It seems I have never been completely happy with my Astrophotographs page. Namely because it is technically art and I am too methodical a person to know how to best display art. I think I have arrived at a good way of displaying my images - tabs with the type of object and the images shown side-by-side in large thumbnail squares. 

From the timestamp of the previous blog post, it is evident that I have not been attending to the website as much as of late. With all the work I have had the past several months, it is no surprise to find that I have not been updating it much. All I have done since then is finish off three images and updated the Astrophotographs page with them. The following are the three images:

A long stint of clear nights around the New Moon allowed me to make quick work of this beautiful target located at the bottom of the IC1805 Heart Nebula - the NGC896 Fish Head Nebula​. I had previously imaged the entire IC1805 Heart Nebula with my other telescope, so I wanted this new image to be a narrowband image of just this small area. 

At no appreciable loss of quality, the screenshots on all my tutorials have been changed from PNG format to JPEG format. Since Weebly's (my website host) server can at times be a little slow, this was done to ensure screenshots load faster (especially if you open them full-size). The total screenshot filesize for some tutorials has dropped to under 1/3 of the original (the narrowband example tutorial dropped from 299MB to 86.4MB). The only tutorial that still uses PNG screenshots is my PixInsight pre-processing tutorial, which ironically goes up in total filesize on JPEG format. 

​A long time coming, a new PixInsight tutorial has been finished. This one is on a subject many have asked me about for over a year - Narrowband Hubble Palette. To date, my tutorials have only covered how to make bi-colour narrowband images but not Hubble Palette narrowband images, despite me having made several of my own. The omission is now rectified with the addition of this new tutorial, which you can read by following this link. 

​​A few days ago, PixInsight version 1.8.6 was released, with a quick bugfix release following it. At the time of typing this, we are on version 1.8.6.1448. This has brought with it several new things, highlighted in detail in this official forum thread. Following installation, you will need to reactivate your license as they made changes to the licensing system. The purpose of the tutorial update however was because SubframeSelector was officially made a process rather than an included script. 

Though I did not post about it at the time, pretty much the day after finishing my previous image on the NGC2146 Dusty Hand Galaxy, I finished working on my NGC7814 Little Sombrero Galaxy image. Lack of time and my new-found addiction to the game Battlefield V have driven me away from posting about it, until now. 

Despite the apparent inactivity on this website, imaging is always on-going, so long as weather allows. Last night I was able to finish work on the NGC2146 Dusty Hand Galaxy, a target rarely imaged by the looks of it. At least there only appears to be a handful of images of this target online. It is pretty close to Polaris so it can essentially be imaged all year round, all night long. 

Despite appearances on the website and general workload, I continue to be pretty active, when the clouds allow. The past few days have been on and off due to a storm lingering around Spain, but thankfully I have been able to run my equipment for quite a few nights. I finished capturing data for my IC5146 Cocoon Nebula image, captured in (R+HA)GB. The end result is shown below. 

With clouds being on and off the past several nights, I have been fortunate enough to finish work on my NGC6888 Crescent Nebula image in Narrowband Bicolour Palette. For this image, I therefore only opted to capture Hydrogen-Alpha and Oxygen-III data. It is an object I have imaged numerous times before but never at this focal length, and I am astounded as to how much fine-structure I was able to capture. 

​On my last blog post, I mentioned that I was working on the IC1396 Elephant Trunk Nebula once again, but this time with the much higher imaging focal length of 1592 mm, though again in Narrowband Hubble Palette. The image was finished shortly after the blog post was made, and work began on another image - a 2-panel mosaic of the NGC7331 Deer Lick Group and Stephan's Quintet, this one in LRGB. Both finished images are shown below. 

Seeing the date stamp on my last blog post is a little bit disconcerting, considering that I have indeed been actively imaging the past several months regardless of the lack of updates to the website. Half-way through my summer holidays, I seem to have found the effort to make some updates here. I will start with my latest images of the M101 Pinwheel Galaxy and the NGC4038-NGC4039 Antennae Galaxies. 

After imaging from e-EyE with a short focal length refractor for nearly two years, I finally decided it was time to retire the Takahashi FSQ-85ED of 450 mm focal length for the longer focal length Altair Astro 8" RC of 1625 mm focal length. I have had this telescope for several years but only used it once, locally in Gibraltar. In anticipation of eventually installing it at e-EyE, I bought a focuser tilting plate and Howie Glatter Laser Collimator a year and a half ago. All I needed for installation at e-EyE was a motorised telescope cover with flat field panel. Given the lack of options and availability of such an instrument from Optec Alnitak Flip-Flat for this aperture, I went for a Gemini Telescopes SnapCap 250mm​. 

This hard-to-catch target, the Antennae Galaxies, presented a very small size in my current field of view, but they were still worth the imaging time. My plan is to change my current Takahashi FSQ-85ED telescope for my longer focal length Altair Astro 8" RC telescope at the end of this month. However, I needed a time-filler - a target to image to not waste the clear nights, and this was it. 

Despite appearances on this blog, I have actually been actively imaging the past several months. On average, I have had three different targets being imaged each night, automatically going from one to another as the hours pass. These images have been posted to AstroBin, Flickr, my Facebook page and even on this website, just not on this blog. This blog post serves to rectify that. The following are all four new images:

Over a year since I finished capturing all my data on the M31 Andromeda Galaxy, I have decided to re-process everything to make a new image. I initially really liked the result I got, but over time I have come to shy away from it because frankly, it was over-processed and had far too much Hydrogen-Alpha enhancement. This gave the image too much of a magenta tone to it. After many hours pre-processing all my data again and then trying out different colour calibrations, I have come to an end result I am very happy with. 

Two months after starting, I have finally been able to finish imaging my large, 8-panel mosaic of Cygnus, including the IC1318 Gamma Cygni Nebula and the NGC6888 Crescent Nebula. This project has been finished in good time as Cygnus itself is starting to disappear off the Western horizon significantly early into the night these days. This started as a narrowband bicolour image but a friend convinced me to capture Sulphur-II data as well, so here we are. 

In the numerous years I have been doing astrophotography, and indeed in the one and half years I have been doing it remotely, this is my very first image of a dark nebula, the LBN603. I was expecting a weak signal from a dark nebula so I expected that perhaps 15 minute exposures would be better than 10 minute exposures. Indeed other images of similar targets showed me people pushing the exposures for longer, so I did the same this time. 

After hours and hours of imaging work done on the Veil Nebula over the past month or so, the image is now complete! This image comprises a total of 90 hours of exposure time, in a nine-panel mosaic with 180 exposures, each 30 minutes long. 

My PixInsight tutorial update continues including features introduced in version 1.8.5. This time, I have updated my tutorial on colour-calibrating images to include the new process PhotometricColorCalibration, which works by plate solving your image and determining a true​ white reference for it. 

Following PixInsight version 1.8.5's release, I am proceeding to update some tutorials. The first update has gone to my lengthy tutorial on pre-processing images in PixInsight. The update has added the new LocalNormalization process and feature into the pre-processing of images. 

PixInsight 1.8.5 was released today, bringing with it a number of good updates to the platform. Everyone who owns a commercial licence for it will have received an e-mail notifying of the release. As always, you will have to uninstall your current version, download the new version from the website and install it separately (you cannot update to version 1.8.5 via the auto-update system). 

After a number of months without updating Tweet Remote Control, I have produced a small update to version 1.5.2. This version is simply a maintenance version to ensure compatibility with the latest API references. 

​Finally, after about two months of on and off imaging due to the Moon and some rain, imaging work on these targets is complete. I was originally going to make this a single panel image of just the NGC4565 Needle Galaxy but ended up making it a standard two-panel mosaic that also included the nearby NGC4559 galaxy. 

Imaging work has now finished on M81 and M82 Bode's Nebula, which was imaged in L(R+HA)GB, as per my usual for galaxy targets of this apparent size. This image is a single panel, rather than my usual multiple-panel mosaic.