Whirlpool 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.

It’s been really hot lately, so I haven’t felt like going out much to do more astrophotography or even any observing. I get enough of the heat during the day from running and gardening. However, I did make a couple of trips out to the dark site when weather conditions were favorable in the spring and earlier in the summer and was able to gather some data for Messier 51, The Whirlpool Galaxy, and Messier 64, The Black Eye Galaxy.

The spring trip to the dark site was the more pleasant one of the two, at least initially. The weather was cooler and conditions were decent and the bugs hadn’t come out in force, but it did get chilly toward the end of the night.

A look at the Atchafalaya Basin from the dark site levee.

I set up my rig like usual and was determined to take another crack at the Whirlpool Galaxy. I had no problems aligning my rig and getting the focus sharp. The PHD2 was holding the scope on target. I was pretty excited to gather at least 2.5 hours of crisp images of this pair of galaxies.

But as the night progressed, I ran into problems. The first was one of the locals driving by in a pickup truck slowly and with their bright lights. With the angle of my scope, the light broke PHD2’s autoguiding. I noticed it fairly quickly though and was able to stop my camera and redo the autoguiding calibrations.

The next thing to happen was I didn’t notice when the external power supply for my laptop ran out of juice. Once it did, my laptop’s power scheme reverted to “battery mode” and powered down the system after 20 minutes. I caught this a little late, lost some images to streaking, but got everything going again.

The final thing to go wrong came with the dew. The humidity was pretty high and the dew settled hard and fast on the cooler metal of the scope. The lenses and mirrors appeared fine, but my focuser started slipping. I didn’t catch this for quite a while and lost even more data to all several images being completely out of focus.

I got to survey the damage the next morning and realized I lost about half of the data I hoped to gather. But the result wasn’t terrible and was definitely an improvement over my last attempt, even with the minimal amount of processing I did.

Messier 51a, Whirlpool Galaxy. ~1.5 hours of 6 minute exposures at 3200 ISO with Canon EOS Ra.

My next trip and my only summer trip to the dark site so far was more productive but less pleasant. I arrived earlier than I intended and waited in my car for the sun to set lower because the horseflies were swarming. I could hear them hitting my card like heavy rain drops. They thankfully went away as the temperature dropped and the sky got darker, but the mosquitos came next. The repellant I had was only so effective, so the best I could do was to keep moving and to keep spraying.

Setting up my rig went even smoother than last time and I was up and running pretty quickly. The only issue I ran into was one I should have thought of. My equipment is relatively old and I’m not using a software package that unifies tracking, autoguiding, and imaging, like the Astro Photography Tool (ATP). That’s definitely something I need to learn.

So, as my target for the night, The Black Eye Galaxy, slipped closer to the horizon, my mount went below its meridian and PHD2 either didn’t detect this or wasn’t set up to perform a meridian flip. In layman’s terms, the mount was turned too far to one side and needed to flip around to keep tracking the object.

I did see what was happening and was concerned my camera would eventually hit the tripod. I knew I’d have to stop everything and let the mount re-locate the object to get it to flip. And I did do all this without too many issues. Since I don’t use plating (again, learning ATP would have helped with this), I had to manually reframe the galaxy in my images to be as close as possible to what it was before I made the mount flip around. Of course, I didn’t find out until the next day that many of my images were ruined with the mount becoming unsteady on the object once it went too far past the meridian. I ended up with image after image of streaky, squiggly stars.

But there was some saving grace to this. I learned about the “Drizzle” feature in DeepSky Stacker, which “is a simple algorithm that creates an image that is larger than the images in the stack and interpolates between pixels to ensure it reproduces fine detail in edges despite the effects of stacking transformations.”

One of the astronomy society members that was out there with me told me about it but couldn’t recall what it was called. When I sat down to stack my images, I went through all of the settings in DeepSky Stacker to find whatever this feature was and I’m sorry I hadn’t been using it all along. It’s CPU intensive, but I have CPU power to spare.

Despite losing about half of my data, again, I got a decent result. And I’m almost curious enough to try re-stacking some of my earlier images with Drizzle x3 turned on.

Messier 64, Black Eye Galaxy. ~1.5 hours of 6 minute exposures at 3200 ISO with Canon EOS Ra.

Between my trips to the dark site, I also caught the lunar eclipse that occurred mid-May. Setting up my trusty 8″ Orion Dob in my own backyard with my phone’s camera and no computerized mounts or laptops, while listening to an audiobook, and sipping some bourbon is a lot more relaxing than hanging out on a levee with cows and bugs. If you look closely at this image, you may be able to see the little object heading toward the moon. It might have been a meteorite or a satellite. Whatever it was, it’s not an artifact in the image.

Tag: Whirlpool Galaxy

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

Spring and Summer Galaxy Shoots