1st light M31 with WO ZS70

[blinky]

Finally got my ZS70 working last night with the Altair 0.8 Reducer - Am quite disappointed with it, there seems to be a lot of blue fringing....  I am wondering if swapping the reducer for the 1x flattener would be a better idea?  Maybe reducer it from F6 to F4.8 is just a step to far???? Thoughts anybody?

[blinky]

BTW, this is just a very rough test image, I need to clean the dust bunnies from the scope and or CCD. It's 11 X 10min subs with the QHY8 as the imaging CCD

[Xplode]

Your dust bunnies are on the sensor, if they were from the reducer/flattener they would be larger circles with a hole in the middle.

A flattener would be much better than a reducer/flattener on a scope like this

[rodrigol]

Juck! Very dirty sensor! My advice: If you have never cleaned a Cc'd before search and do some reading about sensor cleaning before you do anything else.

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[blinky]

I think I have a couple of ccd cleaning swabs left, and I will see if I can swap the reducer for the flattener then.... Cheers folks

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[blinky]

Well I went to clean the sensor but it looked really clean, could see no dust at all. Gave it a blow with a blower then a swipe with a cleaning brush.....

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[sloz1664]

Hi Blinky,

I have the Z71 and that suffers from blue halo also, but yours looks OTT. Have you checked that your RGB colours are balanced with a GV2 star or check your image with excalibrator. Download the free trial.

Nice image apart from where coal man's sneezed on it 

Steve

[lensman57]

Finally got my ZS70 working last night with the Altair 0.8 Reducer - Am quite disappointed with it, there seems to be a lot of blue fringing....  I am wondering if swapping the reducer for the 1x flattener would be a better idea?  Maybe reducer it from F6 to F4.8 is just a step to far???? Thoughts anybody?

Your scope is an ED doublet and a bit of fringing is expected. There are a couple of issues here, one is the black specs that you have taken steps to correct, the other one is colour balance. At  least on my laptop it is quite blue with very little red or yellow. You may wish to address this in a reprocess. As for the removal of the blue halos there are a few options available. You may consider a fringe killer filter, use Noel Carboni's action for PS to reduce the halos or use the dust and scratches filter to pick out the stars and then use the noise reduction filter in PS with the chromatic noise slider set to about 7 or 8 to clear the halos.

Regards,

A.G

[blinky]

I think the halos are due to trying to reduce it to f4.8 I'm waiting on a 1x flattener and am hoping that will reduce them. As for the colour balance, this was just a quick process, I soon realised the data was pretty much useless due to the halos and dust

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[Astrosurf]

Regardless of the halos and dust, that's a cracking image. When you get it sorted you'll be producing excellent images!

I get red halos when using my 200mm lens and modded camera because of the IR not focusing. I haven't tried lensman57's method but will try that next. Mine's a bit rough and ready. I select the stars with the Magic Wand tool with the tolerance set at about 40 or 50, then (if I remember this correctly) I go to Select > Modify > Expand set to about 2 or 3 so the selection is just outside the stars or touching them. Then I go to the red channel of the layer and do Filter > Other > Minimum and set the radius to 1. You can adjust how much you've reduced the reduction by going straight to Edit > Fade Minimum and use the slider to adjust. You could try that with the blue channel. HTH.

Alexxx