11 abr 2026

m94

 With apologies to all the residents of m94, note to self to do this properly. It needs loads more time. Hopefully then there'll be colour as well as the outer halo. Alas, the calima hit around midnight, after only 90 minutes. 

galaxy m94 in canes venatici
atr533c on gso203    26xmiin @ hcg100

lan

                                                    

192.168.3.

astro1          1
cocina         19
cocina2        21
bmax-b4         5
z420           13
z440           15

7 abr 2026

m82 m3

 Not the same session. One with sv220, one without. Always wanted to get the Ha of m82. This seemed to do it without the usual processing fight...

galaxy m82 el cigarro in ursa major
atr533 on sv550-122    70x4min @ hcg100

globular cluster m3 in canes venatici
atr533 on sv550    34x4min @ hcg100


6 abr 2026

sv550-122 focus

Filter

Step

Bin

Expose (s)

ir/ 260/nada

17

1

3

220/uhc

20

2

10

Filter focus routines with the 122/f7 in fields with few stars.
Current focus steps ~3010

the barren star field surrounding m82 needed...

... a bigger hammer than usual
this was 8s exposures
we settled on 10s 

one frame arriving

4 abr 2026

xeon cores

 Xeon CPU E5-2696 v2 @ 2.50GHz in a z420 museum piece: 12 cores, 24 threads. It's not fast, but it certainly beats my Ryzen 7 Beelink for astro processing at a fraction of the cost. It also weighs thirty times more!

Here we are using 24 parallel processes during star alignment in SetiAstroSuitePro's stacking module.

homography star alignment with 24 parallel threads




















z420 settings
Here are 70 fits frames calibrated and stacked in around 5 minutes... and processed in less than that. Fed up of staring at a comnputer screen!



27 mar 2026

march galaxies

Two good nights. Guiding averged 0.40 arc-seconds with quite small stars. Not too bad for a cheepo refractor I suppose.

sv550 with, 1.0x field flattener: 122mm f7: fl 854mm 

       
looking north


looking east


now with focuser


galaxy m106 and friends in canes venatici
atr533 on sv550    60x4min @ hcg100

galaxy m63 girasol in canes venatici
atr533 on sv550    52x4min @ hcg100

globular cluster m3 in canes venatici
atr533 on sv550    34x4min @ hcg100


m3 with a less in-your-face approach