kirkster501

Good for you. I was referring to a complete beginner. Indeed, each to their own.

200mm Dob and a Star Atlas and a red torch. I advise all beginners to start there and forget all this fan-dangled goto stuff. Goto will make you bored; press the button... look.... yawn..... Press the button again....look...yawn.... Hmm, Coronation Steet on now love????? Let's head inside. It's missing the whole point of star hopping and learning the sky. A 200mm dob is a very good and respectable instrument. A dark sky and you wil see a ton of things with it. It is also very portable. If you do decide to upgrade later it is very re-sellable. Still have these things even now 25 years later.

Good luck to you both. Not that I'm lecturing you but one of the biggest differentiators for any business is customer service. You guys have always excelled at that. So many pay lip service to this when, in fact, successful businesses are built upon it. Any none monopoly business will go down the toilet without returning customers and customers will return when they have received good service, through good times and also when things don't go to plan occasionally.

It took me ages to get my head around this too. Remember that when a flip occurs, it doesn't matter; the sensor is still aligned to the optics of the telescope/lens in the same way. It doesn't matter if you turn the scope upside down, back to front or whatever, the fact is that the sensor is still in the same place with respect to the telescope optics. So the flats do not change. The imaged subject has rotated 180 degrees, not the alignment of the optics themselves. So the dust bunnies will have moved 180 degrees with respect to the image, not the optics. Software like Pixinsght can stitch all this together automatically since as Olly says it can work this out. The slightest movement of the camera sensor with respect to the optics requires a new set of flats, strictly speaking. I can get away with reusing the flats from previous sessions as long as the camera is left on the scope and is covered between imaging runs (so that new bunnies do not appear and they shouldn't because most of them are near to the sensor and not on the telescope objective). I do indeed do this for a few nights worth of imaging runs if this is the case. But the camera must not move with respect to the telescope. It is incredibly annoying to collect a quality set of lights and forget to get the associated flats. I have several data sets ruined that way and have had to resort to complex and much inferior photoshop hacks to get rid of dust bunnies and vignetting that flats would have sorted out at step one calibration phase!

Just a word of warning that some nights the guiding IS awful and you can instinctively think you are doing soemthing wrong and fiddle with things on your rig or settings in PHD when, in fact. there is nothing wrong and that the seeing is just rubbish that night or at that time. You must always be mindful of this. I have enough confidence now to know that my set up is fine and if my guiding is all over the place then my rig is fine and it's just a bad night. It takes time to build this confidence in your rig and to know when not to fiddle. Alan, are you sure you have eliminated differential flexture if you're using a guidescope? I highly recommend Off Axis Guiding, even for a smaller refractor. I have never looked back since I went this route. It is simple, straightforward and all my issues went away when I did made this move.

I’ll take another look later guys thanks for the feedback.

Perfect Wim. That’s what I thought was in the data and you made a brilliant job of that.

I like the middle version most. The bottom one is too "Spice Girls" for me (Baby Spice). With the middle one you could give it even more of a contrast and saturation boost, your data is very good and would tolerate it I think.

This is really nicely done. It is difficult to get the right balance with M33 (and M31/M81 as well) between the background sky and the brightness of the galaxy.

I do that all the time. I had to throw away a ton of data from two clear nights earlier this year because of this!

Yay, onward and upward mate!

Finished this set in May and reprocessed it in a number of ways. Seven hours of data of LRGB (Baader filters) Atik 460 and TEC140.

They were there in the Ha master mate. No processing at all of the Ha Master other than DBE and a bit of noise reduction. EDIT: It is 39 x 300s subs.

Just brought the galaxies down a little in brightness.

Three hours of Ha (3nm) and one hour each of RGB. All Astrodon filters HaRGB with 1x1 binning. Samyang 135mm lens with G2-8300 camera, guided. Everything five minute exposures. Processed with Pixinmsght to the RGB and Ha Masters and then Photoshop. Blended Ha and RGB with tone mapping RGB Ha (3nm)

Cool - thanks man!

There's some astonishing detail in there mate! Wow, brilliant! Fabulous commitment in gathering all that data.

Fabulous. Much more difficult to do a good M45 than it may first appear since the bright stars drown out everything else unless you are careful with the processing. My efforts at this have so far been in vain. When I get round to it again when its clear I hope mine will be as good as yours!

Wow, magnificent Goran!

Takahashi FSQ85 at native FL with Atik 460 and Baader RGB filters. 25 minutes each of RGB of 5 minute exposures.

Thanks for the detailed description Johannes, I get it now about the superlum Can you explain this line? "Linear combination of masters using SHO-AIP script to create RGB-master for tone mapping." So you created the "RGB" by HOO combination with that script?

I think I need to do a masked stretch on this to tone the galaxies down a bit. They are too dominant.

Nice result!

Very difficult to process and keep the IFN with out blowing out everything else.... would really do with more data next year. FSQ85 reduced and Moravian G2-8300 about 6 hours of integration with LRGB.

Bravo. Well done and great service from ADM.