Medium-wide fields 2020

[hhzhang]

The two images retouched

[hhzhang]

2020-Aug-21/22

A very clear night that Singapore had not seen for months!

But I did not feel well.

Before dawn, went up to collect some photos from autumn Milky Way section (there are a number of wide field gems in Auriga-Cas-Persus)

Given the short time before twilight, I managed to collect 33mins of photons from the double cluster.



The central crop, at 66% pixel scale



This might be a work in progress since there are shorter duration shots with better color accuracy for brighter stars that are yet to be combined.

[hhzhang]

Lyra. Another small yet cute constellation

[celeron787]

Haha I was aiming to shoot the perseus double clusters last night too, but too tired to stay up any later. I settled with M16 and M17 which was high up.
Did you manage to catch the ring nebula in Lyra?

[hhzhang]

Haha I was aiming to shoot the perseus double clusters last night too, but too tired to stay up any later. I settled with M16 and M17 which was high up.
Did you manage to catch the ring nebula in Lyra?

The image above is cropped from the 55mm frame. And the M27 is merely a turquoise dot that needs a close look to find.

[hhzhang]

DIscovered that SiriL is a nice tool for astrophotography. 60x15s subs of the M17-M18 region. Heavly cropped. And M50 is quite poor at capturing (deep) red colors.

[celeron787]

Quite a good amount of nebulosity in both M16 and M17. I can see a bit of the pillars of creation in the eagle nebula.
The mild purple fringing around the stars can be easily fixed in Lightroom.

[hhzhang]

Quite a good amount of nebulosity in both M16 and M17. I can see a bit of the pillars of creation in the eagle nebula.
The mild purple fringing around the stars can be easily fixed in Lightroom.

Thanks. I probably was too lazy to care about details/defects. Plus I don't have a lightroom license.

[hhzhang]

Now winter constellations are high in the sky in the before-dawn hours. These are the hours the clear skies are occasionally present -- but not for long, in this persistent wet season.

The Orion's core region.

[hhzhang]

2020-Sept-04

A 2nd-hand Nikon Lens AF300F4.Tested shots in wide open. It is ok for G filter with tight star images, but shows significant abberations (coma and astigmatism) in R (the worst) and B bands. Probably it is not designed to tackle the 2.4micron pixel size of my imaging sensor.

NGC6752 the great peacock cluster. My first shot. Kinda disspointed at the optical abberation at full aperture, so aborted the imaging sequence just after a few shots -- also because of the severe light pollution for this target's low altitude position.


The majestic M7 -- though I have a lot to learn about how to properly capture this large and bright cluster with the background of a bright super dense star field.


Pluto -- my first image of Pluto, finally. Also meant for a test of the limit magnitude.