Last night at 1:15 A.M. I decided, that I cannot let this beautifully clear night pass without some astrophotography. I drove up to Farnach, which is only 7.5km away, but provides some nice dark skies above the brightly lit Rhine Valley.
I set up the Vixen Polarie and took pictures using 20mm, 85mm and 300mm lenses.
The summer milky way and the multitude of nebula and clusters hidden in it, never cease to impress me. When I went to bed some hours later, dawn was already breaking. Read More
Only minutes before I started my first video, apparently an asteroid slammed into Jupiter, as far as I can see, no trace of damage can be seen on my pictures.
Today the Great Red Spot was prominently visible:
Supernova 2017eaw, discovered by Patrick Wiggins is located in the so-called fireworks galaxy. The supernova is the tenth supernova in this specific galaxy to be recorded during the last 100 years.
This is the third supernova discovered by Patrick Wiggins, overall he searched 1051 nights and took about 500000 images of galaxies for his finds.
7x60s at f/4 using ISO 1600. Nikon AF-S Nikkor 300mm 1:4E PF ED, Nikon D750, ISO 1600, SkyWatcher StarAdventurer, crop
Software used: Autostakkert 3.0, Registax, Fitswork. This version is a bit softer, shows much less artifacts but still more detail I think.
I also updated the animation with reprocessed frames Read More
Yesterday evening I was able to use the stable seeing shortly after sunset for some images of the moon:
Jupiter is near opposition this April, here is the view from April 9th:
Astro-Physics 127mm f/8, QHY5L-II, 3x Televue Barlow.
Today two big sunspot groups were prominently visible on the sun:
Active Region 2644, 50 frames of 524, Astro-Physics 127mm f/8, QHY5L-II, Vixen 2x Barlow
Active Region 2645, 50 frames of 524, Astro-Physics 127mm f/8, QHY5L-II, Vixen 2x Barlow
Today Venus was a very delicate crescent, with only about 4% of it’s visible disc illuminated by the sun. I used the 127mm f/8 refractor with a 1.4x teleconverter and took a number of images using the Nikon D750. 20% of 46 individual images were used to create this image using the software Autostakkert:
127mm f/8 Astro-Physics, Nikon D750, TC-E14II
This evening I did a quick test under the stars to see, how iAstroHub 3.0 works with my setup.
Apparently it works quite well, though I need to test with longer exposures.
