A couple of nights ago I let my #Dwarf3 stay out all night with a stellation mask, which bagged me about 8 hours worth of #Antares , #Messier4 , and other goodies, including the Antares #ReflectionNebula.
I ran it through the #DwarfLab #StellarStudio tools, and then did a bit more cleanup in #Snapseed and #GooglePhotos - about 15 minutes work.
I'm pretty darned pleased with the results.
A quick snap of the sun with my #dwarf3 and the solar filters. There was some high, hazy cloud, so it's not very sharp, but you can see sunspots.
A quick 30 min test of my #dwarf3 telescope on M81 & M83. No post processing, just a straight stack of 120 X 15s subs.
I'm pretty happy with this. I'll have to have a test against my big telescope soon. #astrophotgraphy
Last night I left my #Dwarf3 out all night.
After a few hiccoughs, I targetted The Southern Pinwheel - #NGC5236 or #M83, for about four hours.
After running the results through the DwarfLab destar routine, I did a little cleanup in #Snapseed and #googlephotos
And this was the result. I'm pretty happy!
The Eta Carinae Nebula.
This was taken with the new DwarfLab Dwarf3 smartscope, one of which I recently acquired. I brought it to Australia with me on a current trip, and shot this Nebula from Bortle 6 skies, using the built-in Duo Band filter..This is 30x15 second frames, stacked and denoised within the Dwarf app. Mild saturation increase in Lightroom.
I took this back on the 10th of March.
It is our old friend the Eta Carinae Nebula.
This time with a SII/OIII filter (thanks for the suggestion, @malcircuit !) and 120x90s@80 for the exposures. Then I ran it through the Dwarflab star removal tool, and post-processed the result in Snapseed.
I was not going to post it, but it came up as a background on my office screen today (long story), and I had not realised just how much detail it had.
So last night we put our #Dwarf3 telescopes on the studio roof at the back of the house, loaded up some schedules, and let them go all, night.
Inspired by @malcircuit 's post a little while ago, one of the targets I programmed in was Markarian's Chain, a string of galaxies.
This is 170x60s@gain 60, post processed using the automated online denoising tool that Dwarf have made available, and finished off in #Snapseed
Recently the Dwarflab app got a very interesting update in the beta stream. But not for telescope control - no this is in the album side. It now has options to upload your images to temporary AWS nodes for automated reprocessing. Star de-trailing, full star removal, and advanced denoising.
Most of these can be handled by well-known and publicly available neural networks, which is probably what these tiny AWS nodes are running.
The real fun, though, begins when you combine the results.
In this shot, I have taken the starless version, and added to it a heavily darkened an contrasted denoised version. This has the effect of reducing the stars, while maintaining the details of the nebula.
A bit of deblurring and sharpening, and this is the result.
C72, The Eta Carinae Nebula, Dwarf3, 60x90s@80, OIII/SII filter. Recomposed to reduce stars, and post processed in Google Photos.
I ordered a #Dwarf3 telescope to take to Bhutan. The telescope is back ordered and probably won't get to me before I go.
Annoyingly, the tripod for the telescope arrived yesterday.
They taunt me.
So last night I had a go at some fairly challenging targets.
This post is not about them, well it is, but it is really about what I did while my Dwarf3 was working on things that should really be left to a proper dark sky area, not the middle of suburbia.
I started the night with my Dwarf3 having a go at Barnard's Loop, using the wide angle lens. This is a massive structure, but very faint, and after 20 frames at 90s, I gave up, because the light pollution just killed any hope.
While that was running though, I pointed on of my DwarfIIs at the Tarantula Nebula, and got a solid two hours out of it before I crashed and shut everything down.
This is the result after some smoothing and enhancement in Google Photos.
480*15s@80
Over the last week I've been going out every couple of nights and shooting C/2024 G3 Atlas as it slowly disintegrates after the front fell off.
Here are a couple more of my Dwarf3 shots, along with one from my phone. One is very heavily processed to bring out the side-tails.
20-50 frames of 15s at 80.
Last night we went down to Scarborough Beach, and hunted for C/2024 G3 Atlas - the current brightest comet.
It was still to close to the sun to see in the glare, but a bit after sunset my Dwarf3 had just enough dark to calibrate, and picked it up just 1 degree above the horizon!
The telescope had just enough time to snap 10 frames and stack them.
The skies finally cleared so I managed to try out my new #Dwarf3 #smartscope. Very impressed!
#M45 #Pleiades 15x60s, gain 60
and #M31 #Andromeda Galaxy 192x15s, gain 60
Aurora alert for Western Australia, including Perth!
We took this shot about 30 minutes ago from Como!
This also answers the question "Can a Dwarf3 image the aurora?". And the answer is "yes".
Last night we (myself, @leece , and her mum) saw in the New Year with a star party for family and friends.
To make it as accessible as possible, we found a park in Como that is almost completely dark, despite being only a couple of kilometres from the CBD. Adjacent to this park is the Como Croquet Club, so we hired their clubhouse as a base of operations.
Two days before, we got a panicked message from the club, asking if their members could have a gathering of their own - which was fine with us, as long as they did not want to turn on the field lights. So we had twenty odd people turn up, along with about the same number of Croquet Club members. As it turns out, the son of one of my workmates played in high school, and got his family into playing a game, much to the delight of the rather elderly club members.
We started proceedings with a couple of shots of the sun and the current sunspots (Me: "This is what it looks like right now!" 16yo daughter of a work mate: "Well, actually it's what it looked like 18 minutes ago." Me: Applause), and then ate dinner while waiting for the sky to go dark. At 8pm, we got our Dwarf3s aligned, and synchronised their schedules for the night. Then we fired up the DwarfIIs, got them running on some ad-hoc targets, and called everyone out, including many of the Croquet Club members, who were also interested.
We opened with some spectacular views of the Orion Nebula, the Sculptor Galaxy, and the Horsehead Nebula. We also started on a shot the Helix Nebula. Most targets we scheduled 30 minutes for, before the Dwarf3s would move on to new targets.
Aiding us in our explanation of what was on display was @ariaflame , a physicist from Murdoch Uni, and a good friend. We talked about the way clusters and nebulae are formed, how stars aged, and just how far everything is.
Around 8:30, the last of our guests arrived - workmate and Perth Observatory volunteer (and former professional astronomer) Steve Ewing, who had with him a 10" traditional telescope. By about 9pm he had it up and running, and was showing off Saturn and Jupiter, which are too small for our smart telescopes to resolve meaningfully. Steve's enthusiastic explanations of planetary dynamics were a highlight of the evening.
Sadly, as 10pm rolled around the sprinkler systems on the oval started up, and we had to rapidly tear everything down before they reached us. As Leece said - "Rain stopped play."
Despite this, it seems that everyone enjoyed themselves, and we got some great images to share with everyone after.
And that is how we saw in 2025.
#astronomy #StarParty #Astrodon #NYE2024 #Astrophotography #2025 #dwarf3 #dwarfII #SmartTelescope
Difficult to observe with an optical telescope, Barnard 33 - better known as The Horsehead Nebula - is a dark dust cloud overlaying the HII bright nebula IC434. To view it directly normally requires very dark skies, clear air, a large (14" or larger) telescope, and an Hb or Ha filter, making it one of the more challenging objects to observe.
For the Traveller fans, it is 422 parsecs away - or about 70 weeks if you could take a direct Jump 6 path to it. It is also just under 1 parsec across - that's a 1 hex object. IC434 is less than a parsec behind it, and is over 4 parsecs across, making it a 4 hex object. Nebulae are one thing (of many) that Traveller tends to gloss over, simply because they are so huge! There is also the matter of such regions being star nurseries, typically with ten or more stars within a single hex. These will all be too young to have any planets, let alone habitable ones!
Back to the real world, though.
With Electronically Assisted Astronomy - in this case provided by a Dwarf3 smart telescope - it becomes an easy object to capture. A mere 37mm lens and a built-in Ha/OIII filter gave a visible image within a few minutes, and an hour of stacked images provided this view.
Dwarf3, 57x60s@80 Dual-band filter. Post processed in Snapseed and Google Photos to bring out the colour and details.
Early this morning I took this shot of the Tarantula Nebula.
56x60s@80 on my Dwarf3.
I only stopped because of something weird.
The green line is clearly a satellite - not a problem. Annoying, but not a problem.
The question is "What are those broad red streaks?" They seem to have appeared in a single frame, and so were less than 60s in duration, but they are very broad. If all three were aligned, I'd say it was a passing jet, but the bottom one does not line up. Despite that they all parallel to each other. And to the satellite path.
Does anyone have any ideas?
