December 2023

Welcome to Hank’s December 2023 Astronomy Photos Blog and HOLIDAY BONUS!

You may or may not know, but I not only enjoy taking photos of the night sky, but a big part of my life is playing, writing, and recording music. My songwriting partner, Jeff Sweet, and I have been writing and recording tunes for a few years under the band name DustUp. We just released our 5th album, and we are celebrating by letting you and any friends you think might enjoy it, the chance to download the album FREE from our site. Just go to https://dust-up.com/freebies and click on Download, follow the instructions, and the 10 songs and album cover will end up in your Downloads folder! Easy Peezee! You can also listen to the songs at that website as well. And while you are there, check out our other 4 albums…. This is a limited time offer, so don’t wait too long to download or it won’t be free any more. And don’t miss the last song on the album—you guessed it, an astronomy tune! Happy Holidays!

Three and a half years ago I started this journey of photographing things in the night sky. My strategy has been to capture images using a technique called “Live Stacking” or Electronically Assisted Astronomy (EAA). What that means is that I use a color camera and a telescope to look at objects (nebulas, star clusters, galaxies…) and capture a series of short exposures (a few to maybe 30 seconds long) for about 10 minutes total. The software I’ve been using is called SharpCap and it then takes those short exposures (frames), matches them one on top of the other (align) to increase the amount of light (stacking), and after each one is stacked you can see the image become brighter and more defined. It’s amazing to watch this happen on the computer screen as each exposure is captured. Over these last three and a half years I have taken over a thousand photos this way.

Amateur astronomy is an interesting hobby, and astrophotography is just one way to enjoy the night sky. Basically, you are looking at some of the faintest pieces of light around, light that has traveled for thousands, millions, maybe billions of light years to find your eyes or camera. It is often such a tiny amount of light, that 10 minutes may not be long enough to collect the light needed to show much of the detail of the object through the background noise in the sky (signal to noise ratio).

So, I’ve started to add some pieces to my telescope to help me collect longer exposures and more exposures of light. What this gives me is a chance to see fainter objects, with more signal than noise, and therefore, more definition. It involves not only more equipment, but a different process of collecting the light and a different kind of software to process the images:

1. The equipment I’ve added to the telescope is a guider—that helps the telescope stay “locked” on an object in the sky and not wiggle around. It’s called an Off Axis Guider (OAG). Specifically, an ASKAR M54 OAG and a ZWO ASI174MM Mini camera.
2. I’m using new software (NINA) to help me select and position the object and focus the telescope.
3. I take additional “calibration frames” that help detect bad pixels (dead or always on sensors) in my camera, dust spots on the mirrors and lenses, and other telescope hardware problems that the post processing software uses to correct those problems.
4. And I use post processing software (Siril) to stack the images, adjust the colors and brightness of the images, as well as separate the background stars from the rest of the image so they can be processed separately and then recombined into a final image.

As you might guess, the technology is rapidly evolving. Members of our astronomy club (Black Hills Astronomical Society – BHAS) who are involved in astrophotography have been an amazing source of support for me and other “newbees” in the club. Without their encouragement, I would not be enjoying this hobby. If you are interested in astrophotography, I suggest you find a club near you. There are a ton of YouTube.com videos that cover this, but it is my experience that without that hands-on support… you’re on your own!

Here are my latest longer exposure photos. The first is the one surviving photo taken with my new OAG setup. C11, Bubble Nebula, 128 second exposures for a total of 60 minutes (128s/60m)

The remaining photos were taken with my HyperStar lens, which reduces my telescope’s focal length from 1760 mm to 391 mm. This means that my regular set up (as with the Bubble Nebula) was about a half of a degree wide in the sky, whereas these next images taken with the HyperStar lens are about 3 ½ degrees wide.

The Flame Nebula and B33: 64s/20m.

These images were taken at 64s/30m. Of particular interest to me was the Witches Head (what a great nose!), Angel Nebula with its little angel face, and the cool Spider and the Fly Nebulas. With these images I’ve begun to realize I could see things that my shorter exposures could not bring out.

These images were taken at 64s/60m.

The last image with the HyperStar lens was so bright that I reduced the exposures to 16 seconds but stacked those exposures for 60 minutes to bring out the details.

The Orion Constellation is visible in the south-east in the early evening now, and it’s hard to miss with it’s belt and sword stars. I took this photo with my iPhone so you could see where the Orion and Flame Nebulas are located in that constellation.

Finally, If you’d like to go out in the evening and spot some different things in the sky, the website below lets you print out a sky map of the constellations for the month you are in (Northern Hemisphere) and what it looks like up there. The second page lists things you can see visually, with binoculars or with a telescope. Pretty cool!

https://skymaps.com/index.html

Until next month, Clear Skies!

Hank