A productive four nights with Voyager

Your Shot with Voyager
#1

After weeks of poor weather the skies finally cleared here near Melbourne (Australia) and on a new moon weekend as well. Given how poor the weather has been I set up both imaging rigs on all four nights to get everything I could. Voyager worked flawlessly on both setups on all four nights with dragscripts managing everything from the initial plate solve and sync to sky flats (For the ASI2600, the 294 needs fixed length flats) and parking the mounts at the end.

All images shot with Voyager, integrated in Astro Pixel Processor and post in Photoshop.

First up was the inevitable image of M42, this is 100 X 10 second subs and 37 X 600 second subs, layer masks used in Photoshop to reveal the core without losing the faint dust. This was shot with my ASI2600 OSC camera and Stellarvue SVX80T on an ioptron CEM70G mount. Shot over three of the four nights.

M42-for-forum
M42-for-forum3921×2598 3.97 MB

To fill in the last night I shot the Witches Head nebula with the same equipment, I need to reframe this to eliminate the light from Rigel.

Witches-head-forum
Witches-head-forum3200×2107 3.79 MB

With my old C925 SCT on an AZEQ6, using an ASI294 MC Pro camera I shot Fornax A and B

Fornax-A-B-Forum
Fornax-A-B-Forum4098×2773 3.85 MB

Finally and with the least data, NGC1398.

NGC1398-Forum
NGC1398-Forum2901×1803 2.66 MB

7 Likes
#2

Hi Paul,

congratulations … really happy finally you have a nice time with our common passion.
All the images are a great result with plenty of color and details. Congrats again and thanks for using Voyager.

All the best
Leonardo

#3

Thanks, I might have to eventually replace the SCT with something more suitable for imaging as it lacks that last bit of sharpness, but I am asking quite a lot of a scope which was not designed for astropohtography, it really is a visual scope taken well out of it’s comfort zone.

I was really happy with how Voyager performed over the nights, I have some recovery blocks set up in case cloud interrupts the guiding which worked perfectly on the night that a band of cloud passed through, both rigs had about a 40 minute pause in the flow of images and examining the logs shows that guiding failed and Voyager parked the mounts, then after a few retries (I set a ten minute pause in the loop to allow passing cloud to clear) they continued on imaging until the end of the night…

1 Like
#4

Would you be willing to share your scripts to help a newbie get started? (Newbie to Voyager, that is, not to astrophotography or programming/scripting).

#5

I can, but I had better add some comment lines so it is obvious what each block is intended to do. Hopefully I will get a chance to do that this weekend, then I can post up the main one I use.

#6

I would appreciate it, thanks!