Meteors

The height of the Geminid meteor shower was supposed to be last night, so I made an attempt to get some images. All I managed to prove is that the AC power adapter I recently got for the 6D and 5D works perfectly. I set up the 6D and fired off 735 shots in about 7.5 hours. The exposure time was 35 seconds, which is a bit too long to avoid some trailing if I had gotten any worthwhile images.

One problem is the Moon is the brightest object in the night sky, by far. The most recent star trails I shot were 800 ISO at f/2.8. This image was 100 ISO at f/4, so if I am doing the math right the stars are only 1/16th as bright as they would be under a moonless sky. If there were any meteors, they were lost in the glare.

What you can see in this image besides the moon is Jupiter and Orion to the left.

Fox and deer

I've had the Browning #11 on the post facing northwest for almost a month. Two questions have been answered: The post does sway in the wind and cause false triggers, but not very often. And the camera will trigger on animals on the other side of the fence. No moose in the past few weeks, but the camera did get quite a few occurences of deer and fox. Melted Browning #6 also got the same critters at its location facing southeast toward the shed.

The newer Browning doesn't freeze night shots. The deer has to be totally still to get a clear image. The fox never stops moving, so all I get is a blur. The running deer during the day shows a shutter speed of 1/861, while the night shots are 1/12. The older Browning actually had less motion blur (shutter speed 1/40), so I need to check the settings to see if I am missing something. (I also need to set AM/PM correctly on #11.) Here are four images from #11 followed by two images from #6.

Mosaic

After travel over the holiday, we returned to clear skies in Montana so I got the Seestar out to try the mosaic function again. It isn't a foolproof process, but I was able to get some results. I shot Andromeda first, getting 61 minutes of exposure time spread over 2 hours and 40 minutes. At that point it was consistently giving me stacking errors, so I switched to the Orion Nebula. For some reason the Seestar did not produce an image on the phone, which gives total exposure time, but after about an hour and a half it also was giving stacking errors. Then I went back to Andromeda and got 81 minutes of exposure time over just under three hours.

The images I edited are the stacked JPGs saved on the Seestar. I run them through Siril just to remove the green cast, and do the rest of the editing in Photoshop. There still was a bit of noise in the corners, but a lot of that was cropped out in these images. The Andromeda image is about equal to what I posted a month ago. The Orion image maybe isn't quite as good as what I posted before, but the previous one wasn't a mosaic. I also shot a few stills of Jupiter. Shown below is a composite with different exposures for the planet and the moons. The planet shows a very slight amount of detail. From left are Europa, Io, Ganymede and Callisto. Not great, but better than I can get with a long lens on a DSLR.

Andromeda mosaic

Orion nebula mosaic

Jupiter and moons

Now what?

We got a few hours of sunshine today so I was back out there with the Lunt 50. Without adjusting the tuning from yesterday, there was a large filament visible near the two sunspots, and some incredible prominences at the edge in the same region. I wish I could show a picture of it. I was able to get the ZWO computer and camera to give me a preview image today, but was never able to get it in focus. I don't think it will rack in far enough. It makes no sense to me. The Cloudy Nights forums talk about using this camera on this telescope.

I decided to take a step back and see if I could get the combo to work on my regular Televue 85 scope with a white light solar filter. First I shot a straight through image with the Canon EOS M100, shown below. But I was unable to bring the ZWO camera into focus either straight through or through the diagonal. If the M100 can be brought to focus, I shouldn't have to rack back much more than an inch to get the ZWO to the same focal plane. It's just physics.

I even tried shooting my camera phone handheld through an eyepiece, and that didn't work. (I have a eyepiece attachment somewhere.) I don't know what to do at this point. Tomorrow I may try focusing the ZWO/Televue on the nearby mountain. If that doesn't work...I don't know what that would mean. Next, I will probably try my Scopetronix attachment which is a rather heavy piece of metal that allows shooting through an eyepiece. That should work with the EOS cameras, but I'm not sure how I will attach the ZWO camera to it. At this point I just want to get that first Lunt image with whatever camera I can get it with.

Use your imagination on this white light image. The interesting features mentioned above would be just below the two sunspots at right in this image.

Lunt solar

I disposed of my old Coronado Personal Solar Telescope recently because it had deteriorated (rusted, essentially) over 20 years and was no longer usable. Not that was very usable to begin with. It was nearly impossible to take images through. There are still Coronado PSTs and more advanced solar scopes being sold, but parent company Meade is bankrupt and I don't know how well Coronado products are supported any more.

The most direct alternative to Coronado in the US is a company in Tuscon, Lunt Solar Systems. I decided to replace the PST with a Lunt 50mm Dedicated Hydrogen-Alpha Solar Telescope, one of their lower-end scopes. I think it should be sufficient to get my sun fix, and if not I can always trade up. Delivery was supposed to occur in early December.

However, it showed up Thursday. There was no time to set it up Thursday and Friday was cloudy. The forecast for today wasn't good either, but it cleared enough for a couple of hours to look through it. It doesn't come with an eyepiece, and the only one I had at the recommended starting point of 26mm is a Meade. I set the scope up on my photo tripod, eventually found the sun, and tried to focus. It looked terrible, not even as good as the old PST on its best day 20 years ago. Hmm. I switched to a TeleVue 20mm eyepiece and found the sun again. Wow. I didn't even have to refocus. Note to self: Use your TeleVue eyepieces whenever possible.

At that point I undertook the tuning process, which involves unscrewing and rescrewing a barrel on the side of the scope. This somehow adjusts the pressure in the tube, I guess. Eventually I was able to glean a filament and a prominence. It was time to try photography.

First I tried the Canon M100 on a T-mount. I figured if any of my EOS cameras could come to focus, it would be this one since it is mirrorless and the sensor is not set back very far. Nope, I couldn't focus it. Then I tried my newly-acquired ZWO ASI174MM Monochrome Imaging Camera connected to the even newer ZWO ASIAir Camera Controller, a Raspberry Pi mini-computer packaged in a nice little case. It found the camera, but I could not get a preview image, which I attribute to my own ignorance. I switched over to ZWO software I installed on a spare laptop. It found the camera, but by that time the respite from clouds was over and I gave up for the day. The weather probably won't be great the next few days, but it might clear for a day on Tuesday. I have a few days to research how to get the ASIAir to show me a preview image of the sun.

I know the Lunt works as it gave me some sunspots, a filament and a prominence. Now I just have to get the imaging part to work. I have acquired a lot of telescope equipment in recent months and it is hard to learn it all at once. I acquired a Skywatcher telescope mount a while ago and figuring it out is one of my next big projects. In a perfect world, I mount the Lunt on the Skywatcher and have the ZWO controller driving the mount and taking solar images with the ZWO camera. At night, I swap in my TeleVue 85 telescope and do some deep sky imaging. To do that right, in time I need to add a filter wheel, a guiding scope and an autofocuser, all of which would be controlled by the ASIAir. But I haven't even hooked it to the Skywatcher mount yet, so one step at a time.

My other recent purchase was a ZWO Seestar S50 smart telescope, which is so easy to set up and use that it has done all of my observing in the past three months. But I know the images I can get with a more conventional setup will be better. I spent 25 years resisting going down this astrophotography road, but it appears I have finally started the journey.

New location

Melted Browning #6 is in semi-retirement, but I have some rechargeable batteries that aren't doing anything else and a vacant spot in my back yard. At this point I'm not expecting great images from #6, but it monitors what is going on. This is probably as good as the 7-year-old camera can do, with decent light and not too much distance to the subject. I didn't see the deer in the yard today, but this is only 25 minutes ago as I'm typing this. As I mentioned Nov. 9, the camera was mounted on a metal rod in the middle of the yard pointing northwest.

The newer Browning #11 has been pointing at my shed for a few months, so I decided to swap locations of #6 and #11. Obviously #6 was pointed a bit too high for a deer, so I lowered #11 when I moved it to the post. I'm expecting it will get the critters going through the bottleneck between the fence and the rock garden, and hoping it will take note of any large grazers in the field on the other side of the fence. I saw several deer go through the field the last few days, and there were no triggers by #6. Maybe a moose will be big enough.

Almost

I knew the weather forecast said clouds were going to roll in overnight, but it was so clear just after sunset last night that I decided to make attempt #2 at an Andromeda mosaic with the Seestar 50. I now officially hate the little tripod that came with the scope. I mounted the Seestar on my big tripod and it was incredibly easy to level. I can put the ball head on the little tripod and use it to shoot the birdbath in the spring.

I got going just before 7:00 and accumulated 656 images in just over four hours. Total exposure time was 110 minutes, so even though each image is 10 seconds, it gets fewer than three images per minute rather than the six that you might expect. Unfortunately 110 minutes of exposure was not enough to complete the mosaic before the clouds rolled in. This is how far I got:

Yesterday I was pondering what would happen if I tried to restack the individual images in the Seestar app. Before mosaic was introduced last week, this is what I always did. For whatever reason, I think it gives better results than the stacking that is done during the shoot. I set the app to save all the individual images and did the restack. I was concerned it might take forever, but it wasn't any longer than usual. However, it threw out about a quarter of the 656 images, and the result was far from satisfactory:

Even though stacking the individual images turned out to be pointless, as long as I had them I paged through to see if there way anything to see. There was. I think this is a satellite. An airplane would be a line of red dots from the running lights, and I don't think a meteor would be a solid line. Because of the way the stacking software works, an anomoly like this that only shows up in one frame gets filtered out.

In summary, whenever the clouds clear again, this is what I will try next time I set up the Seestar:

• Use the big tripod.
• Don't rely on the battery, plug it in. The battery is probably good for 5 hours, which is not enough for a mosaic shoot.
• The mosaic image can be set at any angle, so pay attention to composition.
• Don't bother saving the individual images for mosaics.
• Focus before allowing the scope to start taking images.