With all the recent issues I have had with setting up a telescope I decided it was time to move with the times and purchase a smartscope. For various reasons I opted to buy a Dwarf 3 scope and this cost me £459 from First Light Optics. It comes with two lenses - one telephoto and one for wide angle. The telephoto lens has an aperture of 35mm and a focal length of 150mm, whilst the wide angle has an aperture of 3.4mm and a focal length of 6.7mm. The respective equivalent focal lengths (which I assume are compared to a standard 35mm camera) are 737mm and 45mm. It has a Sony IMX678 sensor. What I liked about the Dwarf is that it has a standard 1/4 inch tripod screw fitting and so I could set it up in the garden on my sturdy Manfrotto.
I didn't get to use it right away because of the poor weather but then on Friday (the 19th December) we had a good clear night with no moon (it was one day to new moon). I have leveling bubbles on the head of my Manfrotto and this worked very well with no issues in the initial set up. Everything is run from an app on your phone and, as with anything new, it took a bit of time to get the connection sorted and to figure out how to start a session of observing. The beauty of it is that once the phone is wirelessly connected I can run everything sitting inside in the warm. There was no problem there.
For my first target I decided to do something obvious until I was more familiar with the controls and so I picked M31 (the Andromeda galaxy). The app has an atlas and you can search for the object you require. I set the Dwarf running with auto parameters and was slightly perturbed when it was scheduled to take 999 images of 15s each, so over 4 hours of observation. I was under the impression that the number of images it would take would be appropriate to the object being targeted, so I wasn't keen to do much else but let it run. However, after about three hours of integration, I thought there must be a way to stop the process and there was (a long press on the shoot button). I was also confused as to whether the scope stacked the data as it captured new images and it does, so I did do further stacking in Mega Stack which wasn't necessary. Once the final stacked image has been acquired the picture can be processed in Stellar Studio to give you a nice noise-free image.
Here is the result of 536x15s (2 hours 4 minutes) of integration:-
The images that are captured are usually 3840x2160 pixels in size in telephoto mode but due to image rotation during the exposure, the post processing has cropped this to 2068x1720 so some of the outer edges of the spiral arms are lost. The two satellites of M31, namely M110 (top) and M32 (bottom) show up nicely as do the dark dust lanes of the spiral arms and regions of blue star formation at the outer edges of the galaxy.
It is interesting to compare this processed image with the raw stacked image produced at the end of the observation. Here is a 500x500 pixel area from each for comparison:-
The one above is taken from the image before processing in Stellar Studio and the one below after:-
There is quite a considerable difference between the two! The stars have been sharpened significantly, the noise has been removed and the colour rendition improved. I definitely could not do this sort of thing in Photoshop myself! Having said that, I don't think there is anything there that wasn't in the original image even though the noise reduction is supposedly AI powered.
Having had a go at M31 and it not being too late in the evening, I decided to make the most of it and try to image something I have never tried before and that is IC1805 which is known as the Heart Nebula. This large emission nebula can be found in the constellation of Cassiopeia east of the 'W' arrangement of stars. After 346x15s (1 hour 26.5 minutes) I obtained this image:-
Again this image has been cropped in post processing so the full shape of the 'heart' can't be seen. In the centre of the image is a cluster of bright blue stars called Melotte 15 and these stars are so powerful that their light is causing the surrounding gas to ionise and then to recombine and emit red light (the H-alpha line). I was very pleased with this image and even though this telescope has a very modest aperture it clearly can do what I would struggle to do with a larger telescope. I am looking forward to photographing other areas of the sky and other suitable targets. It was well-worth the investment.
All text and images © Duncan Hale-Sutton 2025
No comments:
Post a Comment