Sunday 8 September 2019

First deep-sky with the SVBONY SV305 camera

Although there was a 63% waxing Moon in the sky, the Moon was quite low during this lunation. A globular cluster was considered to be the best class of deep-sky objects on which to make the test.
Until Nicola is given the Linux and macOS SDKs with which to implement the SV305 in Linux and macOS, we have used SharpCap in a fresh build of Windows 10 with which to capture data.
An ED f/5.5, 80mm refractor was mounted on a Celestron AVX GOTO mount and the SV305 camera was placed at the prime focus.
80 x 20.3s exposures of the globular cluster M2 were captured in RAW12 as 16 bit Tiffs along with 30 matching dark-frames at maximum resolution of 1920 x 1080.
The best 72 frames were dark-frame corrected and stacked in Autostakkert!3 to debayer the Tiffs, giving a total exposure time of just 24.36 minutes. The final image was back-cropped to 1920 x 1080 and post processed in the Gimp 2.10.

Click on the image to get a closer view

M2


Notwithstanding the bright sky due to moon sky-glow, the SV305 performed well and produced a pleasing image of M2, demonstrating that this camera has the capability of capturing deep sky images.