RASC - St. John's Centre
Members Photos

Would you like to see more than what's possible in a regular eyepiece, but don't have the patience for full blown image capture and processing? Electronically assisted observing could be the answer. You can use simpler equipment/setup in combination with readily available (ie. free) software to enhance your observing activities.

The following collage of images were all achieved in a single evening (within about 2.5 hours) @ Butter Pot Park on October 17, 2015. Equipment used included a CPC1100 on a wedge, Canon 6D DSLR camera and a laptop. Software used was BarkyardEOS and AstroToaster. There was no guidescope or guide camera required. Also no computer control of the mount/telescope was involved (laptop only used to capture images and run AstroToaster). The dark skies helped, but a light pollution filter can help achieve near the same results, if you live under light polluted skies.

Astrotoaster will stack/process images "on the fly". Most of the images used for each subject were 15sec each (for instance, NGC7331 was result of 16, 15sec images). There are free image capture applications out there that could be used instead of BYEOS.

Objects in order from left-right, top-bottom: Dumbell (M27), Ring (M57), NGC891 Crescent (NGC6888), Veil - Eastern (NGC6992), Cocoon (IC5146) NGC7331, Running Man (NGC1975), M78

Click on image for full original photo.