> A dream come true
Nowadays we are so into the globalization and technologies, that I can submit observation plan to a remote, professional observatory at the other part of the word!
Yes I can image the southern sky with a "telescope hosting" at Chile. This country is astronomer's dream as we have there mountain and desert with perfect dark sky and seeing conditions. I recently use El Sauce observatory trough telescope.live.
It was challenging and exiting to plan observation at souther hemisphere and then process real professional data in FITS format (by the way I do not like it as it is hard to
extract all the dynamic range from it. There is not so much good software that reads it).
The target I submited is very special for me. It is the minor planet Gabrovo (2206 Gabrova), named to my home town and discovered in 1976 by Nikolay Chernih.
I actually try to shoot it with my telescope but failed to recognise it (it turns out later that it was actually on the image), so I use the 60cm RC telescope of El Sauce observatory.
This a great step towards my scientific explorations. Thank you Galactic Hunter for letting me know for this platform :)
Here is Galactic Hunter youtube channel
Red more on page 18 of Amateur Astrophotography magazine
And here it is the first digital image of 2206 Gabrova
Moon at 45% illumination and 70x magnification. With aperture of 200mm,14,1 stops dynamic range, color depth of 23.7 bits at this image there are slight color variation on the moon surface that reveals it’s structure.
This is the beginning of my research on how dark the sky could be and what is benefit of a dark sky for astrophotography. I was inspired from those 2 sites. First one presents mathematical model of how dark the sky is.
You can find my last DSLR Astrophotography article in Bulgarian at page 76. I am sharing my last findings for this publication, Specially written for the Institute of Astronomy.
Satellites, cosmic trash or UFOs, the moving spots are everywhere on the sky. Typical satellite behavior is to reflect sun light. It should be yellow or white and could fade and shine due to its rotation.
If you have used DeepSky stacker to stack RAW files, maybe you have notice that the resulting image is poor of color saturation. This is because it has a higher number of bits then the display could show.