Sunday, June 16, 2019

Because it was such a beautiful evening last night, I decided to take out my 102mm, f7, 714mm fl Explore Scientific and with my ZWO ASI120MM camera, try to get something of the moon and Jupiter. I took quite a few shots of both as it was so pleasant outside. Here is Jupiter with Ganymede's shadow on it using Registax6 and Photoshop CS5. I'll look at the moon images later to see how they came out.
Keith

Sunday, June 2, 2019

Result of using a Duo Band Ha-Oiii filter

Al Ernst writes:  
Club members might be interested in this experiment.

I recently purchased a duo-band Ha-Oiii filter. It was installed on a STL4020cm one shot color camera and used with the telescope at St Joseph HS observatory in Metuchen, NJ where the light pollution yields an SQM of 18.3.

Thus, a worse case scenario.

Images were tried of a star cluster, a galaxy and a planetary nebula ~ M97.
Only the latter came out well.

Club members with DSLRs or OSC cameras might want to give this approach a try.

C-14 f7 at St Joseph HS Observatory in Metuchen, NJ
SBIG STL4020cm with duo-band Ha-Oiii filter
23x5 minutes
1x1 bin
-20°c
Processed in Nebulosity and Photoshop by Al Ernst and Rick Kelly

Thanks for the heads up Al.
I also read in the current Sky & Telescope that Lumicon has released their "new and  improved" Generation-3 Oiii filter.... and the price seems right too ~ $100 for the 1.25" version and $200 for the 2 inch! Here's Al's image using the impressive duo-band Ha-Oiii filter.   - Keith