Category Archives: Astronomy

AstroBlog 2019.004.9 Imaging Nebulae – Scope, iPhone and 25mm plossl

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When I bought my new iPhone, I chose one that would allow me to do astrophotography with my telescope. If you’ve been seeing my last few posts, you see some of the results. The moon was easy. Planets? Not so much, but I’ll get there, even if I have to use filters or stack some images or shoot video. Stars are not as easy as I hoped, still getting a lot of blurry results on the bright ones. But as per my last post, I was able to get globular clusters. I had high hopes for that, as I got something previously with my wife’s iPhone 6 plus and the default software; with my new iPhone and Night Cap software, I knew I would “get there” eventually, just was pleasantly surprised to get there on the first real go at it. I still need to hone my technique, but it’s good enough for me for now. I took a shot at Ceres to try an asteroid, but well, I’m not likely to do much on that in the short or even long-term.

Which leaves me two outstanding targets, and the ones that the astrophotographers who use webcams and DSLRs manage to accomplish daily — a galaxy and a nebula. Galaxies only ever look like faint fuzzies to me, particularly in my light polluted skies of a suburb in the city, and I’ve never really done a true dark sky location. But nebulae? I’ve seen them. Orion was easy, the Veil popped when I used a filter. So I know I *CAN* see nebula, but I wasn’t optimistic I would get much easily with my phone setup. But I gave it a go. I’ll share it in numerical order in the Messier catalog.

First to share is one of the ones that I am most proud about, and super excited. M8 aka the Lagoon Nebula has some amazing colour in it when you do some long-exposure shots with high-end setups. But you know what? A 10s exposure at ISO 9216 also gave me a bit of colour (top centre, a bit of red to the right):

Holy doodles! I did it! Still need to work on my technique, and it would be better without the suburban light pollution or the moon overlighting the sky, but I got it! I’d like to thank the academy for this honour…hehehe. Mostly I should thank my friend Loren who inspired me with his shots and advice on an active FB group. But I’m not done! Here is M8 again, with even MORE colour, although a bit fuzzy too. Remember this is a single frame exposure, not complicated stacking or retouching in any software:

M16, the Eagle Nebula, shows only a bit of a faint glow, so maybe I shouldn’t get completely cocky yet:

M17, the Swan Nebula, looks like a smudge:

Here it is again, but ooh, I managed to centre the smudge (hey, I’ll take what I can get for success):

I confess that I saw these in reverse order i.e. the smudges before the Lagoon ones with colour, so it was more of a build-up for me. I was like, “Okay, well, there’s something there, and if I stare long enough, I can imagine a bit of colour. It’s promising at least.” M20, the Trifid Nebula showed up as only a faint glow/fuzziness:

And because I was still a bit cocky, I also tried for an open cluster nebula, NGC6572. Nada.

But did I mention the first one had some colour? 🙂

All in all, I’m ecstatic about the night. My first real night going hard-core on everything, and I was doing a huge star tour all at once, not taking my time with specific objects or fine tuning. About a minute an object at most. I tossed about 40% of the images I took, too rushed, too many star trails, etc. But considering I was trying for nebula and clusters, losing 40% is pretty amazing, normally you’d lose about 90% or more with the first shots. I’m not going to be featured on the Astronomy Picture of the Day anytime soon, or well, ever, but I’m accomplishing what I wanted. Souvenir shots of my observing. I’ll definitely accept these as “mission accomplished!” any night of the week.

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AstroBlog 2019.004.8 Imaging Globular Clusters – Scope, iPhone and 25mm plossl

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I love viewing globular clusters — big giant collections of stars all together. Although they tend to be bright, when I tried to image them on my old Android phone, it couldn’t even DETECT any light coming in from them. I did get one image from my wife’s old iPhone 6 Plus a year ago (ISO 7200, 10s, f/2.2):

So I knew it was possible. And with my new iPhone, these globulars were high on my imaging list, but I honestly didn’t know what to expect. For Messier 4, I tried ISO 9200 and a 10s burst, which didn’t turn out too shabby:

M5 with the same settings was much more compact and bright:

For Messier 9, I bumped ISO to 10K, still 10s, and it is easily found, albeit a bit faint:

For Messier 10, I continued at ISO 10K, 10s burst, but I did it twice about 90 minutes apart:

A little better contrast in the second, but not a huge difference. I did the same with M12, although the second image wasn’t quite as bright:

M13 showed up really bright, but also a bit fuzzy (ignore the red circle, it’s a flashlight remnant):

M14 was really faint:

M19 was small and compact:

I liked M22 as well, even if I was getting some red light from my flashlight intruding on the image:

M56 seemed super faint, but it was still recognizable:

M80 is REALLY compact and tight, almost looks like a ball:

M107 was faint and a bit fuzzy:

Moving into the NGC catalog, there are five in the list…6293:

6304, including the red flashlight problem again:

6316, so small and faint:

And 6356, again with it being small and faint, and some red flashlight intrusion:

6712 is one I liked because it is so faint yet I still managed to capture something:

Finally, I have one of an open spiral cluster, and even though I normally don’t find open clusters that interesting, you can see the lines that make up the arms of the spirals:

So a bunch of globular clusters in there, and most of them turned out. I wasn’t being particularly meticulous, just trying them out to get going, but I’m really happy with the outcomes.

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AstroBlog 2019.004.7 Imaging Stars and Asteroids – Scope, iPhone and 25mm plossl

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I tried imaging some stars, and I thought it would be relatively straight-forward. People online basically tell you to use a magnifying glass to look at your phone screen, zoom in, make sure they are pinpoints, and BAM! You’re good to go.

I’ve always loved looking at Antares, and the way it twinkles red, gold, and blue at times. It was putting on a show on Saturday the 8th, and my wife loved it. I tried imaging it later at ISO 2304 (why?) and a duration of 10s (a setting a friend online has had a lot of success with). Anyway, it did NOT turn out like my wife was used to seeing it:

I tried to grab Polaris too with a 10s duration, but for some idiotic reason, I forgot to put the ISO back down to normal and instead it went at 9000+:

And finally, just for fun, I tried for Ceres. You know, the asteroid. My friend online has a well-honed process and a much clearer scope and skies, and he does tons of asteroids, so I thought I would try it for 10s at ISO 8000:

There are a few dots just above the one in the centre at the bottom, likely too faint unless you zoom in, and according to Stellarium, that’s about where Ceres should be for the time of the picture. Maybe, maybe not.

Certainly none of them stellar examples…

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AstroBlog 2019.004.6 Imaging Saturn – Scope, iPhone and 25mm plossl

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I didn’t have much luck with Jupiter, but Saturn looked almost easier. It wasn’t. I tried starting with ISO 24, not too sensitive, with a 1s duration (not sure why I didn’t go for a faster speed). And I got something, which loses a lot when you crop it:

Because it was dark, I jacked the ISO up to 1280, and went for 8s…again, I got something:

Another site had talked about maxing out the ISO, which seemed crazy, but I went to 9000+ and a 1s duration, with understandable washout:

I don’t know what I was thinking, other than I was having trouble with settings, but I went up to 2.5s, with at least the stars showing well:

And just for fun, I closed out with 25s, which is about 15s too long for my alt-az mount to track anything without blur or star trails:

Sigh. Not a giant success.

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AstroLog 2019.004.5 Imaging Jupiter – Scope, iPhone and 25mm plossl

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Since I was having success imaging the moon, I was cocky enough to try for some planet shots. Jupiter was up and looking super bright (not the least of the reasons being it’s nice and close right now), so I went for it. The 25mm plossl was my best bet previously, so I went back to it for my go to lens for the attempt. Of course, it’s not going to get me very close shots, it’s pretty low power, but what the heck.

I started methodically…At ISO 24, I experimented with various short duration bursts…1/800th of a second:

Then 1/320th of a second:

1/250th of a second:

1/200th of a second:

1/125th of a second:

1/80th of a second:

I had a lot of trouble seeing what the planet and moons were looking like in the viewer, so almost impossible to tell if I was getting a good image (i.e., in focus) or not. I tried to use the moons to get them pinpoint sharp, but even that was a challenge. Overall, at ISO 24, I would say the best image was somewhere between 1/125s and 1/200s. Cropped and shrunk, here is the 1/125s…I get a hint of bands on the planet, and the moons are faint:

At 1/200s, I get bands and no moons:

I tried bumping the ISO up to 32 next, and 1/100s…for some reason, the planet went almost blue rather than white, and I still managed some bands:

At ISO 50, 1/20s still had a bit of a hint of colour shadings:

While at 1/8s, it was all washed out:

When I boosted to ISO 160, even at 1/20s, it was all white too:

Similarly for ISO 250, 1/20s:

And again at ISO 800, 1/20s:

Further attempts at ISO 2000 produced just more white planets, and finally ISO 9000 just blew everything out in the image:

All in all, I would not say it was a screaming pile of success for planets. Fun, some interesting stuff, but I don’t have the methodology down for planets.

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AstroLog 2019.004.4 Imaging the moon – Scope, iPhone and 15mm plossl

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Continuing for my fourth outing of the calendar year (i.e. 2019 + 004), my fourth batch of photos were still of the moon, this time swapping out my Delos for the 15mm plossl. I had NO trouble at all marrying the plossls compared to the larger glass and it makes me think I might end up picking up a few plossls if I see them on sale or used, just for imaging.

With the upper camera on my iPhone, settings were f/1.8, ISO 24, auto whitebalance, and an initial duration of 1/250s. And I started out strong right out of the gate. Mare Crisium is still prominent to the right of centre, and the Sea of Serenity above to the left, with a nice ridge in the dark in between. It might be called rimae littrow, but that seems more like the name of a general crater.

A shot near the bottom of the moon, with a very prominent Theophilus at the 12:00 position, next to the Mare Nectaris:

And again:

And a zoomed in version of Theophilus (a prominent impact crater between Sinus Asperitatis and Mare Nectaris, partially intruding into crater Cyrillus … Theo is 4200m deep, with central mountain 1400m high):

Mare Crisium again, just for continuity:

And a dark section focusing on the ridges (duration altered to 1/640th of a second) with the crater at the bottom being Plinius, and the ridges above named, wait for it, Rimae Plinius:

Overall, very satisfying. 🙂

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AstroLog 2019.004.3 Imaging the moon – Scope, iPhone and 17.3mm Delos

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I confess I was a bit excited to use my Delos for this batch. It is my favorite lens by far, a perfect power for my scope. And yet attaching it to my iPhone with the adapter was a giant pain in the patootie. It has a larger FoV and display glass, should have been easy to set up, but I struggled more than with the plossls. I thought it was perhaps the power, but you’ll see later that it wasn’t. It just didn’t line up great.

I was still set on the f/1.8 lens on the camera, and it’s lowest ISO is 24, so I was still working with that….add in AWB, and 1/125th of a second exposures. 

At first, I had an itty bitty FoV which allowed me to capture Mare Crisium again:

This next one was so small, it was hard to be sure it was still the same sea:

I was still struggling, and this one I don’t even KNOW where it is targeting:

Then, I repositioned the camera on the lens, and voila, I got this:

Super washed out, which is likely the 1/125s duration combined with the extra power. But Mare Crisium is at least identifiable again. Then as I was playing, I found these rilles:

Super fun, and when I threw a Lunar and Planetary filter on them, they REALLY popped. Very cool. But overall, I was disappointed with the Delos. I got a couple of pics, but was expecting more excitement and an easier time with mounting.

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AstroLog 2019.004.2 Imaging the moon – Scope, iPhone and 25mm plossls

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Since I had success at 1/200th of a second, i.e. .005s, with the Hyperion, I started with similar settings for the 25mm plossls. For my main plossl, I had ISO 24 (lowest option for the f/1.8 camera) and AWB:

With my second plossl, I doubled the time to 1/100th of a second:

Still decent detail near the terminator but the rest seems a bit more washed out.

And finally, I have a weird thing in the second plossl that I think is for help with either imaging or alignment, not sure which:

Most likely my go-to lens of choice in the short-term. Partly as later in the night, I was looking at a bunch of other stuff with the 25mm setup, and tried the moon again…glorious at ISO 24 and 1/250s:

 

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AstroLog 2019.004.1 Imaging the moon – Scope, iPhone and 36mm Hyperion lens

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One of my big astro goals for the year is to get my scope and iPhone working together to do some basic imaging. I’m not looking for Hubble quality, just some souvenir pics that I’m happy to keep and share. Maybe I’ll even print a couple. But that’s about it. And generally I’m looking for single frame shots, not detailed stacking and processing. I’ve broken the process down into six main steps, and step one is marrying the lens to the smartphone. I’ll talk more about that another time, but the moon is a great target to start with as it lets you see your results pretty fast — the so-called trial and error method.

First up for the night was my Hyperion 36mm 2″/1.25″ lens. It’s a big piece of glass, and I thought I would easily fit the whole moon into the image. Well, not so much. It was difficult to get the phone aligned over the EP, or rather the EP aligned under the phone, and with a good sized image. I succeeded, but not as much as I expected. I put the ISO down to 15 to avoid washing out the whole image (after all, the moon is SUPER BRIGHT), auto-white balance, the camera is hard-set in the phone to f/2.4, and that left me playing with the duration time.

At 1/10th of a second, i.e. .1s, the upper right quadrant got overexposed and washed out:

At 1/13th of a second i.e. .08s, it’s less washed out, but still not much detail:

At 1/15th of a second, i.e. .07s, unsurprisingly there’s not much difference but a little less washed out:

At 1/125th of a second, a big jump to .008s, there is a lot more detail but the rest of the moon goes dimmer:

And at 1/200th of a second, i.e. .005s, the upper quadrant has decent detail, most of it being lost more by the angle than by the exposure:

And continuing with the same settings, I jumped down to the bottom of the moon:

Overall, I succeeded in getting images with that lens. But I wouldn’t say it is my favorite lens to marry to the phone.

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AstroLog 2019.003.3 Observing Saturn with filters

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It was getting late in the evening, almost 1:00 a.m., in my backyard on June 6th and I was ready to call it a night. But Saturn was peeking out from behind some houses, and I thought, “I already have all my filters set out, why not try them?”.

As I mentioned in the previous log on Jupiter, the seeing conditions sucked, with lots of haze in the sky. Jupiter looked like it was under water at times. Anyway, it was what it was.

The Hyperion 36mm 2″ lens showed Saturn nice and bright, but no real division other than the main rings around the planet. The 25mm super plossl showed things clear and bright, but as with the observing of Jupiter, a 15mm plossl was too strong and anything with my Powermate giving me virtual 12.5 or 7.5 were way too strong. Again, my 17.3mm Delos was the Goldilocks of the night, with power just right. FYI, I was still aligned from earlier on Regulus, Antares and Denebola.

I knew my Ultrablock and OIII would do nothing so didn’t bother. The Moon and Sky Glow was too dim, and I couldn’t find a good setting for the variable polarizing for this one (but I was tired, so maybe not a fair test). I couldn’t see what I did with my Lunar and Planetary Filter, found it afterwards when I was cleaning up. Which means mostly I just did colours:

  • 08 Light yellow — Too pale;
  • 11 Yellow-Green — Pale, but okay;
  • 12 Yellow — Dim and pale;
  • 15 Amber — Corona around the planet;
  • 21 Orange — Another corona;
  • 23A Light red — Dark with a corona;
  • 25 Red — Just dark;
  • 29 Dark red — Too dark;
  • 38A Dark blue — Too faint;
  • 47 Violet — Too dark;
  • 56 Light green — Light green, not bad otherwise;
  • 58A Green — Too faint;
  • 80A Blue — Too faint;
  • 82A Light blue — Too dimmed.

What did surprise me though was that the V-Block brought it in nice and crisp.

Overall, I would say the V-Block or #11 vs. #56 were the best for me. But I still want to try the Lunar and Planetary filter by itself. Not a complete test, but it was easier than I thought and faster.

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