AstroAbdur

04/26/2022

Finally processed some of the data from the last 2 days. Here is a link to the timelapse from the April 24 prominence from the Coronado PST. It was too big to attach here so I uploaded it to Youtube. It was quite a sight to see visually through the scope as well. I have added the Earth for scale. In the interest of accuracy, I should state that a prominence isn't really an explosion. It is a dense cloud of incandescent ionized gas projecting from the Sun’s chromosphere into the corona. Prominences sometimes extend hundreds of thousands of kilometers above the Sun’s chromosphere. Enjoy 🙂

Here are my results from my solar imaging session yesterday. I was using my Coronado PST and Qhy462 guide camera. This thing was bigger than the Earth and I ...

03/05/2022

Just took this shot of the Rosette Nebula.

My full YouTube review of the scope I used is here on my YouTube channel:
https://youtu.be/HyNdD4qOnYQ

Equipment used:
C11 EdgeHD hyperstar F2
EQ6R PRO
ASI1600MM Stacked and processed in Pixinsight

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Youtube: OurAstroLife
Instagram:
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03/05/2022

This is my image of the Andromeda Galaxy from 2.6 million light years away. I combined my image of the moon and my image of Andromeda to show just how large the Andromeda galaxy is. On a clear dark night, you can see it as a smudge with just the naked eye. Have you ever seen it with your own eyes before?

My full YouTube review of this scope:
https://youtu.be/HyNdD4qOnYQ

Equipment used:
C11 EdgeHD hyperstar F2
EQ6R PRO
ASI1600MM
Stacked and processed in Pixinsight

Follow me on Social Media:
Youtube: OurAstroLife
Instagram:
Twitter:

07/29/2021

I only had my C8 set up on the balcony last night as I wasn't expecting such good seeing conditions (really wishing I had imaged with the C11). Jupiter was only 20 degrees above the horizon when I was imaging it so I used an ADC to help with the atmospheric dispersion. I used a 2x barlow and I took multiple videos of 2 mins each that I later de-rotated to make one sharper image. Any tips or suggestions are always welcome 🙂

Equipment:
old C8
2x barlow
QHY462 camera
13 videos of 2 mins each with 25% of frames stacked and de-rotated

07/01/2021

The seeing was really good today so I got some images of the sunspot group. Hoping to get more higher resolution shots once I have a backyard and can image the sun when it's higher in the sky. This is pretty much how it looked visually in moments of good seeing too. I was using Baader solar film on my C8 and Fuji XH1 camera.

06/12/2021

I got some footage of Jupiter on June 12, 2021. To my surprise, the great red spot was visible and the moon, Ganymede, was casting a shadow close to it. I decided to get a few images between 3 and 4 a.m. and captured an animation of the rotation. Jupiter was between 12 and 14 degrees in altitude during this time so I wasn't able to capture as much detail as I would have liked. I am really looking forward to the time when Jupiter will be at 60 degrees altitude. I am hoping to improve my planetary imaging skills in the meantime.
Equipment details and higher quality video at this link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgUnn3qgCuM

I got some footage of Jupiter on June 12, 2021. To my surprise, the great red spot was visible and the moon, Ganymede, was casting a shadow close to it. I de...

05/27/2021

Reviewing some binos for the OurAstroLife YouTube channel
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXN5cS-WC1E

This is my video review comparing three very popular 10x42 binocularsVortex Diamondback HD 10x42https://amzn.to/3fpcm2xVanguard Endeavor 2 10x42https://amzn....

05/19/2021

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImIGPcX6UW8&t=111s

US OPT Telescopes link:
https://bit.ly/33XcYpQ

Canadian Amazon link:
https://amzn.to/3weBI92

This is my video review of the Meade 8-24mm Zoom eyepiece (same as the Celestron 8-24mm). The Meade and Celestron are both optically the same eyepiece and the only difference is that the Celestron has a chrome barrel and the Meade has markings for the zoom amount. I have owned both eyepieces in the past but I sold the Celestron and kept the Meade as they performed the same. The eyepiece shown in this video is the Meade but it has been discontinued so I have linked to the Celestron version. I am mainly an astro-photographer and not so much a visual observer so this review is mainly tailored towards beginners looking for an eyepiece to get started without spending too much money.

The links in the description are affiliate links so if you end up purchasing the eyepiece through them, I will get a small commission from the retailer at no cost to you. Thank you for supporting my channel and please let me know if you have suggestions for future reviews or tutorials.

US OPT Telescopes link:https://bit.ly/33XcYpQCanadian Amazon link: https://amzn.to/3weBI92This is my video review of the Meade 8-24mm Zoom eyepiece (same as ...

04/29/2021

I made a time-lapse of this giant prominence I saw on April 24, 2021. I was using a Coronado PST and an ASI1600MM camera and the data was captured over a one hour period.
More videos on my channel:
https://www.youtube.com/.../UCOigpu7c-bT3C6oItFLQq7Q/videos

04/29/2021

Here is a picture I took of the ISS (International Space Station) passing in front of the moon. Since I was using a manual camera mount to hold my C8, I had to manually track the moon and unfortunately I was still moving the mount when the ISS passed. Lesson learned, next time I will use a tracking mount. I still got enough usable frames to make this image so I made a tutorial to show exactly how to take and process a picture like this. I used the free programs PIPP and GIMP (beta version 2.99.2) in this tutorial since not everyone has Photoshop. Equipment details in the description 🙂
Link to the tutorial:
https://youtu.be/DXrAgbKiHIY
Link to my channel with more tutorials:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOigpu7c-bT3C6oItFLQq7Q

04/18/2021

As luck would have it, the forecast for Thursday night was looking really clear. Encouraged by my results from last weekend, I decided to head out of town to get some more data for my image of the Whirlpool galaxy. The night turned out to be what I consider perfect. There was no wind, seeing was excellent, transparency was great, and there were few if any technical issues that needed to be resolved. My mount was guiding at 0.35" total RMS for a good part of the night instead of the usual 0.8" seeing limited nights. I was able to get 3.25 hours of additional data to combine to my previous attempt from the weekend and I combined it with my colour images from 2020 and 2019 (the colour was all from my uncooled Fuji camera so it wasn't super efficient). The result is my longest total exposure time ever for one image, a whopping 9 hours and 21 minutes. Half of that was taken with my ASI1600MM and half was with my Fuji XT2. I stacked only my best frames in DeepSkyStacker so I did have to discard some frames due to satellite trails (I used straight average instead of sigma clipping in DSS as I got a better result by discarding the frames with satellite trails).
I have included a few other zoomed in crops of interesting regions from the full image. You can see the 2.3 billion light year distant galaxy cluster right at the bottom of image 2. Image 3 shows the location of an 11 billion light year distant quasar (magnitude 20.3), and image 4 shows the full zoomed out view. I have also included one of my earlier attempts at shooting the Whirlpool Galaxy from 4 years ago.
Equipment used:
Asi1600MM with ZWO filters (L and Ha)
Fuji XT2 mirrorless camera (colour)
Orion 8" reflector
EQ6R mount

My Youtube channel and tutorials:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOigpu7c-bT3C6oItFLQq7Q
Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/OurAstroLife/