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Astro by Joe

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België
Durbuy
Astro by Joe

Joey | 29 | 🇳🇱
Amateur Astrophotographer
Bresser 60/900 + Canon EOS 550d
ZWO Seestar S50

12/03/2024

IC 434 - The Horsehead Nebula with its companion NGC 2024- The Flame Nebula, watched over by Altinak, which is a star so bright, my light pollution filter gives it a really fat halo.

The Horsehead Nebula has always been my favorite object in the night skies. It captures the beauty in the chaos of the universe. It's not just that the matter just happened to accumulate in a distinctive horse head. We are also just in de right spot to perceive it like an animal that happens to have evolved on this little blue dot.

The Nebula is a hydrogen emission nebula, and the horse head itself is actually a cloud of interstellar dust partially blocking the hydrogen region. Altinak, the big blue blob to the left is actually a 3-star system. Altinak Aa is estimated to be around 28 times as massive as our sun and is one of the brightest stars in the night skies. It's also the star given as a prime example of halo's from the seestar's dual narrowband filter, which is evident by the big blob it has become.

I like stars, like a lot. But with a bright star near an emission nebula, it will easily outshine the nebula, causing a whole lot of issues. This target, normally speaking, needs a lot of integration time, so I was pleasantly surprised by what a mere 40-minute integration with the seestar produced! I will definitely get back out in the fields soon because this one will be revisited!

12/03/2024

I promise new targets are gonna get processed soon, but I had to share my 3th post-processing of the Bubble Nebula!

This time, I took advantage of the dual narrowband filter to extract the hydrogen alpha and oxygen iii emissions from the data.
You'll notice the blue oxygen iii region being much more pronounced. This is because I assigned the Hubble HSO pallette, assigning red to hydrogen and blue to oxygen iii, as the Hubble Space Telescope does.

I have my own little Hubble. How cool is that! 😁

I didn't RGB blend the stars, so they look a bit iffy. In my next HO image, I'll make sure to get the stars just as nice!

Well, I'm off to gather and process some more data, so stay tuned for new content!

22/01/2024

I wasn't really pleased with my results just yet so I decided to take the plunge and get myself Pixinsight. Got a rare free sunday afternoon to give it a try.

I decided to reprocess my data on the Bubble so I could see the difference it makes. I used the WBPP script for stacking and finally got to use BlurXterminator, boy is this one powerfull tool!

The version with the diffraction spikes is my old processsed image, the one withoud is the one I did in Pixinsight with the same data. Altough I should have added the spikes in the second one too but I'm really pleased at the results!

11/01/2024

NGC-7635 - the Bubble Nebula

The Bubble Nebula is an emission nebula in the constellation of Cassiopeia and is located approximately 7100 light years from earth.

The bubble gets its round shape from stellar winds of its central star, which is estimated to be around a mass of 44 times our sun. In the right hemisphere of the Bubble, you can see a nearby moleculair cloud glowing as it is exited from the stellar winds.

Having such a good result on M101 last night, I decided to dedicate the second of two clear nights to another single target. Due to sight line restrictions at home, I had to choose a northbound target that would be visible all night, so the Bubble Nebula was an easy choice.

I didn't sleep yet, so after setting up and making sure it was tracking accurate and not dropping frames, I went to bed and let it do its thing. Got a little hearth attack when I woke up this morning because the connection was dropped, so I hurried outside, and fortunately, it was still there!

It managed to capture 728 30-second exposures throughout the night, making for a total integration of 6 hours and 4 minutes, a new personal best!

My post-processing workflow keeps getting more streamlined, and I decided to try and add diffraction spikes, I wasn't a huge fan of diffraction spikes, but I am starting to like the effect they have on the pictures so I might experiment with it some more.

Bortle 7/8 ish
Seetar S50
728x 30s @80 gain
Siril - Astrocooker - Photoshop CS6 - Starnet - Starspikes Pro 4

10/01/2024

M101 the Pinwheel Galaxy

Located in Ursa Major, this face on spiral galaxy lies 21 million lightyears away and is about 80% bigger than our own Milky Way galaxy.

I got a rare full clear night at home, so I decided to pick one target for the entire night. M101 is a very faint target because it is so distant, and its location in the night sky made it the ideal target. I started off with 20-second exposures, but because it is so faint, I decided to switch to 30 seconds after about 2 hours.

In the meantime, I have been practicing a lot with my post-processing, and it's finally starting to pay off. So, while I was post-processing old data, the seestar managed to take another 3 hours worth of 30-second exposures. All set and done, I managed to capture 5 hours and 40 seconds of data, the most data I captured on a single night, as well as on a single target!

Well, of course, I couldn't call it a night and leave the data for later today. No, that requires patience, and I'm not really known for my patience! So after almost melting my poor old laptop by stacking 724 FIT files and a little magic, this is the result!

Bortle 7/8ish
268 x 20 seconds 80
256 x 30 seconds 80
Total integration time 5h 40s
Zwo Seestar S50
SIRIL - Astrocooker - Photoshop - Starnet

18/12/2023

M33, otherwise known as the Triangulum Galaxy, is a spiral galaxy in the constellation of Triangulum. It's approximately 5,7 million lightyears from Earth, spans a whopping 30.000 lightyears, and contains an estimated mass of 50 billion times that of our sun.

I was struggling with tracking and stability issues throughout the weekend, so I was happy to get at least some data on 1 target.
Stability issues not being fixed means I got a whole 40,5 minutes of data over the course of the whole weekend, not quite as much as I had hoped for, unfortunately.

I also got the chance to try out some new post-processing tools, but the limited integration time means I had to overstretch the data. So I'm not 100% pleased with the results, but since work is calling tomorrow, this was about the best I could get from the data.

Taken with the seestar
243x10s @60 gain (total integration 40,5 minutes)
DSS
Photoshop CS6
Starnet++
BlurXterminator
Astrosharp

31/08/2023

The Blue Super Moon!

For the people who where expecting a moon with a pretty blue hue, I have some dissapointing news; the name Blue Moon is given to a second full moon within a single calandar month and has nothing to do with it's color. Last nights blue moon coincided with the supermoon making this moon even more special! I had to free up time in my busy schedule to capture but man was it worth it!

Since I sold my EXOSII last month, I had to go full manual tracking and managed to collected over 12 gigabytes of data last night, sadly my stacking software isn't playing ball a the moment so I had to make do with a single exposure. Last night was the most fun I had doing astrophotography in a long time, goes to show that complicating things isn't always for te better!

Eos 550d
Bresser 900mm refractor
Manual EQ mount
Single frame
1/60s
some correction and streching in Photoshop to bring out the different shades of minerals on the lunar surface.

21/06/2023

Tonight goes to prove: if you stop chasing your opportunities, your opportunities come to you. Haven't had much time to focus on AP the last few weeks but when I drove home from a late night carwash a perfect opporunity appeared! I rushed to get my camera and tripod and was able to capture this beauty!

The Moon and Venus just bright enough to poke trough a dramatic evening sky. Quite happy about this one!

Single 2,5 s exposure on 135mm/f4,5
Canon EOS 550d

05/06/2023

The Strawberry Moon!

Nearing the summer solstice, tonights full moon rises with this beautyfull rose golden hue, giving it the nickname the strawberry moon!

Focus wise I was a bit off because I was concentrated on getting the colour spot on and I think I managed pretty well!

25% of 522 frames
0.8 seconds on ISO 200
Proccessed with PIPP and Autostackert

24/05/2023

The cresent Moon and Venus over the Ardennen Mountains. Not my most specteculair shot and Instagram lowers the quality even further, but after weeks of setbacks I'll take what I can get!

It was shot in the (well lit) town square of nearby Durbuy without tripod and only my Sigma lens so I'm quite pleased at how it turned out!

Eos 550d (unmodded)
Sigma 55/135mm
f4.5
Single 6 second sub @ 400 ISO

23/05/2023

Clear skies are clear skies, even when you're on vacation! Belgian skies do not dissapoint so far!

Adres

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