Orion Nebula With DWARFLAB DWARF II

160-frame 15-sec exposure stack of M42, the Orion Nebula, taken from my backyard last night with a DWARF II. I performed denoise and sharpening in Topaz. Click on any image for a gallery view.

Steve here. I finally setup the DWARFLAB DWARF II smart telescope I got this past Spring. The results are amazing!

This is from my backyard in East Boothbay, ME, USA, which is a Bortle 4 light pollution zone (rural/suburban transition), according to https://www.lightpollutionmap.info/.

The nebula is the middle "star" of Orion's sword. You may recall my failed attempt to get M42 with my DSLM setup. The image above is what I was trying to achieve.

The DWARF II is an integrated system incorporating telephoto and wide angle lenses, imaging sensor, tracking mount, computation, and image storage. It automates all the steps of astrophotography: alignment, plate-solving, focus, target go-to, tracking, image capture, stacking, and stretching.

Just set it on a tripod, point it in the general direction of the sky, and push a few buttons on the companion phone app. The scope identifies what it's seeing, rotates and elevates to the target, and begins taking images and accumulating them in the stack.

Part of what's fascinating is that the app shows a live view of the currently-accumulated stack. So you can watch the image improve in real time, one 15-second frame at a time. It's jaw-dropping to watch.

I also found out that my wife's Chromebook can run the Android app. This is what it looks exposing the 41st frame:

Purists may not like this. I'm reminded of Ian Malcolm in the movie Jurassic Park: "I’ll tell you the problem with the scientific power that you’re using here. It didn’t require any discipline to attain it."

But in a package about the size of a couple of paperback books, this makes incredible astrophotography accessible to everyone for a modest cost, under $500. There will be those who don't go any further. But this will definitely light the fire for some people, pushing them to learn more. They will learn the discipline.

Its small size makes it extremely portable, so you can always have it on hand even if you have other setups.

A new DWARF 3 model is coming soon. This excellent review with video by Trevor Jones shows it and explains how the scopes and app work.

Optically, the DWARF II is a 25mm aperture periscopic telephoto lens with a focal length of 100mm. The image processing stacks the raw images and crops them to an equivalent focal length of 675mm. The microSD card stores all the raw images along with the final stack. That allows you to do your own processing as well as the automated processing.

Here's a comparison of the field of view (FOV) between the raw and final image, including the William Optics Redcat 51 and 71 that I'm currently drooling over, using the Astronomy Tools FOV calculator. It's centered on a rendering of M42.

The white circle is the raw image capture, and the yellow one in the center is the equivalent final image, matching my actual image. You can see it's a significant crop. But it's good to know that even such extreme digital zooming can produce such amazing results.

For further comparison, here's the final image in GIMP, followed by one of the raw images. The center bounding box shows roughly the final crop dimensions. Again, you can see it's a significant crop, using just a tiny fraction of the image. I had to zoom the raw image to 400% to get an equivalent view matching the final image.

Which just makes me want a Redcat even more. Yeah, a much more complex setup. But if the tiny aperture of the DWARF II can do this, imagine what the much tighter FOV of a Redcat will be able to produce! In fact, you don't need to imagine, just checkout the AstroBackyard posts that mention them.

After M42, I got this 77-frame stack of M45, the Pleiades. It would have been longer, but the battery ran out.

I also intended to get M31, the Andromeda Galaxy, after swapping the battery, but the sky had clouded up too much by then. I got it the next night, along with the Horsehead Nebula, also in Orion!

For scale and location reference, below is a shot I got of Orion and the Pleiades this past October 25th with my Canon R100, 18mm, ISO 400, 120 seconds, mounted on my Star Adventurer. This field of view is roughly the expanse of sky we can see with our naked eyes.

The Orion Nebula is the middle "star" of his sword. The Horsehead Nebula is just off the leftmost star in his belt. The Hyades cluster in Taurus forms a distinctive V shape between Orion and the Pleiades (and no, the V isn't the bull's horns).

I had bought the bundle that included the Neutral Density (ND) filters. That allows me to shoot sun images. This is a 15-frame stack from earlier in the day that I cropped further. This will be a great way to track sunspots.

I plan to use the AstroBackyard Image Processing Guide and Alan Dyer's Nightcapes and Timelapses e-book to do my own processing of the raw images.