Andromeda Galaxy – M31

Posted on 16/10/2017 by philipp

In Autumn the Andromeda galaxy is conveniently placed in the darkes part of the sky for my home, the eastern sky.

Due to the vibration prone location of my telescope on the top of our house, I had to throw away 2/3rds of the individual exposures due to trailed stars, so I ended up with only 22,5 minutes of data. Another possibility is, that the guiding didn’t work properly, calibration was suspiciously short.

Anyways, here is the Andromeda galaxy at 1016mm focal length, Nikon D750, 45x30s, ISO 1600, Astro-Physics 127mm f/8, Meade LXD 650 mount.

45x30s, Astro-Physics 127mm f/8, Nikon D750, ISO 1600, preprocessed and stacked in Regim, developed in Photoshop and Lightroom.

Venus at 4%

Posted on 16/03/2017 by philipp

Today Venus was a very delicate crescent, with only about 4% of it’s visible disc illuminated by the sun. I used the 127mm f/8 refractor with a 1.4x teleconverter and took a number of images using the Nikon D750. 20% of 46 individual images were used to create this image using the software Autostakkert:

127mm f/8 Astro-Physics, Nikon D750, TC-E14II

Testing a new guiding setup

Posted on 27/02/2017 by philipp

This evening I did a quick test under the stars to see, how iAstroHub 3.0 works with my setup.

Apparently it works quite well, though I need to test with longer exposures.

Mercury Transit 2016

Posted on 09/05/2016 by philipp

Today the tiny disc of mercury crossed in front of the sun. The weather didn’t cooperate fully, and I had to switch mounts as the Meade randomly stopped tracking in RA, and the WiFi router for the roof didn’t work as expected and tested… but I was still able to get some decent images… Read More →

Jupiter and Galaxies

Posted on 08/05/2016 by philipp

At the beginning of the evening, a short session imaging Jupiter, then I switched over to some galaxies.

This is a short animation made from multiple AVI sequences:

M13, M5, M57

Posted on 06/05/2016 by philipp

In spite of bad seeing and strong gusts of wind I did set up the big refractor to do some astrophotography. I spent quite some time to get things running – in the end the spring galaxies were already too far west in the glare of the train station, so I switched my targets to two globulars and a planetary nebula. Here is a list of what went wrong:

I wasn’t aware that the D750 uses a non-standard USB port on the camera, I had to search for half an hour to find the original cable
the laptop I usually use has been upgraded to Windows 10, installing the drivers for the guiding camera did not work
on the backup laptop guiding with PHD worked, but Backyard Nikon crashed and/or got no connection to the camera, I tried many combinations of USB extension cables, USB ports, removing the SD card, formatting the SD card, upgrading to BackyardNikon 1.0.5, in the end I focused using live view of the camera and used the built-in interval timer of the camera to shoot 30 second exposures…
the seeing was really terrible, making focusing difficult, and bloating the stars during the exposure
for reasons unkown (user error?) the quality setting on the camera was changed to FINE, so I only took JPEG images instead of NEF( Raw)

Preparing for the mercury transit

Posted on 05/05/2016 by philipp

Today I was making sure everything is in working order for Monday’s transit of Mercury across the sun.

I was able to fix the issue of the declination runaway motor of our club’s LXD-650 mount, and took some images using the 127mm refractor with a 1,4x teleconverter.

The sun 05-05-2016, Astro-Phsyics 127mm f/8, Nikon TC-14E II, Nikon D750, 1/4000s, Baader ND3.8 photographic solar film

The 95% Moon

Posted on 26/10/2015 by philipp

Even when the moon is almost full (95% in this case) there are interesting features to be found near the terminator:

Aristarchus is a young, and therefore very bright crater. Next to it is the Schroeter Valley, a rille, probably created by flowing lava.

Hainzl (top left) and Schiller (lower right) are very unusually shaped craters.

Aristarchus and Schroeter Valley lie on a slightly elevated diamond shaped piece of terrain. In this color enhanced image you see a brownish tint in comparison to the surrounding mare material.

Reiner Gamma is an enigmatic bright swirl on the lunar surface.

At lower left Mons Ruemker is seen as a slight bump on the plain of the mare. Apparently it is a lunar shield volcano.

Wargentin is the crater at lower right that has filled up with lava right up to the brim.

In this mosaic you can see the relative location of Wargentin, Hainzl and Schiller.

Clavius, Gassendi and more

Posted on 24/10/2015 by philipp

23rd October 2015

127mm f/8 AP refractor, Televue 3x Barlow, QHY5L-II color CMOS camera, stacked in Autostakkert, processing in Photoshop.

Clavius is the third largest crater on the visible side of the moon. It has a diamter of 225 km and is 3.5 km deep.

Schiller is a very oblong lunar crater. It seems to be a fusion of two or more craters, probably created by a very oblique impact.

Plato is the flat floored crater in the top of the image, to the right, a rille, the rima Plato is visible. To the lower right the Alpine Valley cuts through the Montes Alpes.

Gassendi has a diameter of 110km and is 1.9km deep. In the image the system of rilles on the crater floor is visible.

Copernicus has a diameter of 93 km and is 3.8 km deep.

Total Lunar Eclipse 2015

Posted on 28/09/2015 by philipp

The September 28th total lunar eclipse was very impressive, as it turned out to be a very dark one, and for once, it happened in a perfectly clear sky.

Philipp Salzgeber photography

Tag Archives: Astro-Physics