Rosette Nebula from a Relaxing Night Under the Stars
Rosette Nebula from a Relaxing Night Under the Stars
Sometimes astrophotography can become too stressful of a hobby, and you forget the beauty of the heavens that lured you out under the dark skies in the first place. Then it's time to just program the telescope to capture a simple target (NCG 2244) ... yes, even one that you've done before ... and sit down in a nice, comfortable chair, and simply look up and be in awe of His creation ... unwind. For this image an Orion 80ED doublet APO telescope was mounted on a Skywatcher HEQ5 mount with guiding using a small ZWO 30mm fl 120mm guidescope and PHD2 guiding software. Even the computer was a very small, inexpensive HP Stream laptop costing about $250 USD ... and it handled the project nicely while it's battery lasted all night. No darks or other calibration frames were taken. The computer did all the work as 20 exposures at 240 seconds each were captured. The ZWO ASI294MC Pro camera was cooled down to -5 C, and the gain was set to 120. Binning was set to 2x2. The site was a Bortle 4 location at 4,000 feet altitude (1,230 meters), and the early November temperature was 15 C (59 F).
Capturing the exposures was done with APT. Processing was done with Pixinsight with final touches in Corel Paintshop Pro. Polar Alignment for the evening used SharpCap Pro.
Rosette Nebula from a Relaxing Night Under the Stars
Rosette Nebula from a Relaxing Night Under the Stars
Sometimes astrophotography can become too stressful of a hobby, and you forget the beauty of the heavens that lured you out under the dark skies in the first place. Then it's time to just program the telescope to capture a simple target (NCG 2244) ... yes, even one that you've done before ... and sit down in a nice, comfortable chair, and simply look up and be in awe of His creation ... unwind. For this image an Orion 80ED doublet APO telescope was mounted on a Skywatcher HEQ5 mount with guiding using a small ZWO 30mm fl 120mm guidescope and PHD2 guiding software. Even the computer was a very small, inexpensive HP Stream laptop costing about $250 USD ... and it handled the project nicely while it's battery lasted all night. No darks or other calibration frames were taken. The computer did all the work as 20 exposures at 240 seconds each were captured. The ZWO ASI294MC Pro camera was cooled down to -5 C, and the gain was set to 120. Binning was set to 2x2. The site was a Bortle 4 location at 4,000 feet altitude (1,230 meters), and the early November temperature was 15 C (59 F).
Capturing the exposures was done with APT. Processing was done with Pixinsight with final touches in Corel Paintshop Pro. Polar Alignment for the evening used SharpCap Pro.