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M42 – 20200116

It’s a bit rough around the edges, but that is because I didn’t crop it – that would have meant losing some other bits where there is interesting detail. The rotation of the image frame is due to the light frames having been taken on an Alt-Az mount, with short image duration to avoid issues with field rotation – however the frames when stacked clearly reveal the rotation, and requires brutal cropping. This was constructed from about the best 30% of 150 10s frames taken as OSC on a Nikon D500, 8″ ACF 2032mm f/10 SCT. Software: APP, PS.

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Allsky camera is live

Well, it is finally up! The allsky camera is in position and live, feeding images and video to this website. It doesn’t have a full 180-degree field of view, but it also doesn’t have black triangles in the corners with nothing in them. That does mean that the South Celestial Pole is pretty close to the bottom of the frame, but a wider lens is an upgrade for another day now. Probably the only thing I am a bit bugged by is the street light out the front of our place – which is not in the field of view – does shine onto the dome of the camera housing, which is almost unnoticeable when the dome is clean, but when the dome gets covered in dew, it washes out the view significantly. 🙁

I will be posting a YouTube video before long showing the construction of the allsky camera.