Category: Articles

Cygnus Rift Widefield

Last night I tried a widefield approach with the camera gear I already have. I used the Laowa macro lens at 100mm and F4 capturing 2 hours at ISO 800. The EQ mount was an Explore Scientific Iexos 100 PMC Eight. No calibration frames used in WBPP in PixInsight. There was plenty of coma creeping towards the middle for quite a distance, A little of this has been cropped but the remainder has been…


Our Spotty Sun gives a Spectacular Multi-Colour Night Show

We have just passed the Summer Solstice on 21st June where our Sun reached its highest point in the sky and gave us the longest day of the year. But back in May the Sun kicked out more than just sunlight. You may have seen in the news that around the world the night sky was lighting up in multi colours. On the evening of May 10th you may have even been out yourself…


Long Distance Gibberish

Image Credit: https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov In 1977 when at college in Coventry I met a very nice fellow student and my world changed. In 1982 we got married. Since then on odd occasions she says I talk gibberish. She’s usually right. Another world changing event occurred in 1977. The launch of the space probes Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 that took advantage of a rare lining up of the outer planets. These craft delivered many surprises…


Chronology of a Cornish Aurora 10/11th May

It’s been a while since we saw a Auroral display like this in Cornwall, but on the night of 10/11 May, many club members from as far as South and West in Newlyn, to as North and East in Carnewas were treated to one of nature’s greatest lightshows. But’s let go back a few days and show the progression of Sunspot AR3664 which produced the spectacular display we saw a few days later. We…


Twinkle, Twinkle GINORMOUS Star

Looking up at a Chinese night sky Confucius poetically said: “Stars are holes in the sky from which the light of the infinite shines.” Scientifically, we now know that the stars are actually giant balls of hydrogen converting to helium in a nuclear fusion process and kicking out huge amounts of heat, light, plasma, particles and radiation in the process. But is our Sun a “normal” size and “type” of star and how does it compare…


Technique for Combining Continuum and Emission Wavelength Data in Astrophotography

by Dean Ashton, April 2024 There are many examples where we image an object that is predominantly a full continuumspectrum object, a galaxy or a reflection nebula for example, but it also contains emissionline nebulae components. Capturing both a full spectrum RGB image and narrowbandemission image which are then combined may reveal more information about the objectand create a more interesting and complete image. With so many new advances in Pixinsight processing methods, one…