Imaging Jupiter with C6N

Jupiter turned out pretty small with the ED80, so this time around I decided to the bigger scope – the Celestron 6″ Newtonian. With its 150mm main mirror, it clearly shows more detail and zooms a bit closer due to its native 750mm focal length. In this image, I got some “onion ring” artifacts, which […]

Nikon True Dark Current Hack

I’m having some difficulty with my flats. After integrading the masterflat and stacking using DeepSkyStacker, I noticed two dust motes even more pronounced than in the original light frames. After some helpful insight from cloudynights (https://www.cloudynights.com/topic/556028-trouble-with-flats-that-overcorrect-my-lights/), I was finally steered in the right direction. It appears quite a few Nikon cameras including my D3200 do […]

Building a Flat Frame Box

Stacking images to increase SNR (signal to noise ratio) is a fundamental task of astrophotography. Aside from the light frames, which are the actual image data, there are also 4 types of calibration frames: Bias, Darks, Flats and Dark Flats. In order to remove vignetting and any uneven field illumination caused by dust or smudges found […]