u/AnakixSpace

Very far away, at the edge of the Solar system, there's a dwarf planet Eris, that many heard of, but never seen or captured with a telescope. The problem is that it's very faint (magnitude 18.5), and constantly moving across the sky, so you can't do multi night imaging. I recently captured Makemake with Dwarf 3 and thought that I can capture something even dimmer. Although Google said that you can capture this object only with aperture starting from 8 inches. I was planning to try capture Eris for over a month now, waiting for clear moonless night, so I could take full advantage of my bortle 5 area. So on 3 october, I deployed and polar align my Dwarf 3, and created imaging plan. Because Eris was not in atlas, I added a nearby star, HD 10955. At the morning I processed the data. Because Eris looks similar to a star I used a Siril script for asteroid and comet finding, and Eris was exactly at the center of this dimm dot I marked on first photo. I also used Stellarium to confirm that it is actually Eris. This dot as actually looks slightly blurry, because of 5 hours of motion. So, Dwarf 3 is capable of capturing Kuiper belt objects, despite its tiny aperture!

Telescope: Dwarf 3;

Exposure: 5 hours;

Subs: 120s 70gain;

Bortle: 5;

Processed in Siril

I wonder is it degraded in anything after year of use, because visually it looks perfect, lens doesn't have any scratches, maybe tracking get less accurate after i hundred hours of tracking objects across sky. If I remember correctly it has warranty for 2 years, but it probably will work much longer

My best image of full Moon.

Telescope: Dwarf 3;

Stacked: 999 frames;

Processed in AstroSurface

Telescope: Dwarf3, exposure time: 3 hours, subs: 30s 50gain, bortle: 6, processed in Siril, 2x drizzled for extra resolution

Now its new Moon and Milky way Cygnus region is staying high most of the night, so I spent whole night imaging it.The image is drizzed, so you can see more details and theres more separation between stars. Also I suggested feature in dwarflab app to make transition between wide angle and telephoto lens images, so it will look like traveling toward object

Exposure: 7 hours;

Subs: 90s 50gain;

Bortle 5;

Processed in Siril;

Setup: Dwarf 3 wide angle lens

To everyone who thinking that their Dwarf telescope has small focal length and unable to image galaxies, look at this! Or even more, download it to view in full resolution, without reddit compression and view galaxy structure up close. I imaged this galaxy less than a day after a supernova exploded in it, without even knowing that. And exposure time is not that crazy, only 4 hours! The key elements that made this image so good are low light pollution, no Moon, target being high above the horizon, and 2x drizzle.

Exposure time: 4 hours;

Subs: 120s 70gain;

Bortle:5;

Telescope: Dwarf3;

Processed in Siril

Recently discovered method how to change colors of the nebula to something that resembles Hubble images. So, emission nebulae have 3 most prominent emission lines: Ha-deep red, SII-deeper red, OIII-white. At least that is how they look on normal RGB color photo. But Hubble palette works differently, scientists map SII to R(red), Ha to G(green), OIII to B(blue) so that is how SHO palette is created. Because Dwarf 3 captured this nebula with narrowband filter, I only had Ha and OIII. So I used Siril script to convert Ha to green and OIII to blue. After that I correrted colors using normalization script, so green will look more like yellow. As I said because filter is duo band it doesn't include SII, so image only has 2 main colors. But Dwarflab Draco has SII filter included, so with it you can get all 3 colors and their variations! (if you can afford it of course).

Target: Monkey head nebula

Exposure: 2 hours

Subs: 60s 100gain

Processed in Siril

Ok, so I have two processing results from capture done in 29.08.26. Both are stacks of 150 images, both are supposed to show colors of the Moon, but the first image is processed in PIPP + Autostackert + Siril, while the second one processed in AstroSurface + Siril. Despite they both stack the same data, the colors looks to be inverted between this images. Best example is area near bright crater on top left, on first image its brown, on the second one, its blue. Which one is more accurate and what is the explanation for difference in colors?

1 thousand frames, 1/5000s 0gain, manual processing done in Astro surface.

You can download both images to compare details without reddit compression.

Stack and processing of 900 frames done in Astro Surface

This video was taken with Dwarf 3 telescope in 2x zoom with 1/50s exposure length. It was very foggy and mostly cloudy. Moon was about 5 degrees above the horizon. According to Cosmic atlas app it was perfect 1.0 arcsecond seeing, and I can confirm that it was much better than usually. I also have a 90mm refractor telescope and I barely saw any thermal distortions, compared to other nights. So I recorded this video, although 35mm Dwarf 3 shown less detail than 90mm telescope. So can I measure a seeing conditions in arcseconds from this video?

Wings of the Dumbell nebula is a very dimm structure compared to bright core, that I almost overexposed by pushing the gain up to 150

Telescope: Dwarf 3;

Exposure: 5 hours;

Subs: 60s 150gain;

Duo band filter;

Processed in Siril;

Bortle 5;

Compressed for reddit

Recently, I sew a post about imaging Mineral Moon, the Moon with high saturation. So I decided to try capture something similar. I tried doing this earlier, but the result was unsuccessful. Because it was full Moon and night was clear, I decided to try again. After some research, I understand that I need lots of frames, at least 150, according to Google. But to make sure and not miss the opportunity, I dicided to capture as much as possible. So 28 august at 10 PM, I polar alighted the scope, pointed it at the Moon and start capturing. Because the app caps the max amount of frames at 999, I had to wait for it to capture all 999 frames, stop the capture, start again untill I get 10 stacks of 999 frames. Thats 9990 frames and 40 gigabytes in total. Capturing one stack took about 8 minutes, and capturing all 10 took about 1.5 hours. Then comes the processing. I didn't accurately measured how much time I spent transfering files and processing the resulting image, but it was at least an hour. I used AstroSurface for stacking and Siril for saturating the final image. So you can see that this time, result was successful! Clear skies!

Settings used: 1/125s 0gain, telescope: Dwarf 3.

Telescope: Dwarf 3;

Exposure: 4 hours;

Subs: 60s 150gain;

Processed in Siril;

Bortle 5;

I heard that increasing gain will decrease noise, but also decrease dynamic range. So I set the highest gain that darkness of sky allowed and imaged this nebula for 5 hours. The result is amazing, lots of stars and dark nebula visible and very little noise, so I had to run denoise script only 1 time and not 2 or 3 like for other projects. But google did not agree with me, it says that 100gain is maximum I should use. Could I get better image if I used low gain, like 60, or pushing gain up is good strategy? Comment what amount of gain you use, I would like to hear suggestions.

Telescope used: Dwarf 3;

Imaging time: 7 hours;

Subs: 60s 70gain

1.8x1.8 mosaic;

Stitched in Seti Astro, the rest of processing done in Siril;

Duo-band filter;

Bortle 5;

Edit: the original result was 25 megapixels, but I had to downscale it for reddit

First image is my processing, second is stellar studio.

Imaging time: 7 hours

Subs: 60s 70gain

1.8x1.8 mosaic

Stitched in Seti Astro, processed in Siril

Bortle 5

Duo band filter

Captured with Dwarf 3

Finaly finished capturing 2 distant dwarf planets with Dwarf 3 telescope. The animations show these objects motion in 5 days. Each image is 1.5 hours of exposure, 60s 70gain, astro filter. Processed in Siril, for object identification I used Stellarium. These objects have visual magnitude of about 17.5, which as google says about the limit of this telescope.

Captured by Dwarf 3, 50 frames stacked

1. original, straight from dwarf 3, unedited

2. more contrasted, more red

3. yellow-orange, more realistic, since Sun was high above horizon and not really affected by atmosphere

4. most realistic, based on what I saw with my eyes through eyepiece