Archive for October, 2010
Pacman Nebula with SV90 Raptor
Posted by jmeriaux in Astrophotography, Deep sky objects on October 24, 2010
This is the first picture I took with my new Stellarvue SV90 Raptor (APO triplet).
The quality of this telescope is excellent and with its carbon fiber tube, it is very lightweight.
Star diffraction pattern is textbook-like. With the Stellarvue field flattener specially designed for the stellarvue refractors at f/d 7, stars are round and tight from center to edge.
I can see a drastic difference with the Orion 102ED I had before: even though the focal is slightly shorter, the SV90 provides much more details. This is a pleasure to image with this telescope!
Total exposure time was almost 3 hours. Having many sub-exposures in conjunction with the CLS-CCD light pollution filter is definitely a good way to improve the S/N ratio in my light polluted backyard…
Date: 10/12/210 – San Bruno, CA
Stellarvue SV90 Raptor at F/D 7 with Field flattener on Atlas Mount
Autoguiding with FS-60C and Starshoot autoguider
26 exposures of 7 minutes with Qhy8 CCD camera
Filter: Astronomik CLS CCD
Processing: MaximDL 5, Photoshop CS4 and Noise Ninja.
Full Frame
Cropped Image
Jupiter opposition – October 2010
Posted by jmeriaux in Astrophotography, Planets on October 17, 2010
I took these shots of Jupiter with my 7″ Maksutov Cassegrain.
Seeing what good but not at the best this night. Seeing was below average first (first shot) and then turned better progressively at the same time Jupiter raised in the Sky.
However the LRGB technique I have been using lately allows to have quite good resolution planetary imaging with average seeing, by extracting the best frames out of the large frame number / high speed luminance AVI.
For the first time I used the Astra Image photoshop plug in for deconvolution (maximum entropy deconvolution) and wavelet sharpening. I got this time better results compared to the deconvolution software “Focus Magic” I have been using so far.
I would recommend this software for planetary image processing.
Astrophotography in Urban Environment 