Day: 25 March 2023

Viewing report 8th & 9th March 2023 Tenerife Los Gigantes Villa

Between 9pm and 12:30am both nights

View from the Villa facing South West

A week with the family in Tenerife afforded me the opportunity to test out for the 2nd time this year the Skywatcher 100 Esprit on the AM5 harmonic mount with the ASIAIR in control and the ASI2600MC with a new Antlia Triband RGB Ultra filter.

Travel Rig

Over the period of the week I picked 2 nights when I wanted to observe. Because of the clement environment of Tenerife and the Canaries and unlike the UK, you can decide when to go out and image as almost all nights are clear, the weather warm, around 22 deg Celsius and the bed not that far away from the pool. Given when we were on holiday which was decided around other activities, the Moon phase was Full.

Night time flood lit pitches

The one problem with renting a villa is when the owners will not pinpoint where on a map it is. There is normally a reason. In this case it was because of the proximity of the local sports buildings. A swimming pool to the front of the villa including a floodlit pitch and 2 more flood lit pitches to the left and right of the villa at the rear.

Impact of flood lighting

So yes it was bright, very bright, as can be seen on the villa party wall.

Full Moon and Floodlights

So given all that light pollution I was then pleasantly surprised how well the final image came out of the singular target I chose. NGC 2244, the Rosette Nebula.

NGC 2244 Rosette Nebula – 6 hours

I exposed for some 75 x 300s over the 2 nights. All the images were on the West side of the Meridian to make it easier without a flip.

Crop of cluster

I found stacking 75 images instead of just the first night of 30+ images gave a much smoother background and nebula, much less noise and easier to work with the data.

Wider crop including dust

So not a bad photo for Full Moon and 3 flood lit pitches. I look forward to testing out the kit at the top of the mountain later in the year under New Moon dark skies.

Viewing report & Filter Comparison 8th March 10pm 2023

I wanted to compare 2 filters this evening as I have recently purchased the new Antlia Triband RGB Ultra filter. The original filter I had for the one shot colour was the ZWO Duo-Band filter.

M42/M43 Filter Comparison

As can be seen above the difference without a filter is quite dramatic (Top – No Filter, Middle – Antlia Triband RGB Ultra, Bottom – ZWO Duo-Band). There is more broadband light captured. The red nebula is less apparent and the background sky is much brighter.

Running Man Nebula Filter Comparison

The above image from the running man nebula, NGC 1977 demonstrates that without a filter a reflection nebula comes through best (Left – No Filter, Middle – Antlia Triband RGB Ultra, Right – ZWO Duo-Band). The ZWO filter gives a more green image over that of the Antila, which in itself reduces the reflection nebula but does start to pick up some of the red emission nebula within the Running Man.

Inverted background sky and stars

The inverted background above gives a sense of the reduction in star luminance that is allowed through without a filter.

This image shows the background with the details of the readout from each of the pixel across the colour channels. Here you get a sense of the green seen in the ZWO filter is less the extra green coming through, moreover the lack of blue being allowed through. Without a filter the background sky is swamped with all colour channels.

With no filter the full effect can be seen above, much brighter background, nebula less colourful and less detailed.

With the Antlia filter above, the final single image I personally find is much more pleasing.

Finally with the ZWO filter you can see quite clearly the green effect.

So in summary I would say the ZWO filter is better than no filter except when imaging reflection nebula, however the best filter is the Antlia filter when paired with my one shot colour ZWO ASI2600MC camera.

Below is a random drawing of a scientist with a Tak laser beam.