Cygnus is positioned above my head when I turn on my Seestar S30 at around 10PM, which means it’s moving away from the bright lights of Taipei City while Cassiopeia is rising above the buildings. Not yet the best time to collect data for Andromeda and Triangulum galaxies, but I get to set my sights on new targets!
Seestar 4K Mode
To turn on 4K, you have to stop the Live session, access the settings and toggle it ON, then start again. I can’t really tell the difference. I’m under Bortle 6/7, and I only take 20 minutes of data each night otherwise it’s inefficient, so 2x drizzle isn’t noticeable, but I still turn it on—what’s the worst that could happen?
Progress Update: Learning Siril and Graxpert, M16 Eagle Nebula
I have now collected 174 minutes of data for my summer target M16, or Eagle Nebula. And here’s how I have progressed with tinkering with Siril and GraXpert. I couldn’t get the smooth denoise, but I think I am able to stretch more data and see more layers around the Pillars of Creation. What do you think?
Siril x Graxpert (Left) vs Seestar App (Right)
Mineral Moon
I finally learned how to produce the image of “Mineral Moon!” When you’re taking video, make sure to tap Raw File, but warning – this will consume a lot of storage space, which I didn’t know and had to clean up on the fly! I take only about 3 minutes of raw video then stack it in the Seestar app. Which leads me to another warning – stacking takes a long time, more than 20 minutes! Check it out in my IG post at the bottom of this post.
Cassiopeia
The mother of Andromeda! It’s still low in the sky, but it has new deep space objects I wanted to take a peek at, and I can’t wait for it to get out of Taipei’s lights! Here are new DSOs added to my database:
- NGC 7635, Soap Bubble Nebula
- NGC 281, Pacman Nebula
Cygnus
It’s a mix of new targets and data collection!
New:
- IC 5070, Pelican Nebula
- NGC 6946, Fireworks Galaxy (but very very faint)
Collected more data:
- IC 5146, Cocoon Nebula which is looking more and more like brain, too
- NGC 6992, Eastern Nebula which is looking more and more like Alien in the movie
- NGC 6888, Crescent Nebula which is looking more and more like brain
Who’s excited to watch the Blood Moon Eclipse in September? Because we are!
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That’s it for now! Stay tuned for the Blood Moon Eclipse post, because we are traveling to Taitung just to watch this celestial event.
🌹
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