Stinky_Pete

I forgot to mention that this is on my leftover neq6 tripod..I have also tested it with a cg5 tripod which worked okay

I would think a second or two of vibration after hitting the scope but not enough to interfere with viewing. After you have found focus its fine and it can hold up to my 4 and 7 year old viewing through it. I would not want to put more than this scope and camera on it tho

Really pleased with this! Took a punt on the SW AZ-GTi with the Celestron C6 SCT for a grab and go combo and i have to say im realy pleased with the result. A bit of wobble when focusing but other than that tracks well and i can move it around the garden (which i could not do with the pier) and find a good spot to get Mars at opposition. Chuffed with the amount of detail the little scope could manage as well. It also means i can finally finish my first solar system family portrait

Thought i would put my 2p's worth in. Last night just about to start on M51. Pier made from an I-beam knocked together for my by a lab mates boyfriend in exchange for a crate of Guinness. I use a cheep as chips lynx 10 windows 10 tablet and a powered hub to run everything. guiding with Phd and Cartes du ciel all throug EqMOD

Bit more deep sky last night, seeing was not too bad where i was (Jupiter looked magnificent). Again this is a revisit of a target i first attempted back in 2001 but a fair bit older and possibly a little wiser M51, 3h10 min in 10 min subs, darks lights etc. I thought i would post my processing effort and the raw sub. If someone out there with a bit more processing nuance wants to see what they can get out of it be my guest. If you could comment on what you have done that might help some of us learn a bit more. altogether a nice night, wife out with friends, kids at the grandparents..... M51 restacked with bias.TIF

its entirely possible that i have made them look "unnatural" through my attempts with wavelets....its an art i have yet to grasp!

That's it, i hold my hands up and apologize to you all. The current run on rubbish weather is entirely my fault. Not only have i had the mount tuned so now it purrs (more on that later when i can get some guide logs from DS stuff) but i have also have a new camera to play with as well as other toys on order. So yep, its me. Sorry So, this cloud induced desperation has driven me back to old data to try and mend my ham-fisted ways using wavelets in Registax and i stumbled across a few extended shots of the moon taken with my 200pds and eos400d back in 2011. I was testing iso's and exposure time with my then new scope and i took about 30 frames of each as RAW files. Registax had a fit when i asked it to stack these frames, i think i only tried it once and then forgot about it. A good bit of advice i received the other day (see my Jupiter thread) was to try stacking in AS!2 and then process wavelets in Registax on the exported file. I have to say this works very well for me, AS!2 seems to work better on my little windows 10 imaging tablet than registax so what i have taken to do is capture my video file, stack it in situ then its a much smaller file to transfer to my big PC for post processing. So long story short, AS!2 is able to process the 30 DSLR frames of the moon and then tease out a bit more data in Registax. This gave me the opportunity to compare how big the effect is from stacking few frames compared to a single one i have been using for the moon until now. I processed one frame in PS alone (Levels, small amount of sharpen and a bit of saturation), one frame i tweaked wavelets in Registax first then processed in PS using similar values as before. Then the 30 frame stack directly from AS!2 and finally the stack after wavelets again. I tried to keep the PS processing as comparable across the images as possible but it was evident that the histograms after stacking were quite different so i had to do it by eye rather than use the same numerical values. It was also interesting to see that saturation looks very artificial at a lower value (eg saturation of "70" in the single frame was equivalent to "60" in the stacked frame). I like a bit of colour in my whole moon shots but i have increased it a bit far in these to illustrate the differences. Happy for any tips people have.

Had a very quick go with Autostakker as suggested. i think i am a little too heavy handed with the wavelets as you can see

ive got one you can have if you are desperate. Its only a cheep skywatcher clone i bought from amazon a while back but its now surplus to requirements. Steve

I have been trying for years to get a decent image of Jupiter using the Meade DSI i used to have as a guide camera. I bought my self a color QHY5l-ii a few months ago but between sending my mount off to be cleaned and tuned and the weather here i have not have a chance to stretch its legs at all. So, last night in between the clouds at various highs i managed to get the following. This was using a C6 SCT, the QHY and a Revelation 2x barlow, took about 1000 frames stacked etc in registax and a little color tweaking in PS4. No where near the detail of some of you guys but for the little C6 im quite happy but as always room for improvement (suggestions welcome)

That's a lovely start, you can see you are getting more details. Export as a tiff and open it up in photoshop or gimp and reset the dark point in levels and you will get the dark sky back. Then it's time to play with curves..... Just tinker with it and it will start coming together ****edit**** just re read that and thought I could make it easier. In deep sky stacker, on the left hand side you will see save image as. Save it as a 16bit tiff file to desktop or where ever. Open up your photo editing software. In photoshop press control L to open up levels. Now more the left hand triangle under the histogram to the right until it nearly points to the start of the curve. Click OK. Now the sky should be black. If you repeat this you can get a bit closer to the start of the curve. You have to be careful because you can make the sky too black (clipped you will hear it called) if you point the triangle too far into the start of the curve. Hope this wasn't patronizing but I know it took me a while to learn the vocabulary which surrounds this

I was wondering what would happen if say 100 of us with the same camera type took 4h each of a single patch of sky and stacked it, how deep that would go. Love the idea of the lensed quasar tho Jaw hits floor That's cool, 8.5 billion years, nearly twice the age of our solar system! Its sort of similar to something I've been thinking about for a while. I've been wondering how far back/deep we can get with amateur kit. I see some post on here with 36h exposure time (which quite frankly is astounding anyway) and I wonder if between us we can get a similar exposure of a target as the Hubble deep field (13 days? In that range) and how it would compare to the professional image. Who's good at processing who would like to have a go eh? Anyone?

Jaw hits floor That's cool, 8.5 billion years, nearly twice the age of our solar system! Its sort of similar to something I've been thinking about for a while. I've been wondering how far back/deep we can get with amateur kit. I see some post on here with 36h exposure time (which quite frankly is astounding anyway) and I wonder if between us we can get a similar exposure of a target as the Hubble deep field (13 days? In that range) and how it would compare to the professional image. Who's good at processing who would like to have a go eh? Anyone?

cheers, im using astronomy tools 1.6 for photoshop when processing so the defrection spikes are a bit artificial but still follow the stars color i think. I normaly have a bit of a green tint when using the CLS so i might have taken too much green out and left it a bit red biased.

Second weekend session and im revisiting some of my early targets again M1 and the Lio trio about 3.5h or 10 min exposures iso800 but only about an hour on the horse. It also suffered from some high cloud last night so its a bit noisy but im realy chuffed with the improvements im seeing from my (much) earlier attempts, having a bit of an issue with color balancing the modded Cannon and CLS filter. However, it feels like its all coming together a bit better. Still have a way to go with processing but i can do that when its cloudy! Jupiter was just nudging above the neighbours house when i was packing up so had my first view of him of the year to round things off....nice evening