Eagle nebula cropped

This pic. has potential. :). Do you mind if I grab it and do a gradient removal?

Be my guest! As I mentioned I am just starting and I am struggling with how to focus, how many frames I need, how to stack, how to post-process... My condition is that you tell me what gradient removal does. At least I will learn something!

Gradient removal takes out gradient, i.e. (uneven) illumination caused by light pollution and vignetting, basically, the "brightness" of the background (where it should be dark). It also takes out color gradient (color brightness which can go from red to green, all in one image,like e.g. red illumination from the guide cam into the imaging cam as happened to this genius << once :S ). It can also take out some noise (graininess), although noise removal is a different step. Normally, flats are taken in twilight (I do mine in the morning, after imaging, at about 1/180 -1/250 of a second, although one reads that maybe the exposure should be longer). One can also stick a white t-shirt in front of the imaging scope, hold a flashlight to it, and take "t-shirt flats" inhouse. There is another method which I use, and that is to create flats from either each image (a lot of work), or from a stacked, precalibrated image (less work). This is what I did w/ yours. Here are 2 tutorials of the methods I used:

http://ccdastro.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/gradient_removal.htm

Shortly, I'll upload the 2 results I got, once I figure out how to get these imgs in here in the answer section.

Here it is..sorry about the wait, I couldn't find a way to put an image in an answer, so I made a album w/ this one img., so you can see it. Pls. let me know when you have looked at it, so I can delete this album again.

Andy

PS I also did a bit of noise removal

Hi Andy,

thanks for this. Just shows me that I have to work on my post-processing skills. I made a copy of the image, so feel free to delete the album. Thanks again. I've learnt a lot!

Cheers

HJW

NP..you have some good stuff there, you should have seen me starting out, I was literally standing beside my scope w/ a remote control for my camera timing 30 secs for the Andromeda galaxy w/out guiding.

As time goes on, you'll get more and more used to it.