Solar imaging and more deep sky imaging
Solar Imaging
Clicking on any image will get a closer view.
H-alpha light
A Solarmax II 60 BF15 H-alpha scope fitted with an IR/UV cut filter and a prototype SVBONY SC715C OSC camera was mounted on a Skywatcher Solar Quest solar finding and tracking mount.
Telescope equipment
Two overlapping areas of the Sun were imaged with AstroDMx Capture by capturing 1500-frame RAW SER files
AstroDMx Capture streaming H-alpha data
The best 75% of the frames in each SER file were debayered and stacked in Autostakkert!4 The two resulting images were stitched in Microsoft ICE, wavelet processed in waveSharp and further processed in Gimp 2.10 and G’MIC-QT.
The Sun in H-alpha light
The SC715C captured the H-alpha data very well in high detail.
White light
An Ekinox 80mm ED refractor F = 400mm with a Skywatcher auto-focuser and fitted with a Photographic grade Baader solar filter OD = 3.8, and an SVBONY SC715C OSC camera was mounted on a Skywatcher Solar Quest solar finding and tracking mount.
The scope was focused remotely with a 4tronix Focus RF auto-focuser controller.
Telescope equipment
Two overlapping areas of the Sun were imaged with AstroDMx Capture by capturing 1500-frame RAW SER files.
AstroDMx Capture streaming White light data
The best 75% of the frames in each SER file were debayered and stacked in Autostakkert!4. The two resulting images were stitched in Microsoft ICE, wavelet processed in waveSharp and further processed in Gimp 2.10.
Note that the preview of the Sun in white light has a green hue. This is normal for true RAW data because the Bayer pattern has twice as many green pixels as either red or blue. The Bayer pattern of the SC517C is GBRG. All colour corrections are made in post processing.
The Sun in White light
Deep Sky imaging
An Altair Starwave Ascent 60 ED doublet refractor with Field flattener-reducer and a Pegasus FocusCube V2, and fitted with an Altair 2” Magnetic filter holder with an L-eNhance filter, was mounted on a Celestron AVX mount. An SVBONY SV165 guide-scope fitted with a QHY-5II-M guide camera was mounted on the imaging scope.
The mount and focuser were controlled by AstroDMx Capture via an INDI server running on the imaging computer indoors. PHD2 multi-star pulse auto-guiding was done via the INDI server on a separate Linux computer indoors.
The telescope equipment
Two hours worth of 2 minute exposures were captured of the Satellite cluster at the heart of the Rosette nebula as RAW Fits files, along with calibration frames.
The live-stacking experimental feature in AstroDMx Capture was used during image capture to improve the preview, of the image capture. 60 image light frames were captured in total.
AstroDMx Capture having captured 60 frames, showing just the 60th frame captured
AstroDMx Capture having captured 60 frames, showing the live-stack of 60 images
Clearly the preview was vastly improved by the live-stacking.
The data were debayered, calibrated, stacked and partly processed in PixInsight and further processed in GraXpert, Cosmic Clarity, Gimp, ACDsee and G'MIC. Four renderings are presented here:
The Satellite cluster and associated nebulosity
Linked channels
Unlinked channels
Blend of Linked and Unlinked channels
HOO rendering
The SC715C was able to capture high resolution data on this bright nebulosity and produced good results.
It is intended to add to this post shortly as more data become available so:
