My astrophotography 2021

[hhzhang]

Beginning of 2021 came lasting rainy and cloudy days.

My first try -- just to check if the stars are still there -- hah!

[hhzhang]

Clear skies finally came upon the prayer and I enjoyed a few hours on a rooftop, busy testing new gears. Oh the ever-increasing light pollution in the town!

Nevertheless, I tried to shoot a number of objects.

1st target was the double cluster. Stars are less affected by the brightened skies than those deep-sky objects.



M42. My best shot of nebula ever. First shot with the L-eNhance filter.




NGC2467. The Skull and Crossbones Nebula. Only managed to capture the core. Too many stars in the mikly way.




M35 and its distant neighbor. 6 frames of 2min each only -- meant to check if a larger scope could detect the faint stars in the neighbor.



M41. Just to snap a picture of this forgotten gem.



Was trying to shoot some nebuli but a view of test subexposures simply ditched the idea -- calling for a much faster lens (small f-ratio than the current slow F7), true dark skies, or both.

[hhzhang]

But my true targets are minor planets today.

{624) Hektor



Much fun seeing the motion of these celestial bodies.

(2938) Hopi. A small yet remarkable body for its title of Most highly inclined (41.436deg) known main-belt asteroid --- until some new discovery took the title on September 20, 2000.




(52) Europa is the 6-th largest asteroid. Shinning at 10mag today.



It is intriguing that a small telescope like this can clearly reveal in a short time frame the motion of ~18km/sec at a distance of 1.8AU.

With that, I concluded my first astrophotography session (data collection part only) for 2021.

[sgkho249249]

nice...may i know when will your coming astrophotography be. Would you mind i tag along as i want to learn.

Thanks
Clear sky

[hhzhang]

nice...may i know when will your coming astrophotography be. Would you mind i tag along as i want to learn.

Thanks
Clear sky

I am also a beginner observer and learner.

It all depends on the weather. The current forecast points to post 20th Jan for chances of clear night skies .My current plan for late Jan till mid-Feb includes

a) building a portable system around a super-light-weight goto EQ mount
b) observing and capturing some remarkable celestial events (wish for clear skies!)
-- 21-Jan-2021 Uranus, Mars and Moon conjunction -- -- will be nicely framed with ~300mm FL + APSC-size camera
-- 2021-Feb-6 (Sat) morning, bet Sco occultation by the moon (I have never observed bright-star occultation events before. So I am quite excited.)
-- 2021-Feb-8 (Mon) morning, Moon transit M8, -- will be nicely framed with a 300mm FL or slightly longer (hope my small APO will be back from service by then!)
c) shooting various deep sky objects and star fields, learning new techniques
d) observing (shooting) motions of a few interesting asteroids, and continuing my variable stars astrometry

For non-deep sky targets, I will be most likely observing from an HDB block's rooftop in Punggol near my home. For deep sky targets, I may choose among some sites at Changi, East Coast Park, or Kranji.

[sgkho249249]

Yes...its the weather hopefully its clear nite sky on 20th. If you plan to astrophotography kindly let me know....

Thanks ...btw im a novice

[hhzhang]

First time doing astrophotography at Kranji. Relatively better for western skies than other obs sites in Singapore.

This session was actually meant for examining the site and testing the equipment.

I made many mistakes, though. I foremost I forgot to bring the lens adapter for the Nikon lens.

Unfortunately, the clear skies were short-lived. But I managed to collect 90mins of data on the target IC434.

F7 was quite slow for such targets, so 90mins of integration a great deal of noises

[hhzhang]

Retouched above.

[sgkho249249]

wow...nice

[hhzhang]

wow...nice

Haven't got time to fine-tune the data processing procedure. But this data quality is probably not worth it. Plan to revisit this target only when I can shoot from a truly dark site and with a focal reducer (or better still, with something like a Hyperstar -- hah hah ).