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Telescope/Camera: Seestar S50

Filter: None

Exposure: 181x10sec (30min) saved as FITS

Average Light Pollution: Bortle 8, fair transparency

Lensed Sky Quality Meter: 18.5 mag/arc-sec^2

Software: Nebulosity, Photoshop

This is one of my absolute favorite objects to image and I was curious whether I could capture it with my Seestar S50. The faint 15^th magnitude star marked by the red arrow is the distant quasar APM 08279+5255, the most distant object visible in amateur telescopes with an estimated distance of 12 billion light years! To put this in perspective the Universe is estimated to be 13.8 billion years old and the light from this object has been traveling for 12 billion of those years. The sun is relatively young by comparison, only 4.6 billion years old. When the sun was born the light from this quasar had already been traveling for 7.4 billion years, give or take. At magnitude 15.2 it is a fairly easy photographic target, though locating the exact field can be a bit of a challenge. APM 08279+5255 may also be glimpsed through a large telescope at a reasonably dark site. Imagine that, seeing the farthest observable object in the known Universe with your own eyes! Now that would be neat! In the meantime, I can take a peek at it from my Bortle 8 backyard with my little Seestar S50.

M42, The Great Nebula in Orion, Seestar S50, 10s x 30m

This is a quick example from my shake-down tests with the Seestar S50. The image on the left was the raw live stack saved as a FITS and converted to a TIFF using Nebulosity. This preserves all of the source data from the live stack in a lossless format suitable for later processing and analysis. The middle image is the displayed real-time live stack showing the enhanced image which is saved as full-scale and thumbnail JPEG. The image on the right is the same data as the source image on the left, but processed using Photoshop, saved as a TIFF and finally as a JPEG. The illustrates that the Seestar does a great job grading, aligning and combining the source images, and saving a high-quality raw image in a lossless format. This is not only handy for later processing but does a great job showing what an object really looks like before the image is processed. The real-time enhanced image looks excellent and in some ways a tad better than my processed image (primarily a bit better contrast than my processed image, though that’s a matter of taste). And finally, the processed example shows that the raw live stack is well suited for stand-alone processing. For my initial evaluation I was also saving all of the raw source images so that I could stack them myself, but so far, I have found that the live stacked image works so well I no longer save the individual source images unless I have a specific interest in doing so.

Next up… I am going to see if I can pull photometric data from the raw live stack. The Seestar is so capable and easy to use it should make an excellent platform for obtaining photometric images of variable stars and asteroids. I’m hoping that ZWO adds a user-defined target capability to the app to make it easier to locate objects that are not in the current database.

There’s always one more thing! 🙂

Enjoy!

Telescope: Astro-Tech RC8 @ f/8, Orion Atlas EQ-G

Camera: Canon EOS Ra, Baader Mk III MPCC, GSO IR Filter

Exposure: 98×1/400 sec, ISO 1600, saved as RAW

Seeing: Fair, 3/5, haze

Software: Backyard EOS, Nebulosity, Autostakkert, Registax, Photoshop

I took advantage of the clear evening last night to pull and all-nighter imaging run. When I stepped outside this morning to check on my gear I found that the sky was closing in and my scope was buried under a thick coating of frost. I was about to begin the process of covering my gear up and saw that the moon was in a hole in the overcast just large enough to grab a quick set of images, so I went back inside, slewed to scope over to the moon, set the exposure, and free-ran the camera until it started to fade, ending up with 98 usable frames. The result was kinda neat with the setting sun just barely catching the eastern rim of Copernicus. A pretty neat end to a very long night.