*** The Official Astronomy & Universe Thread ***

SpellowHouse said:
If any star makes me nervous, it's that one. Well, two. It's way too close for comfort, although they say that the axis of rotation is pointed well away from us.
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Betelgeuse is unlikely to be a problem - it would need to be 10x closer to do meaningful damage to Earth from the general blast and ~2.5x closer for there to be a risk from any axial jet directed energy which doesn't seem to be pointed towards us.

There are a few GRB progenitors I'd be more concerned about (circa 2018 several potential geoeffective ones were discovered) and it is thought there are more than 13,000 white dwarf stars in range of earth with the potential to cause extinction level events (or at least significant impact on biological life on Earth) at an average interval of ~2.5 million years.
 
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Dr Becky is going to be offline for a bit. She announced she has been diagnosed with Breast cancer and is going through op/treatment.

Wishing her well again. I know a number of women that have gone through the same - both survivors and unfortunately some that it didn't. Hopefully it's sorted, she recovers quickly and continues.
 
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The sun, taken this afternoon with a Dwarf 3 (recently acquired) - 35 stacked images, all done within the Dwarflab app.

I'm still figuring it all out, but a couple of questions if I may.

The surface of the sun in the picture seems to have a texture - does anyone reckon that's convection patterns on the surface or just noise?

I've just tried using Pipp and Autostakkart with a 2 minute AVI (3600 frames) but the results we're nowhere near as good as above (I'd have thought it should have come out a bit better) - A brief skim of a couple of online tutorials is all I managed before trying to process the AVI but is is worth persevering with it or is the above probably about as good as it gets?

Ideally, I'll focus on learning Siril when I get a chance to image the night sky.

Edit: Also - any general hints and tips welcome.
 
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I thought I'd post in here, in case anybody else is interested.

I've had the Dwarf 3 for a couple of weeks now and had a bit of a play with it. It's surprisingly easy to setup but the real skill seems to be in processing the images, which I've not gotten the hang of yet.

Anyway - these are my efforts for the past few nights. I appreciate they're hardly going to set the world of astrophotography on fire but not bad I think, for after a couple of hours of Youtube tutorials on Graxpert and Siril.

Also, the skies weren't particularly clear.

Anyway, from my rather light polluted garden in East Anglia.

M31
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C20
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C27
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As I say, the real skill (with the Dwarf 3) seems to be in the processing and I haven't got that right yet (particularly the stars - they're tricky) but still, as a complete beginner I'm quite happy with the above.

I think I may have found a new (and soon to be, rather expensive) hobby.
 
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I'm jealous of your Andromeda image, i have a skywatcher 200 and currently my Andromeda isn't as good :) i use https://www.astrobin.com/users/Eri to host my images but haven't updated for a few years due to issues with the telescope motor and those damn dirty clouds lol... hopefully i'll get things back working and tested during my annual leave next week.

What software do you use to process? i used pixinsight which is a rather large learning curve for me :D
 
AlphariusOmegan said:
I'm jealous of your Andromeda image, i have a skywatcher 200 and currently my Andromeda isn't as good :) i use https://www.astrobin.com/users/Eri to host my images but haven't updated for a few years due to issues with the telescope motor and those damn dirty clouds lol... hopefully i'll get things back working and tested during my annual leave next week.

What software do you use to process? i used pixinsight which is a rather large learning curve for me :D
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I'm using Graxpert with the initial stacked image to remove the background and de-noise the image, then Siril for processing the histograms and things like star removal and processing. It's rather a steep learning curve as well but at least they're for free.

I can't really justify the cost of Pixinsight at the moment.

Thanks for the link - I might do the same. I can see from your images you're definitely able to get the stars better than me and I think your M31 is pretty good, particularly the center of the galaxy which is way overblown in my image.
 
Thanks for the responses, guys!

I should point out that I havent pushed the Dwarf 3 as far as it's capable. In particular the M31 galaxy is comprised of 900, 10 second exposures in Alt/Az mode. I don't think it can do much more than that due to the rotation of the object in the sky.

The Dwarf 3 does have an equatorial mode where it somehow (I have no idea how) accounts for the rotation in real time and should be able to push the exposure time up to 60 seconds. I haven't tried it yet but that's my next plan for the Andromeda galaxy to see if I can tease out a little more detail in the rings (and reducing the gain to try and dim the center).

I daresay it will be weeks before the skies clear again :(
 
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I used to be into it, I used pixinsight but this was about 12 years ago. Using narrowband filters worked well in light pollution in my experience clean stars and detail in the nebulae etc comes with time on the exposure so you dont need to push too hard on the post processing.

I do think about getting back into it but it takes a lot of time and effort.

Its just amazing what you can image though.
 
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