M101 supernova SN 2023ixf taken 6-23-23
Jun 30, 2023 19:19:09 #
Sounds familiar to me as well. When I was a kid, I asked my folks for a telescope. The department store junk I got put me off of astronomy for many years.
When I finally bought another telescope I got a Meade 8 inch Schmidt Cassegrain with a manual mount. It was decent for visual observing if a bit frustrating to align and find objects. Typically high magnification and the manual mount made tracking frustrating and images bounced around a lot. Living in southern California also made it very difficult to see anything but the brightest objects.
When the kids were small I got my hands on a 12 inch piece of Zerodur, intending to grind a mirror and make my own scope. A few years later, I dug the glass out of the closet and traded it for a Japanese made Vixen SX-2. It was light weight and had a nice controller with a nice display including a sky map. Again, very nice for visual, but the stereotypically awful Japanese software made it challenging to use for astrophotography.
Like you, I found I was more attracted to deep sky nebula and galaxies, so the 8 inch was replaced by a 4.5 inch triplet. With the field flattener it is 600mm focal length and gives me nice sharp images across the entire frame.
The raw images were looking good, but processing with deepskystacker and photoshop was very frustrating as I could not get anything to look much better than a single image.
About this time, the Vixen stopped communicating with the computer entirely. I wanted an Astro-Physics
Mach2GTO or Software Bisque Paramount MyT, but other obligations made spending over $10,000 not practical
. I ended up getting a Skywatcher EQ6-R pro and have been pretty happy with it so far. I've only had it about 6 months, so still think of it as new.
I'm now using N.I.N.A to capture images and it works really well talking to the mount, camera, tracking camera and focusing motor. I'm still learning to use the automation features in N.I.N.A. to set up an imaging session and have it run basically unattended. That said, the images I took of M101 were done hands off once the mount was lined up. It took 10 images, refocused, then 10 more for a total of about 70 images. I'm still using my standard Nikon D750 for the camera, but I can already see a new camera (Cooled CMOS, monochrome and filters) in the future.
With the good glass and a decent mount, I've been getting more, better raw images, but still in post processing hell.
I finally broke down and bought Pixinsight to process with and the learning curve is very steep but the results are worth it.
When I finally bought another telescope I got a Meade 8 inch Schmidt Cassegrain with a manual mount. It was decent for visual observing if a bit frustrating to align and find objects. Typically high magnification and the manual mount made tracking frustrating and images bounced around a lot. Living in southern California also made it very difficult to see anything but the brightest objects.
When the kids were small I got my hands on a 12 inch piece of Zerodur, intending to grind a mirror and make my own scope. A few years later, I dug the glass out of the closet and traded it for a Japanese made Vixen SX-2. It was light weight and had a nice controller with a nice display including a sky map. Again, very nice for visual, but the stereotypically awful Japanese software made it challenging to use for astrophotography.
Like you, I found I was more attracted to deep sky nebula and galaxies, so the 8 inch was replaced by a 4.5 inch triplet. With the field flattener it is 600mm focal length and gives me nice sharp images across the entire frame.
The raw images were looking good, but processing with deepskystacker and photoshop was very frustrating as I could not get anything to look much better than a single image.
About this time, the Vixen stopped communicating with the computer entirely. I wanted an Astro-Physics
Mach2GTO or Software Bisque Paramount MyT, but other obligations made spending over $10,000 not practical
. I ended up getting a Skywatcher EQ6-R pro and have been pretty happy with it so far. I've only had it about 6 months, so still think of it as new. I'm now using N.I.N.A to capture images and it works really well talking to the mount, camera, tracking camera and focusing motor. I'm still learning to use the automation features in N.I.N.A. to set up an imaging session and have it run basically unattended. That said, the images I took of M101 were done hands off once the mount was lined up. It took 10 images, refocused, then 10 more for a total of about 70 images. I'm still using my standard Nikon D750 for the camera, but I can already see a new camera (Cooled CMOS, monochrome and filters) in the future.
With the good glass and a decent mount, I've been getting more, better raw images, but still in post processing hell.
I finally broke down and bought Pixinsight to process with and the learning curve is very steep but the results are worth it.
Jun 30, 2023 19:21:48 #
Jul 1, 2023 13:04:38 #
Here is sample of one of the raw images to give you an idea of what the stacking and processing can accomplish.
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