Astrophotography

12 posts

A Better Blink Tool – ASIFitsView

As much I love PixInsight for almost anything in regards to processing, for anyone that has used the blink tool to look at sub frames has likely discovered that it leaves a lot to be desired. It doesn’t de-bayer images, and it’s a bit cumbersome to “delete” images. I often find myself clicking the incorrect button and closing the entire stack of images, and then when you do manage to remove an image it stays in the list which can easily lead to confusion as to whether the light was actually removed. Recently I have been testing out ASI Studio […]

STEVE Over Lake Ontario

On 9/18/23 I drove up to Fair Haven State Park near Oswego in order to attempt to see the Aurora activity that night. As the skies looked to be clear I took a chance on the drive, unfortunately when I arrived there were a few too many clouds forming off the lake to really see the Aurora clearly. Still I got the DSLR out to take a time lapse. After a few minutes I noticed a strange phenomenon off to the west that went high over the lake and was not something I had seen before.  It was not clouds […]

Picture of Allsky camera at Darling HIll Observatory.

The Allsky camera at Darling Hill is live!

After far too long, our Allsky camera at Darling Hill Observatory is live. The Allsky camera takes a widefield view of the night sky every 15 seconds or so and saves the images. At the end of the night, we have it set to after sundown and before sunrise, the software will process the images into a time lapse video letting you see the constellations wheel over head. It will create start trail images showing the Earth’s rotation. And Keograms where a thin slice from the center of each image is stiched together in a time series and shows the […]

Arp319 at 9 hours 56 minutes

The 9 hour rule in Astrophotography

I am testing to see if what is said about 9 hours being minimal time for a truly deep sky image. Collecting 9 hours in Syracuse is at least a 3 night proposition but I was able to keep just for minutes shy of 10 hours for this image. There is a definite improvement over the 6.5 hour image in brightness of the galaxies and smoothness in the background. Here is the final image and links to the previous images. The differences are subtle. At a quick glance, I don’t really see much difference in the three pictures. But when […]