Pinwheel Galaxy - Brian Fontenot, Author

We finally had some clear skies during the new moon over a weekend, and I got the opportunity to take the Seestar S50 and my usual rig to the dark site for some long overdue astrophotography. I’m a little late writing about this, as this trip was in early June. If I had to summarize my experience with the Seestar, whether it’s from my backyard or the dark site, I could do it with one word: convenience.

The little bugger is lightweight. It connects easily to my tablet or phone. It aligns it self. It finds objects. And it starts capturing data. I set it to grab images of Messier 51, the Whirlpool Galaxy, which is relatively bright and easy target, and let it run while stacking 20s images. While it was doing that, I wrestled with getting my Celestron 1100 EdgeHD going.

The evening didn’t start great for me. I began setting up my tables and gear and realized I forgot my power supply at home. I needed it to power my mount, so that meant a return trip home and cost about an hour of time. Fortunately, a friend was out there and watched my gear for me so I didn’t have to break it down and repack my vehicle.

Warding off mosquitos (mostly) and trying not to step in ant piles, I got the hefty scope going and powered up with the Hyperstar and my trusty Canon Eos RA attached. The Astrophotography Tool App was spitting out live images onto my new laptop screen. But, I ended up wasting another hour and a half trying to align the scope over the Skyportal app.

I went through the three-star alignment process half a dozen times, even powering the mount down and restarting the app. I swapped from the device I intended to use for the Skyportal app to using my phone. Eventually, I realized I was misunderstanding the language of the alignment process. It starts on star 0, not star 1. So the alignment kept failing because I was basically aligning on my first star, Polaris, twice.

I was seriously aggravated, but I was able to get the big scope and my fancy DSLR snapping 30 second images of Messier 101, The Pinwheel Galaxy. During that ordeal with the setup, I kept checking the cheap Galaxy Tab tablet connected to my Seestar. I let the capture of the Whirlpool Galaxy run for half an hour. It was actually too much data. The picture below was what that looked like. I’m not sure how that satellite streak stayed in there.

Like with all the Seestar images, I was able to touch up the final JPEG on my tablet/phone with the basic photo editing tools (the light balancing slider is awesome). The result is pretty rich with detail.

I navigated to a variety of other targets, seeing what else I could capture. The same friend that watched my gear suggested I try comet, Comet C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS). The comet was in the Seestar object library. It found it quickly and I was getting data back after only a few minutes. The image is a little grainy after 6 minutes of imaging, but still pretty good after a little on-device touching up.

Comets aren’t large objects, so I thought to try a planetary nebula next, Messier 97, The Owl Nebula. I could capture it with my big scope with my ZWO planetary camera (assuming the USB cable doesn’t interfere with the Celestron Wi-Fi controller… that’s worth it’s own blog) and process it on my laptop, but that would have meant removing my DSLR, the Hyperstar, the counterweight, and reinstalling the secondary mirror just to capture this one target.

I moved onto some objects recommended to me in the Seestar app. Messier 27, The Dumbbell Nebula, came up and the Seestar started spitting out images. This is only after 3 minutes of 20 second images.

The last object I went after I had never seen or heard of before. It was listed in the Seestar app as being above the horizon, so I gave it a shot. It was so cool looking, I tried point my big scope at it to image it with the DSLR, but the object was not in the Skyportal app library. My astronomer friend suggested that was probably because Celestron wants you to buy the premium SkySafari app, which has a much larger library. I haven’t done so, yet, but I probably will before I go out next time. The Seestar got it, though. Check out NGC 6334, The Cat’s Paw Nebula.

In the time it took my to capture about an hour of data from the Pinwheel Galaxy with my big scope, I managed to grab at least five images of various deep sky objects with the Seestar. Here was the result of my Pinwheel imaging. It didn’t come out nearly as well as it could have, because my darks, for some reason, didn’t have the same pixel count on the files as my lights and Deep Sky Stacker refused to stack them. I also skipped taking flats. I didn’t want to disturb the others at the site with a bright white light, and the mosquitos had started eating my back. It’s also worth mentioning the field of view for the Hyperstar I’m using is huge. The Pinwheel Galaxy might take up 1/20 of the actually image space. This makes zooming in necessary at the cost of resolution.

While this is probably my best image of the Pinwheel Galaxy so far, I have to consider how much of a pain in the butt it was to get it. Meanwhile, the Seestar tooks images all night without an issue. And the only setup I needed to do for it was to take it outs of its case, attached the tripod, put it on a small folding table, and connect my tablet to it. It even has its own power supply, which remained above 50% battery life after a night of imaging. My tablet used even less of its battery life.

The Seestar just rocks.

The planet parade is starting soon and I’m looking forward to being able to setup at my home and really give my ZWO camera some work. Saturn’s ring are about to flatten relative to us and disappear from view. And Mars should be pretty close for some decent imaging if the Saharan dust stays away.

The next target I hoped to shoot was Messier 101, The Pinwheel Galaxy. I made my first attempt from my backyard, relatively early in the night. The Pinwheel Galaxy was low to the northeast and among a fair bit of light pollution. I couldn’t even get it to pop out on my tracking scope using the PHD2 software to live stack multiple, multi-second exposures. It was just too washed out. At a magnitude of 7.86, where the higher the number the dimmer the object is (Orion’s Sword is a 4), capturing this sucker would require a better sky.

I packed in my gear that night, frustrated, but a couple of weeks later with a cold front blowing through, one of the members of my local astronomy society wanted to take a trip out to the society’s dark site. Open to members, I had only been out to the site once before. It’s about 25 miles west-ish from my house and encompasses a levee that sits between a cow pasture and the Atchafalaya Basin.

Setting up on the levee at the “dark site”. Facing west-ish. The Atchafalaya Basin on the left and the pasture on the right.

There are alligators down in the water, roaming cows sometimes, and random locals and sheriff’s deputies going up and down the levee road at odd hours. It’s definitely darker compared to my backyard skies, but there’s sadly plenty of light pollution to the west, a clear indicator of the city’s existence. And more pollution has encroached around the edges as developers drop down new subdivisions.

I’d have visited the site more often on my own, except for a couple of reasons. One is I don’t trust my forward-drive sedan to handle steep dirt, levee roads. If I get stuck out there, I could be stuck a long time, alone. Second, it’s hard to feel safe on your own out there and you really shouldn’t. People, whatever there intentions, come and go through the dark hours of night, and you do need to be aware of the wildlife. Not only are there crocodiles, but you have to be aware of bears, coyotes, and just about every animal that makes the Basin it’s home. It is also within cows to be mean, too.

The third reason would be bugs, which I hear get pretty awful, but I’ve only been out on cold nights. An experience for another time, I suppose.

But how dark does it get? The first time I went, I was a little disappointed. A front had come through so the night was pretty clear, but not perfectly so. I don’t remember if there was moonlight or not. Back then I didn’t realize how much of a problem moonlight could be. So, I could see a lot of stars and some nebulosity of the bright nebulas like Orion and The Pleiades.

This second trip, I got out to the site maybe half an hour before sunset. Traffic was awful on the Interstate and it took longer to travel there than I hoped. A cold front had passed through but the area was dry and on the levee where we do our observing, a constant cold breeze blew ALL night.

The sun slid a little lower as I unloaded my car and started setting up my gear. That’s when things got eerie, but in a logically fascinating way. The sky directly above looked a starless black relative the deeper blues and pinks of the sky around it. And it was as clear as I had ever seen a sky be. Staring up at it was unnerving and gave me this weird sensation of vertigo, like I was going to fall into the sky! I reasoned it must be because I had nothing for my eyes to focus on to give me any sense of depth or perspective. It clearly had nothing to do with Outer Gods and the myriad of other terrors in various stories by H.P. Lovecraft. All of that said, I don’t know if anyone else has ever experienced this before, but it was pretty cool.

Eventually, the other society member arrived and we set up our gear. Both of us had targets in mind for the night, but neither wanted to be out into the early a.m. hours. And when it got dark, it got as dark as I’ve ever seen it as an adult. I could just barely make out the faintest glow of the Milky Way with my naked eyes (and contacts). That’s how dark it got!

I collected a few hours of data (exposures) and spent the night freezing my butt off while I snacked on jerky and mixed nuts. The other issue with setting up at a remote site to do astrophotography is you have to find some way to occupy your time while your camera and laptop do the hard work. I brought a pair of binoculars with me to try to view some other objects, but ultimately relied on conversation and an audio book, “Magelord” by Terry Mancour. It’s book 3 of the Spellmonger Series.

I got glimpses of the exposures being snapped and was thrilled with the clarity I was seeing in the images. I actually shot these at ISO 1600, instead of 800, to try to bring out more detail of the galaxy. I also did 6-minute exposures. Normally, 5 minutes is sufficient, but at the dark site 6 minutes was making things pop.

While the 6-minute exposures worked better than they had any right to with the wind, the higher ISO setting came back to bite me. I didn’t have my trusty porchlight on the levee to use as a light source to take flats and a poor combination of rainy weather and a busy schedule have kept me from being able to set up my gear again, at home, to take those flats. My scope has a ruler on its focusing tube, so I can see precisely which focused I used at the dark site to capture my flats the next time I set up. I did do some quick and flat-less processing of my data as soon as I got home and stopped shivering. I just had to see what I had!

Messier 101, Pinwheel Galaxy — Messier 101, The Pinwheel Galaxy, processed quickly without flats. Data collected at dark site.

In the meantime, I recycled my most recent flats from my work on the Messier 51, The Whirlpool Galaxy. They aren’t a perfect representation of the flats I would have gotten that night at the dark site, but they should be close enough as far as focus and dirt go. The set up and focus would be the same from my Whirlpool Galaxy imaging. The problem, however, is I took those flats at ISO 800, not ISO 1600. Still, I’ll share the results below.

I plan to reprocess this image from scratch when I can set up again and grab some new flats. I forgot to balance the color before I did the color-preserving star mask. So, the stars are a bit red-shifted thanks to my Eos Ra’s sensitivity to infrared light.

Unfortunately, as the season marches on, I’m going to lose some of my better targets until the fall. So, I’ll have to figure out what to shoot next, when all I really want to do is take another crack at Messier 33, The Triangulum Galaxy and Messier 31, The Andromeda Galaxy, again.

Tag: Pinwheel Galaxy

Taking the Seestar S50 to the Dark Site for the First Time

Shoulder to the Pinwheel