Finding targets to get enough subs for astrophotography

When doing astrophotography you usually need to get at least certain amount of light subs to stack and get a reasonable overall signal-to-noise ratio.

With Telescopius you can see a list of Deep Sky Objects which will be high in the sky enough time for you to get enough subs. To do this:

  • Go to the DSO Search page

  • Enter your astrophotography session time limits. In this example, we’ll use the astronomical sunrise/sunset and seize the whole night.

  • Now set the minimum altitude you’d like the targets to be when imaging, and for how long. Let’s say you’d like to image targets when they are at least 40 degrees above the horizon and take at least 60 5-min subs, this means roughly 300 minutes or 5 hours. So the minimum altitude inputs would look like this:

image

These settings will end up showing you objects which stay at least 5 hours above 40 degrees between the astronomical sunset and sunrise.

You can also play with the search parameters to filter objects transiting North/South, or East/West.

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It would be really useful if Telescopius was able to give an indication of the relative amount of Ha/Oiii/Sii emissions in a narrowband target. Not sure how you’d get that data (crowd-sourced?) but it would help with planning a session.

Thanks for your suggestion @skyrunner! That’s actually on the roadmap, hopefully coming soon. In fact I’d like to suggest different sky surveys in the Telescope Simulator depending on the object you are seeing.

I’m not sure how to get that data either just yet, I’ll have to do some research, any suggestion is welcome :slight_smile:

Try contacting Greg, author of Sky tools 4…
Or Robin Glover, author of Sharpcap…

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