bwana Loc: Bergen, Alberta, Canada

Clouds and haze all night but I could see a star once in awhile so had to give the color Infinity a go...

I was using a 2" GSO 0.5x reducer on my Celestron 8" EdgeHD; my first error of the evening. Absolutely terrible "seagull" stars on outer 20-25% of subs! Probably either a crappy reducer or overcorrecting an EdgeHD telescope. I'll use a different reducer next time out.

I started a session on M86 but clouds and haze shot down that session. I then moved to Jupiter and played with it a bit trying to get a reasonable white balance and shot a 124 sub session on it. Not a great image at 1000mm FL. The ATIK Infinity is not a great planetary camera with its very high sensitivity; I would use a serious neutral density filter if I use it again for planetary.

I noticed that both the Blackeye galaxy and Hercules star cluster were in the clear and shot a 20x30sec. session on each. By the time I got to the Hercules cluster, cloud was catching up to me and I noticed the Infinity software was dropping about half the subs.

Meager results shown below:

bwa

Jupiter - 124 subs - 400% magnification


Blackeye Glxy (M64)-ABE-StarReduction-LR

(Download)

Hercules Cluster (M13)-ABE-StarReduction-LR

(Download)

JimH123 Loc: Morgan Hill, CA

Sorry it wasn't a perfect night for first light. Here is one of m65, m66 and ngc2638. I did this before getting your tip on how to expose, so I had less stretch room. This is on the 8" Orion Astrograph with the Infinity OCS and I was using a 0.5x folcal reducer from HighPoint Scientific which I have not had any problems with. What I did have a problem with for this image was polar tracking and every star was stretched towards the upper left which I didn't care for. So I cheated. Used StarTools to select the stars and to do a redistribution making them all perfectly round. Some of the faint stars were not in the selection and you can still see their elongated trails. This was 16 images for a total of 400 sec.

One thing I notice with the Infinity is that it is so sensitive, that rarely can, or need to, use real long exposures. Its way more sensitive than my DSLR bodies. And has so little noise.

(Download)

bwana Loc: Bergen, Alberta, Canada

I at least know it works! From here on out it is simply fine tuning and picking some good skies...

I'm off to a star party at our local astro-dealer's place tonight. I don't think the sky is going to cooperate but the guys/gals that show up are fun and the coffee and donuts are always good .

I also spent some time this afternoon getting more acquainted with the color Infinity's white balance settings. I had the camera on a Samyang 50mm lens pointed out the livingroom window. White balance didn't work at all well until I added a UV/IR Cut filter then white balance popped right to where I had been trying to set it manually with White Balance set to either None or Auto.

I also notice the Auto Range does NOT work at all the same with the color camera as it does with the mono camera. I would almost consider the Auto Range on the color camera to be wrong, i.e.: Full Range does NOT encompass the full spectral range the camera is seeing. You have to adjust the Black slider to manually prevent Black clipping. The White slider seems to work as anticipated. And the midline slider works properly with the White (Luminance) channel is selected.

Of course adjusting the RGB channels to get the color balance wanted is almost an art form but with an UV/IR Cut filter in place it seems to be considerably easier.

The picture below was taken with my test setup (ATIK Color Infinity, Samyang 50mm @ f/11, UV/IR Cut filter):

bwa

(Download)

SonnyE Loc: Communist California, USA

Well, it can only get better and better from here.

I can't get mine to work yet....

I have to buy it first.

I had a time with focal reducers. Low buck was terrible with coma. High buck needed spacers that were nowhere to be found in America at the time.
But when I discovered Orion makes on specifically for my Geewiz3, I got that and it's been fine.
(The camera stinks, but the FR works great. Screws right into the camera, no other stuff needed.)

JimH123 Loc: Morgan Hill, CA

As long as I'm playing with it, decided to shrink the stars even more.

(Download)

SonnyE Loc: Communist California, USA

Looks nice Jim!

What are you using to shrink the stars?

JimH123 Loc: Morgan Hill, CA

http://www.rc-astro.com/resources/StarShrink/

It doesn't mention Photoshop Elements, just Photoshop. Ready easy to use. I wonder if you shrink them too far if they become black holes? You never know!

I like his other product too: http://www.rc-astro.com/resources/GradientXTerminator/

Be sure to check out his photographs. He is way, way beyond my pay grade!

http://www.rc-astro.com/latest.php

On the star shrinking I just did, perhaps I should have dialed back the sharpness a bit since the stars are way sharper than the galaxies?

SonnyE Loc: Communist California, USA

Quite the software.
He seems to like $49.95
I was looking at some of his Photographs.

Technical Details
Optics: 20" f/8 RCOS Ritchey-Chr?tien Cassegrain w/ RCOS Field Corrector
Mount: Software Bisque Paramount ME
Camera: SBIG STL-11000XM, AstroDon MOAG-A


Golly, Lester!
With toys like that, 50 bucks to him is like a nickle is to me. Wow!

Watch out, a black hole in your computer could be a bad thing.