Back in Action; NGC5371 & Hickson 68, LOMO is alive

[astrovirus]

I has been about 18 months ago since i had imaged from my home (September 2013) and in between i had only aquired 2 images during the spring/summer of 2014, when i went camping with my family, so i had gotten a bit rusty. I build myself an observatory on my 2nd floor balcony, but when I finally got around installing all the equipment in the fall of 2014, the Dutch weather put off a serious first light for almost the entire winter. Also because i still had some finetuning to do to the alignment (and I don't like that being outside at -10°C, having to tinker woth the bolts and bits), and because for some reason all clear nights coincided with me having other things at hand.

So finally last week, we had some nice clear spring nights and just siad, forget about the fine tuning (that's for full moon nights) and let's give the LOMO a proper first light run for its money. Decided to take on NGC5371 & Hickson 68 Galaxy group, and it turns out this is an object that isn't imaged that often by DSLR. In the end I aquired 9 hours and 20 minutes of data in 5 minute subs with the Canon 350Da at ISO800 and the TEC@ 0°C. Calibrated with 80 darks, 30 flats and 100 bias frames in DSS and post-processed with PS CS3 (DSLR-LRGB method). I am more than satisfied with how the imaged turned out, although i pushed it to about the limit as the remains of my dust motes are starting to show up just a little bit. hope you like it too, thanks for watching.

[Sarah and Colins Astro]

Amazing image ..... just WOW!!!!

[kalasinman]

Very well done. I love the color and detail too.

[astroman001]

Fantastic image. Love the faint galaxies in the background as well.

Peter

[michael.h.f.wilkinson]

Very nice image. Love all the detail

[pietervdv]

Nice image, but you have a slight green colourcast around the galaxies. Try running HLVG in Photoshop. That should clean it up right away.

Regards,

Pieter

[SteveA]

I like this one....in fact the green cast is rather nice...okay maybe not acurate but it looks cool.

[lensman57]

I love it. Really well done.

A.G

[leemanley]

Thats a stunner, well worth the wait in getting up and running, looking forward to seeing your next endevours
Lee

[Avdhoeven]

Welcome back Tim!!!

[astrovirus]

Thanks for all the nice comments, and it's good to be able to shoot some nice images again. I'm really pleased with the comfort of comming home from work, open the observatory and be up and running within about 15 minutes. Also thanks for pointing out the green colorcast, which is very difficult for me to observe being a red and green color blind person, and therefore having a biased color interpretation. i have to go by the histogram for most of my color balancing, and weakt color casts are always problematic if i'm not made aware of these. so I did some HLVG magic on the original image and this is how it came out now: