Flare in my image.

[diurnal]

Has anyone seen something like this? and what is it and how do I correct it. I have a stellarvue APO 115MM, and a standard stellarvue field flatterner, an extension, and then a canon 60DA. It just started happening last week but it doesnt happen on other targets, its just been happening on the pelican nebula.



Thanks

[Jason Tackett]

I saw an example similar to this in Alan Hall's book, "Getting Started: Long Exposure Astrophotography". In his case, stray light from a bright distant light was entering his optical path through the filter wheel where he manually turns the wheel. Is it possible that a new light source has entered your observing environment in the past week, or one that is oriented just right to enter your optical path when you aim at the Pelican Nebula?

One way to possibly diagnose this after the fact may be to see if the pattern changes systematically over the course of the night by comparing your registered subframes with the PixInsight Blink tool since the relative orientation of the offending light source and your optical path should change during that time...unless the offending light source is attached to your OTA, then this won't work to rule out external versus internal causes.

Hope this helps!
Jason

[diurnal]

Jason,

Thanks for the reply. I blinked the subs, and it seems to stay the same. However, it hard to tell since its so faint. It could be my laptop light entering the camera, I'll have to seal the camera and see. there is a street light in that direction, but i guess it should change in the subs if that was the problem. so it could be a light leak on the camera.

Im sifting through my data, and found there was no flare in the pelican nebula 7-5-14 but there is a flare in the 7-7-14 data. Dunno, i'll keep looking for the answer.

[diurnal]

all i can think of is there is a street light in my neighbors yard. the light is hidden pretty well by trees. so i'm thinking individual beams shoot through the trees. so instead of seeing one big gradient you see individual lines.

the lines are on all subframes, so the light tracks even at meridian. but the data i took from 7-5-14 there is no lines in the subframes. was the light off that night lol. not sure.

im going to try and process them out, not sure if i can do it.