bwana Loc: Bergen, Alberta, Canada

The weather finally gave me an hour or so of relatively clear sky. Shot the Virgo Galaxy Cluster with following:

Astro-Tech 65EDQ scope, Celestron AVX mount, Baader filters,
Lum: 12x30sec., RGB: 9x30sec.,
preprocessing in Lightroom and PixInsight, postprocessing in Lightroom

(Download)

CraigFair Loc: Santa Maria, CA.

Beautiful job, you are really giving me something to shoot for. I just got a new QHY10, 10MP, Sony APC-S sensor. I'm going to go to the observatory to do my 2nd round with the Camera. I'm going to shoot the M101, a little bigger and brighter than the Virgo Cluster Galaxies I shot earlier this week.
Craig

bwana Loc: Bergen, Alberta, Canada

The QHY10 is a great camera. Should do the job nicely!

bwa

Europa Loc: West Hills, CA

Nice, this is one I did a year ago, needs lots more exposure time...hoping to do it again soon.

(Download)

bwana Loc: Bergen, Alberta, Canada

A bit more of the Markarian Chain...

bwa

Europa Loc: West Hills, CA

Yes, what I was going for, but inexperience gave me that.

SonnyE Loc: Communist California, USA

Nice!
I think I need one of those Mono Infinity's.
I know I need something behind my telescope.

bwana Loc: Bergen, Alberta, Canada

A mono camera is only the first step. Filters and a filterwheel are also required... And thus continues the $$$ black hole of astro-imaging!

bwa

SonnyE Loc: Communist California, USA

Oh, I have that covered with a 9 filter wheel hard mounted to my telescope that I thread my cameras on. (If you can call them that... )
I almost have the filter wheel driven. But hit a snag and decided it can wait.
I'm all set except for the CFO part. She just thinks I spend to much entertaining myself.
Meanwhile I'm keeping my talons sharp...

You guys give me something to aspire to.

Albuqshutterbug Loc: Albuquerque NM

Both shots are really nice.
I really have to get off my tush and image more at night.
Well done both of you.
Jim

JimH123 Loc: Morgan Hill, CA

You will absolutely love the Atik Infinity SW that comes with it. Stacking in Real Time is an awesome way to go with ability to adjust the image for best appearance, and then all you have to do is to capture the screen to a 16-bit TIFF file (of course you have other capture options also, but I like TIFF). And the SW is perfectly capable of handling field movement and rotation on the fly so that the stacked image still looks good. (Provided that you don't generate star trails on any one image)

Atik really, really, really needs to open this SW up to all their other CCDs!

bwana Loc: Bergen, Alberta, Canada

You can configure the SW to ignore subs having more than a defined amount of trailing. I haven't tried this but it supposedly works?

And yes, I would love to have the SW work with my ATK 428Ex camera!!

bwa

JimH123 Loc: Morgan Hill, CA

Yes, it works as advertised. I use it to ignore things like planes flying over that I don't want in my stack. Also have a problem with my 14 pound cat that comes up unannounced and suddenly throws his weight against a tripod leg and rub against it. It enough to jiggle the scope enough to see a tiny jiggle and it can filter that out if set it tight enough.

But the trailing I am talking about is when you set your exposure time too long for the tracking you are using and the result is that there is sufficient time to generate tiny star trails. In this case, all images will have those trails. But what is so good about the SW is that you can still get good results with a so-so polar alignment if the exposures are short enough to avoid star trails since the stacking process aligns on the fly in case the field has moved since the last image.

And IF this SW were to work with the other Atik cameras, it sure would be tempting to mostly capture using this SW and to not bother with capturing all those FITs and doing stacking manually after done. Its a lot of work to stack and process, and this SW pretty much relieves the user of having to do that. The price you pay is that you don't get quite as good of results as you can get doing it the manual way, but you can certainly get reasonable results and have a lot of fun capturing more objects during the time spent out under the stars. And I like to capture and see many objects in an evening out with the scope. I find that when I go out with the Infinity, its not unusual to capture perhaps 10 objects in one evening rather than dedicating several nights for the same object to get those beautiful images. And I find that the Infinity is so sensitive that just about anything I spot on the sky charts, it can see it if I stack long enough.

Note for those unfamiliar with the Infinity. It is not necessary to capture Darks. The SW figures out stuck pixels during the stacking process and removes them, and removes noise. It doesn't use Flats and Bias images either. When you are looking at an image on your laptop screen, you can play with the black point and white point sliders and get the image to look the way you want. With the OSC model, you have RGB sliders also.

I consider the Infinity as a mid capability solution. At the low end are the video cameras designed to capture the sky and this has been given the name EAA (Electronically Assisted Astronomy). The video camera can be quite sensitive and a lot can be seen. Infinity is a step up and uses a regular CCD camera (without cooling) and provides superior results to the video camera route. It is limited in pixels, 1.3M, but what it has are large enough to have considerable dynamic range. It also can generate FIT files if desired. And finally at the high end are the dedicated CCD cameras with higher pixel counts and cooling where the user has to manage the stacking of FIT files, but can produce the spectacular images.

Albuqshutterbug Loc: Albuquerque NM

Is that with this camera?
http://www.highpointscientific.com/atik-infinity-color-video-camera-atk0145?utm_source=bing&utm_medium=cse&utm_term=ATK-ATK0145
That is really nice. Are you doing auto stacking?
Just wondering as it's listed as a software feature.
Jim

bwana Loc: Bergen, Alberta, Canada

I'm actually using a mono ATIK Infinity and filterwheel. I am definitely using the software's alignment and stacking feature; works wonderfully. I also use the built-in histogram (Levels) adjustment prior to saving individual imaging sessions. Very easy to simply take the various LRGB or narrowband results directly into PixInsight for final creation of color images.

Actually, ATIK's Infinity software is probably the biggest selling point of the Infinity; simple but very stable! I also have a mono UltraStar and its software is not nearly as solid, as a result I'm in the process of selling the UltraStar...

bwa