Enhanced Photoshop

I haven't taken any remote shots lately, just improving old images with full Photoshop. I still say "full Photoshop" because I spent so many years using Photoshop Elements. Elements is a fine program but I don't think I can ever go back. Anyway, there are two "enhanced" modes in (full) Photoshop Camera Raw, DeNoise and Super Resolution. What happens if you take an 8 Mp image from the 1D Mark II and apply Super Resolution? You get an image with four times as many pixels. I tried it on this 2012 image of an eagle in flight, Mississippi River Lock and Dam 18, Illinois.

I cropped this without resizing, so these are the pixels that Photoshop gives you. There is a little bit of noise in the darker parts of the original, which is only more obvious when the image is upsized, but the well-lit eye and beak are sharp as can be. I also include the version of the image I posted on my site. This just reinforces what I have said before. The 8 Mp second generation 1D (vintage 2004) can produce good images under proper conditions. The difference between it and more modern cameras, such as the 5D Mark III I got later in 2012, is the ability to get a good image under less than optimal conditions. The older camera is more prone to noise in areas that are underexposed. But going back and processing 1D Mark II images from more than 10 years ago is a breeze with (full) Photoshop. What wondrous times in which we live.

Below that is an image taken at the Butterfly Conservatory in the American Museum of Natural History, New York, also back in 2012. As I was in work travel status, I did not have my big camera with me and this was taken with the 10 Mb Canon S95 Powershot. I still have it in my arsenal, although I use the 24 Mp Canon M100 as my small camera now unless space is at an absolute premium. Once again, after applying the Super Resolution, I cropped without resizing. The normally-processed image is included for comparison. Super Resolution applied to a 10 Mp image from an old point-and-shoot can't replace what you get with a real macro lens on a modern camera, but it is pretty good.

New Year

There were prediction of Northern Lights last night, so I set out the 6D with the 14mm lens. I got 710 images, 29 seconds each, ISO 400 between 7 PM and 1 AM. The AC adapter replacing the battery works great. I brought the camera in at 1:00 because it looked cloudy, but when I looked at the images later there were some hints of activity at the end. These single images were from about 10 PM. The images were not as spectacular as the ones in October, so I wasn't shy here about pumping up the color. The first composite covers the entire time and includes car headlights lighting up the landscape. The second composite is fewer images from the latter part of the shoot, so the trails are shorter. I did the composites with StarStaX because it is so much faster than doing it in Photoshop.

Ermine

One reason I put up with the crappy image quality from Melted Browning #6 is it still can tell me about something totally unexpected. I have it pointed at my shed on the off chance that a bear or a moose wanders by. Or a white weasel, aka an ermine. There he is at the corner of the shed on Dec. 18. The winter of 2022-23, voles under the snow chewed up my lawn, but it wasn't so bad last winter. Maybe this is why. The Alaska Wildlife Alliance says, "Female ermine are smaller than the male and will use their size to fit perfectly into vole tunnels, the ermine’s preferred prey." I usually don't crop trailcam images, but the ermine is so small that I did it with this one.

In other news, there are four deer, more or less, who wander through the yard. The most recent trailcam images from Browning #11, mounted on a steel post in the middle of the back yard facing northwest, captured them jumping over the fence a couple times. The latter one from Dec. 14 was excessively blurred, but the ones shown here from Dec. 12 had better light.

A fox runs past the camera every few days and usually is severely motion blurred with exposure time of 1/15th of a second, but here he paused long enough for the nighttime camera to get a decent shot. The Browning #11 has two cameras, color for daytime and B&W for night. Unfortunately, the B&W images still suck, but maybe they are better than the older #6, which only has one camera.

When I put #11 in the middle of the yard on the metal post, I was concerned about it swaying back and forth in the wind, and for the most part that has not been a problem. But we had some high winds last week and it registered more than 1,800 false triggers in 36 hours.

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. The final image is from the DSLR, 5D and 500mm lens, the Jupiter-Saturn conjunction in 2020. The visible moons are Callisto, Io and Europa.

Andromeda mosaic

Orion nebula mosaic

Jupiter and moons

Jupiter, moons and Saturn, 2020

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.