My First Time Catching Uranus

I tried to find Uranus a few nights ago, but the bright nearly full moon made star-hopping impossible. Tonight I realized the weather was clear and there was no moon in sight, so why not try again.

With no moon star-hopping was a breeze, Stellarium made it simple.

There is no detail on Uranus so I’m not looking for a very long video, just enough to clean up some of the camera noise. I ended up taking a roughly 30 second video, which I figured would be fine. Exposure was manually dialed in with the gain as high as I could go to keep shutter speed (and blurring) to a minimum.

I was using my 4x barlow lens and ZWO ASI290MC camera. The video was broken into individual frames in PIPP, and I had to manually throw away any blurry frames. For some reason autostakkert had a hard time with that. I then put my remaining good frames into autostakkert and did some final sharpening in Registax with wavelet filters.

Before finishing I tried to see if my camera could zoom out enough to see the pleiades, but sadly I can’t. In one last ditch effort to see something before running back inside I pointed to the Orion nebula down low on the horizon in the trees. To my amazement I actually got a pretty good shot!

This is probably a 15 second video, stacked in autostakkert, and adjusted in darktable.

Nebula are extremely difficult with untracked telescopes, but this is more cloud structure than I’ve ever managed before. I’ll have to give this another shot next time I go out!