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The Writing Life of a Tadpole

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The Writing Life of a Tadpole
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Logbook next to telescope looking at moon and stars

AstroBlog 2019.008.2 – Jupiter with a Celestron NexStar 4SE and an iPhone

The Writing Life of a Tadpole
July 21 2019

As mentioned in my previous post (AstroBlog 2019.008.1 – Saturn with a Celestron NexStar 4SE and an iPhone), I went out on July 12 with my son’s Celestron NexStar 4SE, stock alt-az mount and tripod, iPhone XS Max, 25mm Plossl, and the Celestron NexYZ phone adapter.

As with the shots of Saturn, I started with single frames of Jupiter. Settings were f/1.8 (set by iPhone hardware), ISO 24 to avoid blowing out the planet’s details, and a simple 1/10th of a second duration:

Cropped, you can see some details:

I doubled the ISO to 50, same duration:

And cropped again:

There seems to be a bit more detail in the top half, but less detail in the bottom. Then again, on a 4″ scope with my iPhone, I’ll take it! 🙂

For the second part of my processing, I worked with a 3-minute video, ~1900 frames:

https://polywogg.ca/pandafamily/upload/2019/07/21/20190721213859-f019186f.mp4

Initially, I tried working with PIPP and then Autostakkert but it is REALLY hard to process the image when it wants you to place little place markers on the image — in fact, it tells you NOT to try it for planetary items. I told it to find its own, the auto option, but it only found 7 (it wants a minimum of 24):

I manually added another 14 to get to 21. In the end, not sure it was worth it:

I tried again, this time with some quality control built-in, and with only keeping the best 40% of images, and again with 7 place markers:

Cropped, still not sure there’s much else there:

I tried it again with 40% of the best images plus 29 separate place markers, and got this:

Cropped, I get this:

More work, but it seems fainter to me, less detailed.

Finally, I tried processing it in Nebulosity, which is almost a sucker’s game for planets. First, it won’t take videos, so I processed it in PIPP first (noise filter, stabilized for planetary images, object detection, centred the object, rotated it 90 degrees counterclockwise, quality estimation and reordering by quality, output as individual TIFF files) and then opened them in Nebulosity. Second, Nebulosity is NOT designed for planetary stuff at this resolution as it wants me to identify and click on features that are all blurred most of the time. Plus, I’d have to manually process EVERY frame of the ~1900+ frames. I tried that in auto mode but it just blurred everything out. I tried a second time, focusing on the best 50 or so images of the first 400 based on a quality estimate by PIPP, then let it stack them, cropped it down to something usable, and finally ended up with this:

While they’re all interesting, I feel like I barely improved in a couple of them beyond what I had in the single frame shot! But I’m learning at least…I think.

An online friend took a stab at processing my videos and got this:

Which looked like one of my early results too.

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Posted in Astronomy, Photography, To Be Updated | Tagged 4SE, astroblog, astronomy, astrophotography, iPhone, Jupiter, plossl | Leave a reply
Logbook next to telescope looking at moon and stars

AstroBlog 2019.008.1 – Saturn with a Celestron NexStar 4SE and an iPhone

The Writing Life of a Tadpole
July 21 2019

My son recently acquired a Celestron NexStar 4SE in June, and on July 12th, the night was looking a bit clear. He was heading to bed but gave me permission to play with his scope. Alignment worked perfectly, I tried for a few things to see, etc. And that was my intent — solely to test the alignment and take a peek at the moon and planets.

Except I was curious how it would fare with my iPhone for simple astrophotography. I captured the images and video, but then I let them sit in my folders for a bit. So much so that when I finally did start playing with them, I totally forgot they were taken on the 4SE, not my standard 8SE. I was a bit disappointed with my processing, but when I realized earlier today they were all on the 4SE, my expectations changed!

So the equipment was a Celestron NexStar 4SE, with stock alt-az mount and tripod not set in wedge mode, iPhone XS Max, 25mm Plossl, and the Celestron NexYZ phone adapter. By the time I started imaging, the moon had set behind the neighbour’s house, so I was focused on planets.

First up is the first single image. Camera settings were f/1.8 (hard set in the phone), ISO24 so it isn’t overblown, and duration of 1/9s. I took a series of them with a remote shutter release to prevent shaking. The result is a little faint, but something there that is clearly Saturn.

Cropping it makes the image a little clearer:

The best one of the set of 55 images is this one:

Cropped and flipped, it looks like this:

I tried stacking the photos using Affinity, with noise reduction, keeping 75% of the images, and this is what I got:

I took a video file as well:

https://polywogg.ca/pandafamily/upload/2019/07/21/20190721151938-4e1e5b6d.mp4

If I take that video, and run it through the astro programs PIPP and Autostakkert, with stacking, cropping, brightening, etc., I end up with this:

A different set of settings, without the brightening, game me this:

If I push that through Registax and play with basic wavelets and brightening, I get this:

The video file has 1200 images/frames, so it should be showing me way more data, but I’m not that great at processing yet.

I wanted to go back and try a stack in Nebulosity 4 (which an online friend uses with great success for DSOs), even though it is not able to handle videos plus it isn’t necessarily the best option for processing planets. Nevertheless, I force-fed it the 55 images, normalized them, culled for quality, and then stacked the final 45 images. This is the result:

Which an online friend took, downloaded, and re-colourized to be a bit more “normal” for Saturn, to give me this:

And another friend did this off the original video:

The stacking options of PIPP/Autostakkert with 1200 frames gave me almost the same outcome as Nebulosity with 45 images. Overall, I’ll settle for either one for an early effort, whether it was with a 4SE or the 8SE. Auspicious progress.

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Posted in Astronomy, Photography, To Be Updated | Tagged 4SE, astroblog, astronomy, astrophotography, iPhone, plossl, Saturn | Leave a reply
Logbook next to telescope looking at moon and stars

AstroBlog 2019.007.1 – Trying for Mercury and Mars with a Celestron NexStar 4SE

The Writing Life of a Tadpole
July 21 2019

My son’s grandparents have a cottage up in the Kawarthas, and it is relatively dark skies. From the dock area, you have a pretty good view of the sky to the South and West, whereas North and East are blocked by trees. We took our son up for a week, and just took his scope rather than his and mine (mostly due to space limitations in the car). He didn’t want to keep the scope to try on his own through the week, so we were leaving him but bringing the scope back with us. Which meant only one night to try viewing, July 6th.

The Clear Sky Chart was showing great clear skies, but the clouds didn’t get the memo. We set up around 8:00 p.m., and by the time we were set up, the moon was completely covered as was most of the Western sky with dark clouds. It opened up about 10 degrees above the horizon, and we got a great sunset, but that wasn’t my goal. I had updates from the sky trackers that Mercury and Mars were trailing the sun, and it was possible to see them as the sun dipped below the horizon. Maybe they were there, I have no idea. There was soup on the horizon even though the clouds had a break in them.

We tried scanning the horizon anyway, but no luck. Eventually, we saw the moon through some clouds, a few gaps here and there, but heavily clouded over 90% of the time. We gave up after about 90 minutes, and it never did clear in the end.

A bit disappointing for the cub and his cousin, but alas, thems the breaks.

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Posted in Astronomy | Tagged 4SE, astroblog, astronomy, Jupiter, plossl | Leave a reply
Logbook next to telescope looking at moon and stars

AstroBlog 2019.006.1 – Testing a Celestron NexStar 4SE

The Writing Life of a Tadpole
July 21 2019

My son enjoys looking through my telescope and has been wanting his own scope for awhile. So we went through a number of designs to see what he would like, with me trying VERY hard not to lead him to any specific conclusions about his own preferences in design. He has a few extra mobility challenges over me, and he ended up going for the smaller version of my Celestron NexStar 8SE — he chose the 4SE.

It comes with a couple of advantages and one disadvantage over mine. For the disadvantage first, it’s simply smaller. A smaller light bucket gathers less light, so things won’t be as bright for distant objects. On the advantage side, the 4SE is a slightly different design (Maksutov-Cassegrain design) which will make for crisper images; it comes with a built-in wedge (if he wants to try equatorial tracking for astrophotography); it is smaller and much more portable; it has a sturdier tripod vis-a-vis the overall weight (his scope is light for his tripod, as it is also designed to hold the 5SE model which is heavier whereas my 8SE is on the high-end of the load options for the tripod it comes with); and his alignment worked perfectly right out of the box. No slippage at all.

The unit comes with a 25mm Plossl, as most of them do, and a red-dot finder. I supplemented it with a Rigel Finder as the TelRad was a tad too long to fit (very disappointing).

We picked the scope up on June 15th during the annual Celestron sale, and I swear it was just coincidence that it was the day my wife left for Italy for a week. And we stayed up late on the 16th, a Sunday night, so we could try it out. Jacob was so tired the next day, but it was worth it.

It didn’t seem like it at first. Jacob wanted to focus just on his scope, not a comparison, so we ONLY set up his scope. And I showed him how to get the Rigel finder to set, not as easy as a TelRad (actually, I am quite disappointed with that, but whatever, it works). For a later outing, I installed the red-dot finder too, and between them, it makes for a compelling initial alignment and tracking. But seeing was terrible, and it’s June. So it doesn’t get dark in my suburban sky until closer to 10:00. And finding three stars to do a good alignment was way harder than it should have been. It said it aligned, but later when I went to do a view of Antares, it was way off. We saw some stuff for about 30 minutes and we were about to pack it in, a bit disappointing overall.

Then Jacob wandered over to the side of the deck where I said you might be able to see Jupiter coming up over the nearby houses and he said, “Umm, Dad? Is that Jupiter up there that’s so bright?”. Absolutely. So of COURSE we had to wait until it was visible. Then we played with some eye-pieces, bumped up the power a bit, and just tracked Jupiter manually.

And BAM!

Jacob could easily see the bands. You could hear the excitement and awe in his voice as he declared, perhaps somewhat biased, that it was “Best view he’s ever had of Jupiter”, and definitely stretching a bit, he thought he might have seen a bit of the Great Red Spot. I didn’t challenge that, although it was doubtful at the angle and power we were using. But regardless, he ended on a WOW note. Nicely done.

Then I put him to bed, and left the clean-up to myself. I was tempted to wait for Saturn or play with alignment a bit more, but it was a bit late, and I still had lunches to make, etc.

But my son found Jupiter in the sky himself, resolved the bands, and stayed up later than he should to see an astro target. I think he’s inducted into the cult that is astronomy.

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Posted in Astronomy | Tagged 4SE, astroblog, astronomy, Jupiter, plossl | Leave a reply
Logbook next to telescope looking at moon and stars

AstroBlog 2019.005.3 – Imaging the stars

The Writing Life of a Tadpole
July 5 2019

After capturing Jupiter and the moon on June 11th, I tried for a couple of stars. I seem to need to boost my ISO and turn down duration. For all photos, I’m using:

  • Celestron NexStar 8SE
  • 25mm Plossl
  • iPhone XS Max, f/1.8 lens
  • Night Cap software

For Antares, I used ISO 5000 and 1/3s for the duration. Not great, but a start:

For the second star, I have a note that says it was Polaris as a double-star with one in behind, but I’m not positive that was what I ended up imaging. ISO 8000, 1/4s for the duration.

And since my wife loved Antares twinkling and shifting, I tried a short video of it. Not the best, will definitely need some work.

https://polywogg.ca/pandafamily/upload/2019/07/05/20190705142455-5b0a9de1.mp4

But at least the moon and Jupiter are coming along.

Signature, clear skies
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Posted in Astronomy, Photography, To Be Updated | Tagged Antares, astroblog, astronomy, imaging, plossl, Polaris, stars | Leave a reply

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