TheSkySearchers

Despite opportunities to catch M33 overhead near the meridian in both 2018 and 2019, this has always been a tough DSO for me to capture because of any number of weather roadblocks, bad seeing conditions, equipment problems, bad polar alignment, whine, whine, whine … .

Here's my best shot of M33. Unfortunately it was captured at ISO 3200 at the end of late night astrophoto session before humidity and high altitude cirrus clouds made follow-on exposures more difficult. My polar alignment was not the best either.

I hope to have one of my Canon cameras modified by this coming Spring so I can capture more color in M33 and other galaxies.

SW Quattro 8 f/4
SW EQ6-R Pro
Canon EOS 77D unmodified
92 seconds, ISO3200
Single-frame, no filters
9/15/2018

Nice job Hank! Looks really good .

Great capture Hank... amazing it's a single frame.

I tried but my mount stopped tracking but I could see it when stretched in my guide camera.

A fine image.

Hankmeister3 wrote: ↑Sun Jan 05, 2020 3:20 pm SW Quattro 8 f/4 ... Single-frame, no filters ...

Thanks! I appreciate this "natural" production, d.h., what the camera and telescope delivered without post-processing.
Nice work.
And congratulations on the patience to do it.

Very nice image Hank!

One of my favorite objects! I wish I could do it from my bortle 8/9 backyard, but it would take up too much time!

Your image looks amazing hank! Thank you for sharing It is hard to believe that is a single frame!

Thanks, Michael. I always appreciate your encouragement. I hope to catch M33 tonight but unfortunately we're going to have west winds at 15mph. There is a building at our Penfield site that I can try to shelter behind, but I'll have to see how that turns out. Anything above 5mph, especially if it's wee bit gusty, is a disaster for single-frame and my set-up. Fortunately, winds are suppose to decrease by one mph each hour until about 5:00 AM. My main goal is to get a string of M42, M45, Rosette and Horsehead/Flame Nebulas to work a bit more on my Stacker-Lite experiment.

mikemarotta wrote: ↑Sun Jan 05, 2020 4:52 pm

Hankmeister3 wrote: ↑Sun Jan 05, 2020 3:20 pm SW Quattro 8 f/4 ... Single-frame, no filters ...

Thanks! I appreciate this "natural" production, d.h., what the camera and telescope delivered without post-processing.
Nice work.
And congratulations on the patience to do it.

Thanks Mike. Technically the image isn't completely au natural. Though a single-frame, I do run all my astro-images through my ArcSoft PhotoStudio 6.0 suite at my meager attempts at "post-production" to separate DSOs from the background fog/skyglow/noise. However, of late, I've totally revamped my simple-Simon post-production tweaks by mostly limiting them to multiple tone adjustments during my single-frame layering processing, despeckling where needed to mitigate noise and ISO "grain", minimal color balancing, white balance and oftentimes add a bit of "gaussian blur" to help smooth the (nebular) images a bit. I now only make minimal contrast and luminance tweaks since separately adjusting for highlight, midtones, and shadow (lowlights) seem to work better.

Unfortunately I can't add detail where photons are simply missing or stretch the dynamic range when using higher ISO values. Whenever I can, I'll use ISO 1600 for DSOs but I would like to consistently get down to 800. This would also help immensely on the "Stacker-lite" experiments I'm presently conducting.

This is why I like using optical systems f/6 or faster, preferable f/4 and f/5. I can expose to single-frame background fog of about 20% in about two to three minutes at ISO 1600 depending on the quality of the sky. This Spring I hope to start using an auto-guider that will help immensely in getting longer exposures with lower ISO values even if my polar alignment is slightly off. Also, I think Canon's in-camera noise reduction (NR) circuits and long exposure imaging processing features are also greatly responsible for the single-frame images I'm presently able to capture. But however long the original exposure happens to be that's about how long it takes the Canons 77D and 80D to "process" the image. So a three minute exposure takes a total of six minutes with in-camera processing time added. That's why I've taken to using two Canon cameras, one on the primary telescope on one on the piggyback Meade 70mm or Canon telephoto. While one camera is processing an image, the other camera is exposing an image.

I just saw your image!

Super job on this Henry! Definitely one of the best single shots yet!

Really good definition.

I might dig up a frame of M33 later. It was my first target post mod. Just curious if I can dig some nebulosity out of a single frame.

You done good!

Jim

Thank all of you for your kind comments. It was fun and educational trying to pull everything out of single-frame I could. Probably overdid it a bit starting with the purplish outer fringes of the arms, but it's pretty amazing what even humble digital processing can do with practically nothing. Five layers went into that image. Apparently there's some kind of "buffering" (I don't know how else to describe it) action that occurs with these astro-images which really do moderately enhance these single-frame captures of mine.

Thanks again Jim and Steve for your ongoing encouragements. Unfortunately it was a bit too windy last night and the gibbous Moon was way too close to Pleiades and the high humidity was scattering the light all the way to the Orion constellation and to the region of the Rosette Nebula. I stood at the Penfield site for about twenty minutes before figuring out it wasn't even worth unloading the equipment with 16 mph winds. Not even a building windbreak that's out there would help because of the direction of the wind cutting straight out of the west-southwest.

For our 42nd anniversary my wife and I will be traveling to New Mexico and Arizona for a vacation in a couple of weeks and she's with me five by five to at least get three good nights (maybe five hour sessions each) under some decent high desert skies. We'll take it day-by-day and hope to revisit at least four to five National Parks out that way including the Petrified Forest, the Grand Canyon, Zion, and possibly Arches/Canyonland. This will be our third visit to those parks since our honeymoon back in 1978!

Hey! Sounds great!
I have had my eyes on Zion for the pasr few years. Looks amazing. Went to Yosemite in 2016 and it was beautiful!

You and your bride have a fantastic time!

Really looking forward to your images!

Thanks,
Jim

We went to Zion last year and absolutely loved it. It was after that trip that I decided to take the leap into AP

Unfortunately I only had a regular tripod.

Amazing image Hankmeister3!

Thanks for posting,

Steve, how did you illuminate the foreground in the photo? Was that car headlights in the parking lot?

Hankmeister3 wrote: ↑Tue Jan 07, 2020 3:23 pm Steve, how did you illuminate the foreground in the photo? Was that car headlights in the parking lot?

It was a 30 second exposure and for about 10 seconds of it I used my iPhone flashlight to light paint it.

I was standing on a hill about 200 feet above the road below. It was quite the steep hike in the dark. I think I had one of the headlamps.

O I C.

I'll have to try that some day when the corn is back up and the trees are in full leaf.

Hey Hank....I'm AMAZED what you get in single frames!
Well Done!
Tom

Thanks, Manuel, I appreciate your kind comment. Thanks for looking!

Very nice for a single frame James. If you ever get your camera modified you will be amazed at the additional "red" that you will capture.

Steve