kirkster501

Agreed. However, think of it this way..... You've spent money, and many of us have spent big, on telescopes, mounts, cameras, filters and all manner of other ancillary gear and paraphernalia. If you want the books you just have to swallow hard and pay for the delivery. It is only £20 or so, not much in the great scheme of things. Studying these books have corrected several important mistakes I was making in my preprocessing.

^^^This. 100% absolutely. I'd add also that it is my opinion, for what that's worth, that for LRGB then Baader are better than Astrodon for half the price. I have said before that the Astrodon L and the B filters are very, very permissive of IR and UV and they can (and often do) cause star bloat with refractors. I know this from personal experience and others on the web say the same. However, for Ha and OIII the Astrodons are the most utterly amazing filters. You could spend your entire AP career with these two filters alone.

That is stunning Dave. I know only too well what incredible perseverance is required in both capturing the data for these mosaics and processing the subs. I like the colours, framing and control of the stars. A wonderful image indeed, well done

The current generation of OSC cameras such as the ASI2600 or the QHY268C are astonishing in what they can achieve.

The TEC 140 is indeed a fabulous scope. It is great for imaging and for AP. I feel it can be a bit "bloaty" on bright, blue stars even with the additional field flattener I have installed. If the incredible FSQ85 is anything to go by then I think I'd prefer a FSQ 150 but those are insane money.

I grabbed 81 x 180s of OSC with my QHY268C on FSQ85 at native FL. This image is ongoing and I aim to add another 100-200 subs to it. Colours are not quite how I want them just yet. Then with my TEC140 and Atik460 I captured four panels of luminance 16 x 300s (in each panel) and created this (still ongoing too). I used PixInsight Star Alignment and MergeMosaic: Then I registered the colour of the OSC to the Luminance and with a bit of processing I get the image below. Don't often see M31 presented like this so thought I'd have a go. Even without the addition of the L channel, the top color image from the QHY268C is very high resolution. Whaddayareckon? No separate Ha channel as yet. Note the many, extremely distant, faint galaxies behind M31. I have also identified several of M31's Globular Clusters as well. The whole project is ongoing but consuming a lot of clear sky time and I'm starting to fancy doing something different. I may be doing soon anyway when M31 disappears behind my house.

Wim's version of the picture is magnificent. One of the best M31 I have ever seen with great colours, detail and the outer halo shining which is so easy to clip out when trying to get the background dark. Just shows the data was there all along. Like a marble statute encased in the mined, raw stone. It takes expertise to chip away at that block of stone to reveal the statue. Same here. IMO the biggest problems people make is overdoing the noise reduction and oversharpening/HDR/Deconvlution. Can destroy the picture and make it look "weird" if overdone. One thing I'd like to see, with my version too, is the addition of Ha data to get the HII regions to pop - which the OSC CCD's don't capture that much of without a filter. You could run the colourmask script on red then use that as a mask, edit the mask so as only the Ha regions are revealed and then use curves to enhance the red a little bit.

There are details on my website (skastro.net) about the images including annotations. There are PGC catalog galaxies billions of light years away in these fields. I am expanding much of the wording on the website as well. After my security breach in March I just wanted to get material uploaded to the new site at stage 1. My next step is editing the posts with the addition of more details and adding new posts of images that I have in development. My processing skills have expanded too so I may be editing many of the images as well.

@wimvbI'm also going to have a go with my new colour camera on these at a wider imaging scale when they next come round in Spring.

They're awesome aren't they? Makes us feel very small amidst such immensity. How many beings and civilisations must exist amongst that vastness (said in a Carl Sagan accent 😂)

You need to be very delicate with HDR multiscale transform, if that's what you are using. The default is much too aggressive. I use a range mask and set the scale to 8 or 9 with lightness mask ticked

Cracking image, I love these galaxy cluster images. Perseus A is indeed fabulous. The most massive object in the local universe. Nicely framed and great colours. Shameless plug - I did a post of three of the Abell clusters for folks that are interested in them. Hope you don't mind me adding to your post Wim.

Splendid picture. If I may say, to be constructive, I think you have gone slightly too far with the sharpening and HDR. Here is my version with same sensor, which needs more processing:

What a shame 😢

Just to close this off. I have more accurately focused the guidecam and increased the star tolerance. Everything seems much better now. Just a QQ. How long are the PHD exposures? Where is that configured? I know there is the slider thingy and I have that set at 2.5s usually. But this is how often PHD takes an exposure right? Not the exposure itself? Many thanks.

It'd be hundreds of years until the gas cloud became visible enough for amateurs to see. I'd rather keep it as it is

Yes I do have that set up. I will send you my settings when i am at the mount next.

I like the top one best as well. The Ha needs to be at the same res as the RGB really. I need more data for it and an LExtreme filter. I'm not spending any more money though for a while on frivolous stuff in the current economy situation.

Yep. When the flip occurs is entirely controlled by the Sitech under-pole, over-pole settings and track past the pole, as you have found. I also had this issue when I was new to the Sitech and, until you encounter this issue, maybe months after MESU ownership if you have been either west or east of the meridian and never needed to flip, you can think something is wrong with the mount. Not at all, if these are set incorrectly the mount just stops when it gets to the Meridian - quite rightly otherwise damage could occur. These settings are very poorly documented in the Sitech manual. You can also set them for the flip when scope is pointing North since then, you need to do am opposite flip. I set mine to 175 so as to flip when 5 degrees past the meridean. You can see these as lines in the Skyview part of the Sitech install. With an astronomy program like CdC you can do dummy syncs and slews during daylight to test these settings by syncing on a star, or roughly where the star would be then, in my example, slewing to a new star 6 degrees past the Meridian which should cause a flip. Once you have flipped and you then want to slew to a star to the East, an opposite flip should occur.

First up, Soul Nebula - IC1848 - with 42 x 180s exposures on FSQ85 at native with QHY268C. Almost full moon 90 degrees away on Wednesday 28th Oct 2020. It needs much more data really. Not had time to gather any narrowband and I don't as yet have the filter to do so. So, as an experiment, I registered the Heart and Soul image taken with a Samyang 135mm and G2-8300 Ha 3nm Astrodon (at bottom) and threw that into it to create this. I am not sure it has fully worked since the resolution with the Samyang is much less than with the FSQ85/QHY. The original Heart and Soul where I stole the Ha data from:

This is the mosaic I am working on in high resolution with the Astrodon 3nm Ha and Luminance. I want to do 180 mins in L and 120 in Ha for each panel. In the two years previous to now (2018, 2019 seasons) I've only done panels 1,2 and 6. I was hoping for a good run at this during this season but the autumn weather has yet again been utterly dire. I've been getting very despondent with it and so did the RGB with the OSC above. I want another 100-150 subs to complete the RGB and the top image.

It is exceptionally frustrating for sure. You want to get out and use the stuff you bought with your hard-earned and yet it is cloudy for weeks on end. Took me a month to get the chance to use my new QHY268C camera I bought end of August. Annoyingly autumn and winter are the worse times in UK now. Best time is late spring- middle of summer when it does not get dark until 11:30. No good at all for people who work. For visual, large binoculars on a mount are a great grab and go option. The 20x110 ones offer spectacular views.

That is mightily impressive. I prefer the bottom one which is a stellar result. The top one I think you have very slightly overdone the noise reduction and smoothed off the image a bit too much.

Yes, you just have to get on with it. Despite the rain and unsettled weather of late there have been some clear spells at night this week in Notts, despite the moon. I've found that with the LDAS LP in front of the QHY268 then as long as I'm about 90 degrees from the moon, with a good shield on the scope, then I can at least grab something. Beggars cannot be choosers here..... My result above still lacks a bit of something I feel. I am hoping another 100 or so exposures will help. What I will say is that pre-processing these large files and their huge data sets takes a toll on the processing PC. 5Ghz/32G/4TB SSD RAM and it still takes 20 minutes to integrate only 49 subs. Just imagine 200 or 300!

I find imaging with anything than refractors exceptionally frustrating. There are enough variables at play with DSO imaging without adding collimation to the mix as well. 0.5arcsec/p is going to be very challenging mate on your guiding in NW Europe. I have tried it and gave up. YMMV though and maybe you might fair better than me.