SK Astro
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Stephen Kirk

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Nebulae Open Clusters

M52 with FSQ85 and G2-8300 Camera

M52 Cluster FSQ85 G2-8300

M52 is a fabulous open star cluster in Cassiopeia.  It is set against a huge amount of nebulosity that spans across the constellations of Cassiopeia and Cepheus.   In this image The Bubble Nebula can be seen at the four o’clock position with respect to M52 and many other objects in the Sharpless Catalogue of nebulae are also visible.  These are detailed in the annotated version of the image below.  The square red box on the finder chart on the right represents the image.Full resolution image here (opens in a new tab). Technical Information Imaged from my backyard in Nottingham, UK on 28 November 2021 with a FSQ85 refractor and a Moravian G2-8300 cooled CCD camera with Astrodon HaRGB filters on my MESU200 mount guided with OAG.All image data is binned 1×1:  Note I do not capture a separate luminance when I bin all of the data channels is 1×1 in…

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Planetary

Mars 14 Dec 2022, C925 and ASI224MC

Mars_14_Dec_2022

The planet Mars captured with my Celestron C925 SCT telescope and my ASI224MC colour camera. I used a Powermate x2 barlow lens to give a higher image scale together with an Atmospheric Dispersion Corrector (ADC). A total of 12000 frames were captured using Firecapture to a SSD drive on my capture PC. I used Autostakkert to process the best 20% and then PixInsight to bring out the details with 8 wavelet layers. A bit of unsharp mask afterwards to sharpen it up a bit. Mars was to the East of the meridian and about 40 degrees in altitude. From my backyard in Nottingham, UK. I am quite new to using the ADC and what I did was use the colour alignment tool in Firecapture to “tune” the ADC to get the colours all as perfectly aligned as I could.

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Planetary

Jupiter, 7 December 2022

Jupiter 7 Dec 2022

Jupiter, 7th December 2022 with C925 SCT and ASI 224MC camera I am not experienced with imaging the planets other than the Moon. This image is not going to win any prizes or keep the award winning planetary imagers awake at night! However, it’s a first effort at Jupiter and a foray in planetary imaging to give me some other astronomy options since almost always, when it is clear the moon is bright thus rendering deep sky observing and photography impossible I used my Celestron C925 telescope with a x2 Powermate (a 2″ version). I then used an ADC to try and improve colour correction and to this was connected my ASI224MC colour camera. I tried my very best to “eyeball” the focus the best I could. This is very difficult to do as Jupiter was bouncing around considerably due to quite poor seeing. Jupiter was at about 30 degrees…

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Lunar

December Moon with TEC140 Refractor

RGB_Moon_6_Dec_2022

The Moon with my TEC140 December 2022.Images taken on the 6th and the 7th.  The 6th was not quite a full moon and the 7th was just a few hours past full. On the picture on the left you can see that the circle of the moon’s disk is not quite full between the 6 and 11 O’clock positions.Both images were taken with my TEC140 refractor and ASI174M camera through Baader RGB filters.Each capture was of 5000 frames and the seeing was quite good so that I could utilise the best 50% of frames of each capture run.  Because of the Field of View with the combination of the F8 focal length of the TEC140 and the chip size of the AIS174M, each capture run through each filter was comprised of a North and South run.  I then stitched the two together in Photoshop.Weather conditions were extremely cold at about…

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Lunar

The Moon TEC140 Refractor/ASI174MM

This is a RGB image of The Moon captured at about 20:00 on 15th December 2021 from my observatory in Nottingham using my TEC140 refractor and ASI174MM camera. I captured two capture runs in each filter and stitched the resultant images together in Photoshop. Each video capture file was 9GB in size.

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