Blog - muddling through
On this website I’ve included my favourite pictures, but I am always on a learning curve with astrophotography and have my fair share of blunders and disasters. So I will be honest here and record the good, the bad and the ugly.
Perfectly Pink Aurora Borealis
On Friday 10th May there was an incredible display of the Aurora Borealis, or Northern Lights. This is normally only visible in the much higher latitudes of Scotland and Scandinavia for example. But here at a relatively lowly 51 degrees north it was a stunning one in 50-year event.
So often, there is promise of an aurora at this latitude, following an outburst of solar activity, but it fails to deliver. So I nearly opted to collapse into bed that night. Due to the prediction that it would be a G4 event - the second highest - I decided to give it a go and headed out to a regular dark spot at a field in Kent.
Initially the pink aurora colour was quite dispersed when I looked at my view finder screen. I actually thought there was an issue with the white balance and camera settings. But then the colours became clearly visible to the naked eye. This was in fact a G5 rating - the highest - and unbelievably spectacular.
After so many cloudy nights recently, this one was completely clear and even the sliver of moon kept a low profile on the horizon. After so many knock-backs the skies delivered a night I will never forget.
I took the image below, which just today got a ‘Top Pick’ nomination on Astobin. I also made a time lapse which is on the home page.
It’s scary to think how easily I might have missed this. Social media and the Press all went crazy with images of the event which would have been gut wrenching to see, had I not driven for an hour and a half into the countryside and taken my own. I think I would have hidden in a cave somewhere until everything quietened down.
May 15th 2024
Clouds… clouds… and a loyal new assistant
I have never known such a sustained period of cloudy skies - it has lasted for several months, right through the autumn and winter, wasting so many long nights of darkness. I have only been able to complete one image since early January. The air has been warmer and heavier with moisture. Climate change must surely be a factor here? I’ve really missed being out under the stars.
Anyway, the good news is that this month there was finally a clear night and I managed to sleep under the stars with new my astro-companion Cosmo. He’s a Korthals Griffon gun dog, but he won’t be hunting game, he’ll be star gazing. He was so well behaved on our first outing and I loved his his gentle snoring beside me in the tent. Astrophotography has always been a lone pursuit for me, but no longer. Galaxy NGC2403 was our first co-production and is posted on the home page.
Being a pointer, can I teach him to point to the pole star?
April 26, 2024
January 24th, 2023
Country Life
‘Town Mouse’ from Country Life magazine paid a visit to my home in south London when I happened to have my telescope working away in the back garden. I didn’t realise it was going to result in a mention in the publication…
September 29th, 2023
PixInsight v Photoshop
I am learning how to use the PixInsight astrophotography processing software and have done a few comparisons. I've been using Photoshop solidly for a few years now and have spent literally hundreds of hours with it. Let’s see a a side by side comparison of identical data from my telescope processed in PS and PI, bearing in mind I am a complete rookie with PI. Here is an open cluster (Pleiades), nebula (Elephant Trunk) and galaxy (M51) to compare. It's all a matter of personal preference of course, but I like all three PI images best. I have to admit I was intimidated by PI due to it's notoriously steep learning curve. But the online tutorials by Luke Newbould linked below have been so clear and useful it has been fun so far. I am definitely a PI convert but perhaps ideally it should be combined effectively PS. It's not a simple case of one program being good and the other bad - they are both great - but PI nudges it for me. One key difference is that my images can seem waxy with Photoshop, but are dusty with PixInsight and have a crisper resolution. Ultimately I think the best way forward is to combine the two software packages.
September 24th, 2023
Could I really have been that stupid? er, yes
Even though I have lost count of the number of nights I’ve set up my telescope, I am not immune to making idiotic mistakes. Last week I travelled out of town to a dark site, as there was a rare break in the clouds. This involved loading the car, fighting through aggressive London traffic and carrying ten boxes into a field…. only to discover I had packed the wrong spreader for the tripod legs I had brought. You can see from this photo how this might have happened. Whilst they are not interchangeable, these two look almost identical. Well, that’s my excuse anyway.
Spot the difference
August 27th, 2023
Milky Way Timelapse
This week I completed my first Milky Way time-lapse sequence. It’s completely new to me, so the processing was pretty time-consuming with a steep learning curve. However, there are so many great tutorials on YouTube for learning how to do this and they saw me through. Now I have a workflow in place for next time.
I think my framing of the Milky Way could have been better, but maybe the final result is okay for a first attempt. The camera was pointing directly upwards at the Cygnus region overhead.
There are so many excellent tutorials online that I won’t give a blow by blow account of the process, but here are the settings that worked for me using a full-frame mirrorless camera (Canon EOS Ra).
I shot between four and five hours worth of individual 30” frames which seems like a long exposure when you aren’t using a tracker, but at 15mm focal length this turned out to be fine. As a guide I stuck to the ‘500 Rule’ where 500 divided by the focal length gives you the maximum shutter speed to avoid star trails. It’s not a definitive guide, but worked well for me.
The aperture was set at f/2.8 and I bumped up the ISO to 6400 to grab as much light as possible. The video runs at 24 frames per second.
When it came to processing, I used Camera Raw to adjust a master frame and copy its settings to the rest. I edited the video in Photoshop. Whilst it is best for stills pictures, Photoshop is fine for a short time-lapse sequence, for example with just three shots. It allows good image control and ‘Ken Burns’ panning and zooming to create dynamism. If you are already practised at using Photoshop for stills you have a head start with a familiar workspace. I can also recommend a neat piece of software called TLDF to eliminate flash frames.
The frames were shot at a super-dark Class 2 Bortle site on Canada’s Vancouver Island with no moon. The skies above this forest location were pristine and absolutely beautiful. I persuaded my wife Alixe to join me, even though this required rough sleeping on the reclined seats of a tiny car. She loved it so much she came back for another two nights. Sharing the night sky with someone you love is special.
There are more time-lapses from this location to come when I have had time to process them.
Thanks to musician Alexander Hawkins for providing an ambient track for this sequence. His links can be found in the ‘time-lapse’ section of this website.
June 18th, 2023
Elephant Trunk
I finally finished my Elephant Trunk nebula. This was mostly shot in my light-polluted London garden during a period of zero astronomical darkness, but I did spend a couple of nights in a Bortle 4 field just out of town to grab some frames of the very weak oxygen and sulphur data in this target.
This is actually my fourth attempt at IC1396 because I have never been happy with the results before. It was the first narrowband target I ever attempted, so here is the latest version with my attempt from August 2020 when I began.
The 2020 version looks poor, but I really loved it. I was just amazed that it was possible to capture something like this.
June 2023
August 2020
Below is my 2023 guiding graph showing the accuracy of the tracking. The red one from 2020 looks pretty horrific!
RMS error: 0.32
RMS error: 5.73
June 16th, 2023
Starry Surprise
The night sky is full of surprises. Admittedly, this is often because I am so preoccupied with shooting my target object that I don’t check what other visual treats are in store. Here’s one that took me by surprise. I was just about to pack up the telescope at 3.57am when Jupiter appeared, chasing the crescent Moon across the dawn horizon. An unexpected moment of beauty.
June 11th, 2023
Clouds
Clouds are the enemy of the astrophotographer. On a trip to the West Highlands of Scotland, they refused to budge and reveal the night sky. The only option was to film the clouds themselves. So maybe this one shouldn’t be on an astrophotography website? Although this might be a totally unconvincing justification, you can just see Venus making an appearance top left in the final few seconds!
June 7th, 2023
Gazing Upwards
Telescope technology has developed to the point where even an amateur backyard rig can be programmed to carry out an entire session with full automation - grabbing sub-frames, changing filters, focusing, meridian flipping and re-framing. All while you sleep.
Okay, sometimes you really need to sleep. But otherwise? Automated or remote sessions can mean you miss out on one of the great joys of astrophotography. It’s not all about grabbing those sub-frames. It’s also about looking up in wonderment.
Once my telescope is up and running through its automated session, I don’t want to sleep. This is the moment I can finally relax, crack open a can of beer and gaze upwards. After a few minutes my eyes adjust to the darkness and things begin to show themselves… the silvery path of the Milky Way. Magnificent Orion, manspreading across the southern sky. Sparkling Pleiades. A meteor, streaking like a firework. I once saw Venus, framed by noctilucent clouds in the warm glow of a nearly-risen sun, lining up with Mars, Jupiter and Saturn to reveal the planetary plane of the solar system. Adding to the drama, the super-bright International Space Station rose above the horizon and suddenly popped out of sight as it passed into the shadow of the Earth.
Often I just gaze upwards, unthinking. But the night sky can also provoke deep thoughts and questions about who we are, where we come from and of course the big one… are we alone? Much better than sleeping.
“Remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious” - Prof Stephen Hawking
June 5th, 2023
No astronomical darkness - what can we do?
Where I live in South London, at around 51 degrees north, there are a few weeks from mid-May to the end of August when there is no ‘astronomical darkness’. Sure, it gets ‘dark’ as most people would describe it, but from the astrophotographer’s point of view the sun doesn’t go far enough below the horizon for there to be proper darkness.
So should I pack up the kit and do something else? I just can’t face the idea of doing no astrophotography for several weeks. So here’s my experiment which is a work in progress.
With no astronomical darkness and heavy Bortle 8 light pollution in my back garden, I am trying to put together an image of The Elephant Trunk Nebula (IC1396). I can only get around two hours worth of data in a night, but I will just keep at it, hoping that I can build up something I am happy with.
Here’s the result so far. This is just the Hydrogen-alpha data with 72 frames of five minutes duration. The total exposure is six hours. I replaced my 12nm narrowband filters with narrower 3nm ones which work a lot better blocking out the light pollution. I will update on this when the moon allows for more progress where I can add Oxygen, Sulphur and colour.
Assisting me with my IC1396 experiment is Caspar astro-cat, pictured here on the garden wall contemplating the infinite expanse of the cosmos under a full moon.
