda as the target.
Ballard
Loc: Grass Valley, California
jimvanells wrote:
Absolutely beautiful image! Great work
Hi jimvanells
Thanks for viewing the image of Andromeda and for the comment.
Absolutely Amazing ! A great deal of work and even more talent goes into imaging of this quality. You are to be commended for a job very well done and thank you for sharing ,,,, for me it demonstrates something to aspire to. I would love to know more about the adapter you made for the canon lens !
Fantastic captures, Ballard.
WOW Truly incredible images esp on DDL !!! Thank you for sharing. Shang
Ballard
Loc: Grass Valley, California
gekko11 wrote:
Absolutely Amazing ! A great deal of work and even more talent goes into imaging of this quality. You are to be commended for a job very well done and thank you for sharing ,,,, for me it demonstrates something to aspire to. I would love to know more about the adapter you made for the canon lens !
Hi gekko11
Thanks for checking out the view of Andromeda and for the comment. Regarding the adapter I started with an old lens connector I had purchased cheaply some time ago and had to fabricate a plate that would connect the lens connector to the filter wheel. The tricky part was that the back focus was 44mm which meant it had to be very thin when you add the thickness of the filter wheel and the distance the sensor was in the camera. So I took some 1/8 inch aluminum plate, put it in a lathe and turned out a disc with a hole of the appropriate size in the center. I then had to put in threaded holes for the old lens connector that would allow it to attach to the plate and holes that would match locations on the filter wheel where it had pre-existing threaded holes. I then painted it black.
I ended up purchasing some small metric taps to cut the needed threads and some metric screws to put it all together.
Below are a couple of pictures of the filter while connector to the lens with the adapter and one of the overall telescope configuration.
This made for a stable connection since the circular plate has a large surface area attached to the filter wheel.
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The 1/8" plate was just about perfect to achieve the 44mm back focus required.
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View of the overall setup.
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Ballard
Loc: Grass Valley, California
Earnest Botello wrote:
Fantastic captures, Ballard.
Hi Earnest Botello
Thanks for viewing the image of Andromeda and for the comment.
Ballard
Loc: Grass Valley, California
shangyrhee wrote:
WOW Truly incredible images esp on DDL !!! Thank you for sharing. Shang
Hi shangyrhee
Thanks for checking out the images of Andromeda and for the comment. The guiding had an RMS value of ~.25 arcseconds that night making for a detailed image at 60 megapixel and with a bit of noise reduction made for a decent image even with DDL.
…AMAZING WORK…! Really well done…Thanks for showing this to us…
Ballard
Loc: Grass Valley, California
SkyKing wrote:
…AMAZING WORK…! Really well done…Thanks for showing this to us…
Hi SkyKing
Thanks for viewing the image of M31 made with the new camera and for the comment.
bwana
Loc: Bergen, Alberta, Canada
Ballard wrote:
The smoke finally cleared off enough to give me a chance to try out my new mono-astro camera. This image of the Andromeda galaxy was made by stacking groups of shots taken with a Luminance, Red, Green and Blue filter. These groups where then combined to produce a full color image. Due to the large size of Andromeda I used a 500mm Canon lens rather than a standard telescope. I also used a homemade adapter to attach the filter wheel and astro-camera to the Canon lens. Many of the subframes had satellites go through while the exposures were being taken, fortunately it is fairly easy to filter out most of the satellite trails (I did end up doing a small amount of cleaning with a clone tool).
The first image is the end result, in download and double download you can see the darker dust lanes in the galaxy and several of its bright blue star clusters. This image required ~6 hours of total exposure.
The next image is same except I went though and circled a number of dim galaxies in background (probably most of these are many 100's of millions of light years away). The red circle shows where I believe I found 1 dim galaxy and the yellow circle is where two or more distant galaxies showed up. This was just a cursory examination and there are certainly many more that could be found. A few of the circles also have PGC numbers of the galaxies in the circles (only a few of them showed up in my charts). You will probably need to use a the double down load to pick out these dim galaxies.
The last images is one of the subframes that shows one of the pesky satellite trails.
All questions, comments and suggestions are welcome.
The smoke finally cleared off enough to give me a ... (
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Great result! That 60MP wasn't wasted...
bwa
Absolutely Amazing. Many thanks
Remarkable photos. The wonder of the Cosmos has always fascinated man, and always will! To be able to take
a glimpse into the past of our universe is amazing.
WOW!!! Thanks for sharing 😀
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