Deep Space Photography Part 4

 April and May turned into an interesting month as we began using both the Askar SQA70mm and an Askar SQA106.  While not a huge difference from the SQA55 the SQA70 nevertheless has 22% more focal length. We also decided to accelerate our plans of getting a second complete setup due to the availability of gear and the cost increases in tariffs. To that end we now have an Askar SQA106 as well as a second ZWO 2600MC Air and a AM5N mount.  The SQA106 is 508mm and has approximately 40% more reach than the SQA70 which should help us with our reaching further into deep space targets.

M16 "Eagle Nebula"

Nebula season is just about over in North America and we’re into Galaxy season which means our targets have changed.  The Nebulas we were able to capture with little effort has slowly drifted from our skies replaced with other targets that require early morning captures (midnight to 4-am).  The Galaxies now come into view early evening to early morning.  This means we have somewhat of a choice, early morning for Nebulas or mid evening (8-pm) to early morning (midnight) for Galaxies.  All we need is clear skies and a strong desire to forego sleep.

M58 approximately 68-million light-years

We had several nights of dark & clear skies around the same period of no moon.  The moon was rising very early in the morning and setting early afternoon which made for perfect conditions. We took advantage and captured 8-nights consisting of 300-seconds captures for a total of 30-hours and 360 captures. Our target was M63 or the “Sunflower Galaxy”.  We captured M63 using the SQA70 as while the SQA106 arrived we were still waiting for a few bits and pieces before we used it.

M58 prior to crop and annotation

Using the first night as a testbed we stacked and processed 48-images in Pixinsight, saving the image as a 16-bit TIFF then opened it in Photoshop where we processed it further.  The final processing was done in Topaz Photo AI before sizing back in Photoshop saving the image as both a TIFF & JPEG. The original image was cropped in at 2-1 in Pixinsight and resized from 100 to 200.

M63 "Sunflower Galaxy"

We’ve already written about just how well the SQA106 performs so we won’t rehash it here.  Both the SQA70 and 106 are excellent telescopes that we look forward to using for some time to come.

NGC4565 "Needle Galaxy" 6-hours

We encountered an issue with our computer after we upgraded the graphics card.  Seems we didn’t have a large enough power supply and while processing (or attempting to process) the images we encountered blue screens of death.  We had enough issues with attempting to stack and process that we had to throw in the towel and upgrade the computer once again.  We decided to go a little nuts and make certain we were “future-proof”. Here’s a partial list: Intel Core Ultra 9 (24-core) processor, ASUS ROG Z890 motherboard, 192GB DDR5 memory and the GeForce RTX 5090 32BG graphics card. We have 7-slots for nvme drives which are fully occupied (27TB total). We also have a 1500w power supply so no more power issues. We also decided to update our monitor to a Dell 40” curved monitor.  The computer arrived June 5^th and we had it completely up and running June 7^th, testing a 6-hour (72-images) capture of the Needle Galaxy. This might be a little overkill however the machine handled the total processing beginning in Pixinsight then Photoshop and Topaz AI without any issues.  The computer in question is the Digital Storm Velox.

Needle Galaxy Panorama (prior to crop)

We're headed to a very dark sky area soon so stay tuned.

Sandy & Don