NGC7790 in Cassiopeia

Digitally 2x zoomed. Exposed in June 2010. Data: Luminance= 2 x 2 minutes at -19°C CCD sensor temperature.

NGC281 in Cassiopeia

This is a test photo of the Pac Man nebula in Cassiopeia, as captured with the 106mm, f/3.6 telescope in only 10 minutes: R=3 min, G=3 min, B=4min. This photo is the first light of the scope with the reducer. The camera was an old SBIG ST-7XME NABG with a small but sensitive chip. This scope screams for a larger chip! Note, the composite above is only a pure RGB without any portion of Ha. The camera shows much noise at this low temperature of -15°C. A water cooling would be very helpful especially in the summer.

The open cluster NGC1342 in Perseus

The open cluster NGC1342 in Perseus under heavy light pollution conditions. (Test photo)

Barbeque in the Plattenwald forest

This is the www.bksterngucker.de team from Backnang. They own a 30 inches Dobson telescope. This is one of the biggest portable telescopes in Europe. Yesterday, they had a barbeque in the Plattewald forest near Backnang/Germany.

The neighborhood of Perseus A

This is the area around the galaxy "Perseus-A" in the constellation of Perseus. This galaxy as part of the Perseus galaxy cluster is about 240.000.000 light years away from our milky way. It is a well known radio source. The Perseus galaxy cluster consists of about 500 galaxies.

Unfortunately, the test photo above is not as sharp as it should be, since the telescope was slightly out of focus during the image aquisition. The integration time was 2 x 10 minutes using a 4 inches f/3.6 telescope (second light), this was not long enough to capture its numerous details.

M33 Triangulum Galaxy (First light)

This is the first light with the 4 inches telescope. The focussing works well in spite of its tight CFZ at f/3.65. The optics are approx. 3 times faster than my previous FS102@f/6. Well, the results look quite promising, although the FOV with the old ST7 is very small indeed. It is less than 1°. The photo is taken during the full moon phase. Hence, strong gradients are detectable in this photo. The color versions are composites of Red=3x3min, Green=3x3min, Blue=3x4min, L=10+3*3min.

How to process Jupiter with GIOTTO

These are the settings I used recently to process my Jupiter photo. The software you see is http://www.giotto-software.de/ available in german language. Don't forget to make a "white balance" with MaximDL after finishing it.

RGB vs. RRGB in planet photography

If you are a planet photographer and you make video sequenses with a color webcam, I have a good tip for you. After adding the avi video stream with GIOTTO or Registax, separate the R/G/B channels with MaximDL or GIOTTO. Copy the R channel to a new file to use it as luminance. Finally load all four files in CCDSoft to make a RRGB composite. You can compare the results on the photo above.

The RRGB processing brings out invisible details of a RGB photo. My RRGB composite above is sharper than the RGB although I think the RGB has better colors than the RRGB. One problem I can mention, is that the red channel as luminance can not match the green or blue details of the planet. Normally, a "real" luminance channel should match all the colors of a RGB photo. That's not the case in RRGB. But as you know, the red channel is immune against atmospharic turbulences, this is the reason why in MY case the red channel shows more details than the green channel. The bayer mask of an OSC cam has two green pixels but only one red pixel. Hence the green channel could better serve as a luminance channel under perfect seeing conditions (in the space ;-). I think so. If a reader has a suggestion please comments this topic. Thanks.

Observing Jupiter from the roof window

Last week, the seeing was surprising good here in South Germany, so I decided to observe Jupiter with my Takahashi Mewlon 210 telescope. The views of this planet were stunning indeed, even at the high magnification of 300x using a Takahashi 7mm LE eyepiece. After this observation, I decided to attach my Imaging-Source DBK21 color webcam on the telescope and to take some photos. I made several avi files. Each one of them had 1GB of data, so it wasn't an easy task to process them with my 5 years old 2GHz PC.

The storms on Jupiter

Last night, the seeing was surprising good here in South Germany, so I decided to observe Jupiter with my Takahashi Mewlon 210 telescope. The views of this planet were stunning indeed, even at the high magnification of 300x using a Takahashi 7mm LE eyepiece. After this observation, I decided to attach my Imaging-Source DBK21 color webcam on the telescope and to take some photos.

Here you can see the results.
You can see even the storms on the planet. It is amazing, isn't?
Made in Stuttgart on July 31th, 2010 with a m210 telescope at 6000mm focal length. All pictures are RRGB composites.