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TEC140

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Images on this post were made by using the TEC140 and Celestron C925 SCT telescopes with my ASI174M mono camera. From my backyard in Nottingham on the evening of 25th March 2021 with the Moon high to the south in Leo at a phase of 86% waxing (i.e. growing towards full moon) and at an altitude of about 50 degrees above the horizon. A slightly hazy sky made for quite good seeing although it was very cold and windy and the moon was jiggling about a lot in the gusts, even inside my sheltered observatory. I had to try and time my capture runs between these gusts and passing clouds, a process that was not always successful. As a consequence I accumulated nearly 600G data for these four pictures in total, much of which had to be deleted. I was outside at the scope for about 90 minutes doing these…

A selection of four images I took with my two main telescopes on the evening of the 24th March 2021 with The Moon at 78% waxing gibbous phase to the South in the constellation of Leo.First up below is a main disk taken with TEC140 refractor.  I shot RGB through those filters on my ASI174M camera and I took the luminance through a 7nm Ha filter.  My field of view with the TEC140 and this camera is only half the disk and so I have to take sequence runs, one for the north and the other for the south and then combine them in Photoshop.  Lunar Disk I then moved on to use my C925 SCT telescope again using the ASI174M in RGB mode.  I did not capture a specific luminance channel this time and just used RGB and made a pseudo-luminance.  The weather conditions were too windy to get…

The Leo Triplet is a popular and famous group of galaxies in the constellation of Leo, best viewed in late winter/early spring in the Northern Hemisphere. They are often imaged together like this as the triplet or as individual galaxies. They are located about 35 million light years away and consists of the Messier galaxies M66 (top left in the image), M65 (bottom left ) and to the right we have NGC 3628, commonly called The Hamburger Galaxy. The galaxies are easily visible in a small to mid-sized telescope as faint smudges in this isosceles triangular pattern. The galaxies are sometimes called the M66 Group but ask any astronomer and they will immediately know what you mean if you mention the Leo Triplet! Another famous galaxy group in Leo is the M96 group. The Leo Triplet Technical Details Image captured from my back yard observatory in Nottingham, UK on the…

The Moon on 25th January 2021 at 89% in Gemini. It was freezing cold, snow on the ground with reasonable skies and seeing conditions. The full disk below is the best 20% in each of the R,G and B filters out of 10000 frames. I used Planetary System Stacker software to process the raw .SER files from the camera and then used PixInsight and Photoshop for processing. I used my TEC140 refractor and ASI174M high speed camera with Baader RGB filters. I no longer capture a separate luminance channel and instead make a synthetic luminance from the RGB data and then sharpen that and use as a luminance layer in Photoshop. RGB Moon at 81%, 25 January 2021 For the two images below I used my Televue 2″ Powermate X2 in order to double the TEC140 telescope’s focal length to 1960mm. The processing and frame set is the same as…

After months and months of cloud, The Moon shone down on us in Nottinghamshire on the 23rd January from high up in the sky in Gemini (my daughter’s birthday!) It was at a phase of 74% waxing gibbous. I used my TEC140 scope, ASI174M camera and Baader RGB filters. The full disk image was with the telescope at its native focal length and with the two closer up views at the bottom I used a 2″ Televue Powermate x2 in front of the filter wheel/camera assembly. RGB Disk at 75% Waxing Gibbous Above is best 25% of 20000 frames in each of RGB. Copernicus and The Apennines After the full disk image I inserted the Televue 2″ x2 Powermate to get a more zoomed in view. Above is the Apennine Mountains and Copernicus crater to the left of centre. Best 15% of 5000 frames in LRGB. Clavius and Tycho Craters…