One of my best astrophotos with my Nikon D5300 was of the Elephant’s Trunk Nebula. I didn’t use any filters and I found that the small details were very interesting to study. All of the major details in the Elephant’s trunk are present in both images. The L-eNhance filter seems to bring out even more interesting details. As the Elephant’s trunk stretches upwards you can see that the D5300 image without filters grows vague. The QHY294C+L-eNhance filter image maintains it’s details much further up the Elephant’s trunk. The stars were…
Year: 2021
Nikon D5300 vs QHY294C
In 2020 I bought a QHY294C and had lots of opportunities to test out this dedicated cooled OSC astrocam. Up until 2020 I had been using a Nikon D5300 with was HA modified by Kolari Vision. The D5300 and QHY294C are 14 bit cameras. The Ha modification did improve the camera’s sensitivity and I noticed more detail in faint galaxies. I decided to start putting together some comparison images. The images presented here used master DARKs, FLATs and BIAS. The Bubble Nebula was my first comparison. This is a cropped…
Focus or Guiding causing high FWHM?
I am revisiting some of my astrophotos to clean them up for publishing. In many cases it’s becoming obvious that my stars are not as sharp as they should be. I struggle trying to determine whether the issue is focus or guiding. I always focus using a live 8-bit video stream and autofocus to yield the smallest stars. When I look at my photos later I notice that the FWHM values vary from night to night and yet, in comparison, my guiding is fairly consistent. If FWHM varied with guiding…