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.

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.