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.

Cat

After a moose passed behind my east-facing trail cameras a few days ago, I mounted Melted Browning #6 on a metal rod in the middle of the yard pointing northwest. I was concerned it wasn't steady enough and would have a bunch of false triggers from wind movement. No problem. There were only 48 images in the past week, mostly two separate sequences of this cat walking on the fence. This is much better than when the camera was facing east toward the road and I had 5,000 images to go through.

Someone should tell the cat that the birds moved out of the birdhouses months ago. I forgot to set the date on the trail camera so I have erased it from this image, but this one is from about a week ago. There also was one deer, but it was out of focus from being too close. I would leave the camera in this location permanently except I have people who mow the lawn and they probably wouldn't handle it well, so this is just for the winter.

Mosaic

ZWO has released the much-anticipated mosaic capability for the Seestar S50. One of the limitations of the S50 is the limited field of view, which meant it was not possible to get all of the Andromeda Galaxy in one image. I tried out the mosaic last night, the third time I have aimed the Seestar at Andromeda, and got mixed results.

Third attempt at M31, mosaic, last night

When you set up the mosaic, it tells you the target exposure time, which at maximum magnification (for lack of a better word) is 1.9 hours. I set it running but stopped it after 37 minutes of exposure time because I wasn't sure it was in focus. In looking at what was produced, I was correct to stop it. There is one rule I need to follow with the Seestar: On the first target of the night, before letting the Seestar start imaging, always always always refocus. I'm estimating that 37 minutes actually took more than twice that time due to lag between images and dropped frames, so that time was wasted. Then for some reason it told me Andromeda was out of range (which I don't believe was true) and wouldn't let me restart, so I shot the Pelican Nebula, 49 minutes exposure time. I'll replace the murky image I posted back in September with image #4 below. Then it let me restart the Andromeda mosaic at a little bit after 11 pm, once again advising 1.9 hours of exposure.

It ran for almost six hours. I woke up at 4:49 and stopped it, figuring it had plenty. But total exposure time only registered at 107 minutes. The center is reasonably good because lots of images contributed to the middle of the stack, but the edges are noisy because fewer images are stacked. I found out about the mosaic capability from a YouTube video done by Cuiv, The Lazy Geek, a guy with a weird European accent who lives in Tokyo. He said it is not practical to save all of the individual 10-second images and restack them because (unlike "normal" images) the telescope is not centered on the object all of the time. I don't know if he was referring to stacking in the Seestar app or a different program, but I followed his advice and turned off the "Save each frame in enhancing" option. Now I'm wondering if I should have kept it on and tried restacking inside the app, which is what I usually do. Maybe it would take 10 hours to restack, maybe it wouldn't work, I don't know. The only other thing I can think of doing differently with the setup is making sure the scope is level. The little tripod has a bubble level, which is completely covered when the scope is mounted. The tripod is so short that it is difficult to adjust. I might put the scope on my big tripod and see if that is any easier.

I would try again tonight if I could, but the weather forecast doesn't look good for another attempt any time soon. It seems I would need to devote 10 hours to getting 1.9 hours of exposure time to avoid some of the noise. I'm also wondering how often the mosaic capability will be useful. I think every Seestar owner's reaction on hearing the news was, "I'll reshoot Andromeda." Except for Andromeda, I don't know of any galaxies that are too big for the Seestar's field of view. For example, I would like a tighter view of the Whirlpool Galaxy, not a wider one. There are a few nebulae and maybe some star clusters that might benefit from mosaic. I saw Orion shining high last night around midnight, and I might take another crack at the Orion Nebula. I don't believe 2x is necessary, but I would like just a slightly larger field of view.

ZWO just announced a new Seestar, designated the S30, that has two lenses. The main lens is wider than the S50's, and there is a secondary telephoto lens. How that second lens works is a bit murky in what I have read. The only examples they showed were of terrestrial images, and I don't need that capability. The price apparently is $350, $150 cheaper than the S50. I don't think this is a "must-have" replacement or second scope, especially considering I haven't explored the capabilities of the new stuff I've recently acquired for my real telescope. But it's nice to see ZWO is expanding this line.

So, let's compare. Image #1 is last night's attempt, processed from the automatically-produced JPG. I used Siril just to remove the green cast; other than that I used the Photoshop RAW filter. Some of the noisy parts of the image were cropped from the sides and top. I kept the galaxy M110 in the frame at the bottom, and noise is very visible in that part of the image. I tried processing the telescope-standard FIT file in Siril, which produced an image which had a bit more detail but a lot more noise. (BTW, I wish Seestar would save its automatic image as a 16-bit TIF rather than an 8-bit JPG.) Image #2 is my most recent attempt from October 2, which was an improvement over my very first attempt from September 27, image #3. And, as mentioned, #4 is the new version of the Pelican Nebula. I know the three Andromeda images are all different dimensions and are difficult to compare. Primary blame goes to ZWO's bizarre phone-centric decision to shoot everything in portrait mode.

Second attempt at M31, Oct. 2

First attempt at M31, Sept. 27

Pelican Nebula, last night

Orion

One of the problems with the Orion Nebula is it is easiest to see and photograph when the weather is cold. I put out the Seestar last night and my fingers got really cold as I was fiddling with it, the phone app, and the flashlight I was using. The Orion image is a 45-minute stack (270 images), which actually took 101 minutes real time. The discrepancy must be due to a lag time between images and a high proportion of images that the software discards for whatever reason. I took five different stacks between 8 and 45 minutes, and the automatically-produced images all looked comparable except for some rotation. The 45-minute one is the only one I restacked.

Someone posted a Seestar image in our local Facebook group of Orion. That one had low contrast and very little color. I took the restacked JPG and ran it through Photoshop, enhancing color and contrast. The Seestar has its limitations, but taking these few extra steps produces an image that is 100 times better than the automatic image.

While setting up, I noticed that Jupiter was particularly bright, so I aimed the Seestar at it for a few minutes. The bottom image is a stack of only six images, but going for a longer time would not have helped. I think the severe lens flare is from my neighbor's porch lights. The Seestar is not a good planetary scope, so really what I was going for with Jupiter was the Galilean moons. All four are visible, and from left to right are Ganymede, Io, Europa and Callisto.

Moose

I post lots of trail camera images of moose out in the woods at night, but every once in a while one wanders through our yard during daylight. Or in this case, right at sunset. I hadn't looked at the backyard trail cameras for several weeks since we have been gone, and was dismayed to find that Browning #11 had dead batteries. It might have been in position to get the moose jumping the fence just before I was able to get to my back door with the DSLR. Leave it to ancient Melted Browning #6 to get a shot of the moose from Oct. 21. (It looks like the same one, but who knows?) Also, from #6 on Oct. 15 is an image of a deer buck. If you flip back and forth between the moose and deer images, you get some idea of how huge a moose is.

I want to have a camera at the choke point at the northwest corner of our property, between the fence and the rock garden (for lack of a better term). If I hang a camera on the back fence facing east (as seen below), it triggers on cars going by. At most we only get a few dozen cars a day, but with multiple exposures on each trigger, it adds up to lots of images to go through. I had to flip through 5,000 images to find a few dozen of the moose and deer. If the camera is on the fence facing west, it gets triggered by waving grass. The owner of the lot behind us hasn't mowed it for four years. With no more mowing on our lawn this year, I sunk a steel rod in the middle of the lawn facing northwest toward the fence, facing away from "traffic" and hopefully far enough away not to get triggered by the grass. I bought a bunch of t-post mounts, and with a little piece of wood as a spacer they work well on a steel rod.

DSLR yesterday

Trail camera Oct. 21

Trail camera Oct. 15

Late to the party

When I booked our cruise to the Maritimes, I didn't realize that it coincided with the comet of the century C2023 A3 Tsuchinshan-ATLAS. We left home just about the time it swung around the sun and put on its best evening shows. Tonight I set up the Seestar in hopes of getting it as it fades into the void for at least 80,000 years, and this is what I got. It took quite a while to locate it in binoculars, but I finally did. I tried unsuccessfully to get it with the DSLR. At 100mm it was very small in the frame, and I didn't think I could find it or focus on it at 400mm. I have received my ASIair telescope computer, but I think it is going to take a while to get my real telescope up and running. There is no learning curve with the Seestar, so that's what I used.

Even a single 10-second image from the Seestar will show the comet, but stacking is necessary to show the tail and to reduce noise. This image is 11 minutes. I shot multiple stacks, including one of more than 20 minutes. Seestar stacks on the stars, not the comet, so the stars are points and the comet head has a trail. It's hard to see since the head is a bit blown out, but there is a little bit of trailing in the first image. The second image is the long exposure, processed to show the trail formed by the head.

Photoshop AI

I've always been a bit of a purist when it comes to digital photography. I try to limit myself to adjusting levels, and applying only minimal sharpening and color saturation. But with its AI features, Photoshop is making it hard to resist "improving" the images. Take this shot of St. Dunstan's Basilica in Charlottetown, PEI. There were wires in the upper left of the image, and a there was a car parked in front. It took a few minutes and I probably could have done a bit better, but the processed image is good enough to post on the internet at 1800x1200. I cropped them differently, but the effect is obvious.

Before

After

Trailcam update

It has been two months since I have checked the cameras out in Custer Gallatin National Forest. Ten new images have been posted to the gallery "Beartooth Pass, August 2024." The location is sort of on the way to the Beartooth Pass, so I included them there. There are five cameras deployed out in the woods:

• Browning #15: I was wondering if there was something wrong with this new camera, so I made sure to put brand new batteries in it last time. It finally produced some images, but none made the cut for inclusion in the gallery. I'm including one below, just to show that the image quality is pretty good, given that all Browning (and most other) trailcam images are overprocessed and oversharpened.
• My brother's Campark T180 #13: This one is located next to his cabin and usually picks up moose.
• Reconyx #7: This camera picks up a lot of deer and moose, the occasional bear, and this time a bobcat.
• Reconyx #2: There were no images from this location except my relatives mugging for the camera. The bridge over Snow Creek it is located next to has mostly collapsed and wildlife traffic seems to have dried up. I'm considering where to move this camera.
• And finally, Browning #5: I know I said this camera was retired, but I needed it for a new test location. The spot is where a trail splits but there is no convenient tree, so I drove a stake into the ground and used a t-post mount. The ground is rocky and the stake is not driven in very far, but it hadn't fallen over after two months. I might move #2 over to where #15 is, move #15 to this location, and finally retire #5 for occasional duty in my back yard.

New Browning #15, unprocessed

Campark #13, moose pair

Reconyx #7, nocturnal bear

Browning #5, mounted on a post because there is no convenient tree

Bear

We haven't had a bear in our yard for more than four years, but a little bear came sniffing around our plastic pumpkins last night. This is from the Ring doorbell, processed a bit to increase the contrast. I used to have a Blink camera aimed at that spot from the side, but it became unreliable and I quit putting batteries in it. Now it is just a dummy camera. I only have one trailcam in the yard right now, in the back, and it didn't get anything.

A lot going on

After yesterday's accidental Northern Lights, I decided to go for it intentionally last night. The first picture is 660 30-second images from the 5D/14mm lens. I spotted a few faint trails that might be meteors, but I think most of the stuff in the lower left corner is satellite flashes. The shooting time was 5 hours, 40 minutes, and the battery (the good one) gave out at 2:17 am. (Unlike with the ancient 1D, Canon did not give me an AC power adapter with the 5D or 6D. The official Canon AC adapter is $140 but I found a knockoff with good reviews on Amazon for $21 that should work with both cameras.) The 660 images overwhelm the Northern Lights, so I narrowed it down to the 97 images between 11:04 and 11:54 pm that showed the most glow. StarStaX did a good job giving me preliminary views and I could have used those composites here, but for these "official" images I did them in Photoshop.

Below that are a couple of Northern Lights single frames. Not as vivid as the previous night, but technically better. With the exposure shortened from 90 seconds to 30, the structure is more defined and there is no obvious star trailing.

The next few nights I am considering doing some 30-second exposures, but not continuously. Maybe with a minute in between. It seems when the Northern Lights start up, they last for a little while, and I don't need to do any more huge star trail stacks again soon. That would still get me 240 images in the six hours starting at 8 pm.

Stack of 660 images

Stack of 97 images with Northern Lights

11:11 pm

11:12 pm

Oops!

I used to work with a nose-to-the-grindstone guy who complained that "those darn holidays" were interfering with him getting his work done. Maybe he was joking; we weren't sure. Last night, I tried to shoot the Draconid meteor shower and those darn Northern Lights interfered. My plan was to shoot 90-second exposures over seven hours and stack them. The result would be a star trails image with streaks of meteors running through it. It was doomed to fail as the intervalometer wasn't retriggering in a second, so there is a 90-second gap between all the images. Just for fun, I did a quick stack in StarStaX and it turned out better than I thought. Without the gaps, maybe it would have been interesting, but there are no meteor trails evident. A suspected meteor trail (image #2) does not even show up in the stacked image (#4) as it was in the lower right of the frame where the Lights were the brightest.

I'll try again tonight with (a) shorter exposure time of 25 seconds rather than 90, (b) the full-frame 5D rather than the 1.3x crop 1D, and (c) pointing more directly north rather than northwest. If nothing else, I will end up with another star trails image.

And these are my first Northern Lights images. I did not see them visually, but that 14mm f/2.8 gathers in a lot of light in 90 seconds.

8:34 pm, Big Dipper visible lower part of the frame

8:49 pm, I think this is a meteor just below the Big Dipper

11:30 pm, Big Dipper has mostly rotated out to the lower right

Failed stack

Jordan

I was looking for an image from 2002 and accidentally came across this one from Nov. 14 of that year at the MCI Center in downtown DC, Washington Wizards against the Utah Jazz. Scoring 19 points in a 105-102 win for the Wizards was #23, Michael Jordan. I only had my little Canon Elph camera with me and I was way up high, but there's Jordan at the center circle during a free throw. I also tried some video, but it was awful. The Elph's stills were 1600x1200 (2Mp), but video was only 320x240 at 20 frames per second. Truly primitive.

And I eventually found the image I was seeking. I acquired my first DSLR, the Canon 1D (Mark I) on Aug. 5, 2002, and the first trip I took was to Maine a week later. The lens for the image below was the humble 50mm f/1.4, which I still have but the autofocus is broken. Actually the image that has been on my web site for the past 22 years was taken with the Elph, but now I prefer this one which is extremely similar but (IMO) better image quality. We are heading back to Maine in a few weeks, which is why I was looking at my old images from there.

Another way

After a few days of fiddling with the new telescope mount and b&w astro camera, I've decided to descend further into the rabbit hole and get an ASIAIR camera controller, basically a Raspberry Pi computer stuffed into a little box. Solar imaging connected by cable to a laptop just isn't going to cut it. The screen is hard to see in daylight to focus, and the cables I have are too short. Rather than buying new cables, I'll apply those funds to the (mostly) wireless ASIAIR. (I'll still need to use a power cord of course.)

The mount is extremely stable, but also extremely hard to see through the polar scope to align. I was reading through the Sky Watcher manual, and instructions on how to set the mount's setting circles is in the same section as polar aligning. After reading through the setting circles procedure, I was regretting my purchase decision. But after some further research I figured out that a Goto scope really doesn't need setting circles. All that is needed is an accurate polar alignment, and supposedly the ASIAIR will help with that also. That will have to wait until November due to our upcoming travel schedule.

I did use the telescope on the mount and the 6D Mark II to get this sun image, but I slewed over to it with the controller rather than using Goto. Unlike a few recent images shot with the DSLR lens filter, this is the color of the filter and the image is not colorized. The sunspots are getting interesting.

I look through old images from time to time. I took this Nov. 11, 2019 with the film filter on the 100-400mm lens/5D Mark III. The only way you can tell this is in focus is the tiny dot near the center of the Sun, which is the planet Mercury transiting. I tried my new Photoshop tricks to get more texture on the surface, and nothing. I can only imagine that the lens film filter doesn't pass those details like the lens glass filter or the telescope filter do. It's my practice lately not to upsize solar and lunar images if they are smaller than 1200x1800 pixels, so this disk is smaller than the first one. Obviously I didn't use the teleconverter that day.

Update: For years I had a Coronado Personal Solar Telescope (PST), but the internal mechanism corroded and I sold it on eBay for parts. I was never able to see much through it anyway, and it was impossible to attach a camera to it. The best I ever did was use a cell phone bracket to look through the eyepiece. So anyway, rather than go down the Coronado (Meade) road again, I ordered a 50mm scope from Lunt. I looked at something larger, but an 80mm costs at least 5x the 50mm, which is about the same price as a PST. I expect the customer service to be much better than Meade/Coronado, which is basically bankrupt. I think Meade makes (made?) their telescopes in Mexico. Lunt is an American company staffed with real people in Tuscon, Arizona.

Lunt builds telescopes to order, and they were backlogged leading up to the recent eclipses. But there are no eclipses coming soon, and they told me the wait time is eight weeks. Just in time for Christmas, and maybe I will figure out my telescope mount by then.

Updated Update: I received the Lunt solar scope Nov. 14, almost three weeks ahead of schedule. Yay! The weather forecast says it is going to snow the next few days and the sun isn't going to come out until the 19th. Groan! But it looks like a beautifully-made device.

Third attempt

I made a third attempt at Andromeda last night with the Seestar and think this may be incrementally better. It is slightly more tilted than previous attempts, and I cropped it to show M110 at bottom right. I used Siril for stacking and most of the processing, but not the stretching. Research indicated I could just do it in Photoshop, so I did. I also got a small, unimpressive image of the Crab Nebula.

I'm going further down the rabbit hole. I am expecting delivery of a real Goto telescope mount (Skywatcher HEQ5) and a real astro b&w camera (ZWO ASI174MM) today. For now my priorities are to get good Sun and Moon images with the b&w camera and Televue telescope, and get my DSLR to work with the mount to get a tracked LANDSCAPE shot of Andromeda and other objects. Once I get all that figured out, then it's on to a filter wheel, filters, an autofocuser, and perhaps a field flattener to get better images of Seestar targets. First impressions: Learning how to align the mount will require some study and some YouTube videos. The rail supplied with the mount is useless, but my standard tripod plates will work. I only put the camera on the mount, not the scope, and targeting was not very good since the mount was not aligned. On the other hand, the ZWO camera was a breeze to set up and I took a test image (not attached to anything) within minutes. I will try a sun snapshot with the scope tomorrow, but it probably will be on the tripod, not the mount. That thing is heavy. From comments found during my research, I knew it was heavy, but I had no idea. I should take off the 11-lbs. counterweights before I move it. I only needed one to balance the camera, and I wonder if the scope will require both.

October 3 sun image from the 6D, monochrome, colorized. I didn't use the teleconverter, so this is at 400mm and heavily cropped. I used the Photoshop AI Super Resolution to upsize it, then cropped it to my standard 1200x1800 (4x6 print size). We've got some good sunspots going. Remember, this is just a white light filter and doesn't show the detail of much more expensive filtering systems. Can't wait to see what the new ZWO does with the Sun and Moon.

Nebula night

From last night with the Seestar, we have the colorful Helix Nebula NGC7293 and the wispy Pelican Nebula IC5070. I've been imaging almost every night since I got the Seestar, and the weather forecast says clear skies for the next week. But I'm running out of things to point at until the seasons change. I wonder how well the Seestar will capture the Draconid meteor shower Oct. 7, or whether I should just do timelapse for about six hours with the 1D and the 50mm lens. It will be near the bright star Vega so I should be able to find it.