So, for this months Astrophotography problem I set “imaging the Asteroid 4 Vesta”. Now vesta is magnitude 8 in the intervening time, a bit dim, however seen in binoculars and doubtlessly image-able with pretty peculiar cameras utilizing stacking, a strong software program approach the place a number of photographs and be combinted to boost dim objects.
The largest problem is definitely aiming your digicam, though the horns of the bull, Elnath and zeta Tau
(Tianguan) are pretty apparent, they didn’t actually present up effectively at the back of my canon IXUS not the cell phone. So I needed to do a little bit of guess work in aiming and do a variety of take a look at photographs to get Elnath and zeta Tau in view.
For the Canon IXUS “level and shoot” digicam I took 10 x 1 second exposures at ISO 3200 and stacked them in Deep Sky Stacker, This wasa easy “drag and drop” process. I used to be restricted to 1 second exposures as a result of Canon tousled their lengthy period exposures (something over 1 second defaults to 50 ISO, which is ineffective). The stack revealed a number of of the anticipated information stars (and a few satellites) however no unambiguous Vesta. I am going to attempt once more with a deeper stack (20 + photographs, and a few darkish frames for noise discount if the climate clears up earlier than the Moon comes out once more (across the 12-Thirteenth).
For the Samsung s24 I took a single 10 second shot at ISO 3200, this *simply* revealed Vesta (see picture above), so if the clouds go away I’ll attempt stacking a number of photographs with the S24.
Free Stacking software program contains Deep Sky Stacker and Autostakkert for Home windows, and StarStaX for macOS.
Labels: 4 Vesta, Asteroid, astrophotography
