ollypenrice

I'm in hospital at the moment (completely mended, it seems!) but I'll put a full size up when I can. Plenty of my 11meg/106 images have been posted with only a tiny down sampling to allow for internet and JPEG effects. Olly

Yes, the chip's an oldie but a goodie... It also got runner up slot in the APOTY comp with Orion. Olly

Steve, you might find this thread interesting. Olly

This 60 mp 35mm camera is, on paper, what the FSQ106 has been waiting for. I hope it works without microlensing or other issues and if it does I don't see it being resistible! But CMOS cameras have their share of issues so I won't be an early adopter. To be honest I love working with the old Atik 11000 camera. I've said before that the numbers are lousy - QE and resolution at 530mm - but the data is so sweet. Lovely stars, lovely star colour. 3.5"PP doesn't resolve the finest details but stars are absolutely not blocky. This is a fallacy and the 106/KAF1100 has more APODS than you can shake a stick at. Olly

Two thoughts: 1) if you're going to swap to a 106 much of the extra cost will go into giving you a corrected circle your new camera cannot exploit. Surely this would be a waste, though there is no way past it if you sstick with 1.25 filters which are on their limit with the APSc chip anyway. So what would you hope to gain with the 106? With the small pixels of a CMOS camera you won't be short of resolution in the 85, you'll have a wider FOV and a better telescope. See point 2. 2) The ED 106 can be a bit of a devil, quite apart from the QC issues which have plagued all FSQ modelss of late. It is terribly prone to temperature-induced focus drift. Your 85 and our 106N Fluorites are better in this respect. I would only change to a 106, myself, if I were also going to go to full frame or larger, like the 35x35 Kodak, but then you need even bigger filters, the square ones. An APSc CMOS in the Baby Q would be great, I suspect and, for me, preferable to the same camera in a 106ED. We already know that the QSI683 works sweetly in the Baby Q. Olly

I entirely agree about the quality of Rob's imaging and with this image in particular. He's gone for a more contrasty curve than I did in the stretch, making the dust lane and filaments much darker. This is something I could do with our data as well but I'm going through a period of conservative stretching at the moment! I felt my images were developing a hard look so I'm trying to keep things softer. Maybe I overdid it this time. There's a close double in the right hand end of the galaxy which gives another interesting point of comparison between large refractor and larger reflector. I suspect we miss Rob more than any other retired imager. I certainly do. Olly

I would. Olly

You need to know the Bayer pattern of your camera. Each pixel has either a red, green or blue filter over it but which is which? Is the top left pixel, for instance, red or green or blue? Using a stellar image is not the easiest way to find out. Maybe the camera manual tells you? If so you need to set the debayerig pattern in your software to match and you should get the right colour. In my rare forays into one shot colour imaging I've done an exposure of a multi coloured terrestrial target and simply tried all the bayer patterns (there are not that many) till I got credible colour and noted then applied that Bayer pattern. Olly

I bet there are... Olly

I was aware of something wrong with the Mk1 version of this image and, indeed, my previous 891 renditions: somewhere along the line I seem to damage the little dark threads rising from around the core roughly at right angles to the plane of the disk. I parked this problem in my copious To Do bin and would have ignored it but from an email from Laurin Dave pointing it out. This gave me the guilts so I pulled my socks up and reworked the core of the luminance. Dave then suggested dropping the saturation to improve the little threads some more. Another excellent critique, which helped. Thanks, Dave. The little filaments now connect with the core. Olly

The charm of PNs in widefield is imagining a time lapse in which all the medium mass stars produce their own. What a sight that would be but I'll happily settle for this one. What's your pixel scale, Gorann? I did this at about a metre and 0.9"PP. Like you, I used shorts for the core. Olly

Quality all the way in. Olly

That's a very polished bit of imaging. Top quality all the way. Olly

This is very nice. I have it in a NAN widefield mosaic but, because it is significantly fainter than the NAN, I didn't feel I could stretch it too far without making it dishonestly bright relative to its neighbour. Doing it on its own like this gives you more freedom to bring it on! Olly

I found little to choose between data taken at 2.4 metres/0.6"PP and data taken at 1 metre and 0.9"PP. I do think it's resolution which matters and to be inclusive I'd have thought that something around 2"PP would find lots of takers. Olly

I guess I'd be inclined to try an alternative scope. It's the only way to know for sure, unless you know you don't have a problem (as in the case of a system guiding with an RMS in arcseconds which is reliably less than half the imaging scale. Olly

There have been SGL collaborations before and I like the idea. I think the target should be a very faint one, or have very faint components, to maximise the benefit. Rather than settling on focal length it would be better to set an approximate image scale in arcseconds per pixel. Olly

The main thing is to ensure that everything in and around the guide scope is rigid. I have some parts of mine held solid by epoxy resin (slightly extreme but they are cheap ST80 scopes). The focuser, the guide rings, all the attachments, need to be treble checked for rigidity. Soft stars don't matter, within reason, and PHD prefers them to be in imperfect focus according to its author. If the little guide scope is really rigid it should be OK. I guide a pair of parallel 140 refractors working at 0.9 arcsecs per pixel with an ST80. As ever, the only way to be sure you're guiding to the mount's capacity is to try one modification at once and see if it helps. Olly

I don't object to Go To at all, per se, but I do object to the amount it eats up in a £350 budget. 8 inch Dob, red light, star charts, just as Steve said earlier. Olly

Dave, those really are good! You've used a number of techniques I don't know at all, here. You have the holy grail of natural colour in tiny narrowband stars and the narrowband structure and depth in the gas with close to natural RGB colour. The images are not just gorgeous and informative but are also original. I've never seen the Veil rendered in this way. Chapeau! Olly.

My pleasure. Want to fix that very slight star elongation top to bottom in Ps? - Create a copy layer. - Set blend mode to darken. - Go to Filter - Other - Offset and, in this case, offset vertically by 1 pixel or maybe 2. Slightly too much is best. - Then go to Edit - Fade and fade the offset till you have perfectly round stars. (This one is very well known and not one of mine.) Olly

If you have APP I'm not sure that AstroArt will add much. Does APP have a 'repair line' feature? This is very good for getting rid of satellite trails and is a big help with planes, though not infallible. Olly

It was the big gap in AstroArt's stacking features. I don't know why it doesn't default to a max of 180 degrees since I'm sure most users would want this. More people will be doing meridian flips than getting their camera orientation out by a mile - surely! Olly

I thought you did. It's dead easy from (I think) AA5 onwards. Go to the second page of the Pre-processing window and 1) choose auto alignment, then 2) Star pattern, translation and rotation and then 3) type in 180 for the max rotation. The screen grab is from AA6 but AA5 is almost the same. The third step is easy to identify, it just requires the maximum permitted rotation to be 180 degrees. This will save you an awful lot of faffing about. A note on terminology: a meridian flip, confusingly, makes a rotated image and not a flipped one. A flipped image is a mirrored one. Some capture software does produce flipped output files, which is rather silly! Olly PS Correction: It seems you have to uncheck 'Automatic Settings' to make the third step. I always do so anyway because I prefer to up the number of alignment stars to the maximum allowed.

What do you use for stacking, Carole? Olly