ollypenrice

Certainly did. The most feckless piece of junk ever brought to market. Almost every component has now broken on the one I bought, as the people responsible for it must have known they would., and it has long since gone to the bin, like the considerable sum I laid out to buy it. Olly

That's actually more complicated than my method. Rather than layer mask my NB when adding it to the chosen colour channel in blend mode lighten, I give it the kind of stretch which I think will make it play well over the colour channel. I go for a very, very hard, contrasty stretch and ignore noise where it is darker than the same region in the colour channel. It won't be applied anyway. I make sure my background is not brighter than the colour background and that the bright features in NB are brighter than the colour (or they won't do anything.) I adjust this stretch of the NB while it is in situ over the colour in BM Lighten so I can blink it on and off to see what it's doing. In short I see a NB image to combine with a colour channel as a completely different thing from a nice standalone NB image for publication. Your NB masking seems a sound idea, though. Olly

More colour, as well. Olly

This is going in the right direction! It's such a hard target to do. Olly

To me, it's a sea horse and, yes, I struggled to bring it out in an HaLRGB rendition. This is beautifully clear. Olly

I can't say I've ever heard anybody say you can't shoot DSOs uncooled, but it's a very successful image. Cooling remains an advantage, however. Olly

Not at all! I'm always an admirer of your expertise. Of all the things, though, that go into the making and processing of an image, I cannot believe that much will change under the niceties of different stacking software. My office is always open, and my data available, to anyone wanting to prove me wrong. I'll even put the kettle on! lly

Some of my robotic shed clients did likewise but nobody is still doing so... It's like anything else, when it works, it works. Go with it when it does. What is a guiding problem? I don't have one. I just bung on a cheapo ST80 as guidescope and get on with it. Changes to the imaging scopes, camera rotation, etc etc, have no effect on anything. In over ten years of imaging, my venerable Mesu 200 never dropped a sub. That's a pretty good definition of not having a problem. To be fair, the same mount ran an OAG for the first three years and, once I'd stopped the thing rocking about by adding a strap to the top of the guide cam, it was as reliable as a guidescope. Mini finder-guiders? Very pretty and super neat, but a royal pain compared with the ratty old ST80. They lose focus easily and have this deeply unconvincing 'easy focus' ring wottsit. Why? My ST 80s haven't been refocused in 10 years. Olly

Given that an image circle is - ahem - a circle, the best non-circular chip is a square one. lly

Agreed. If you can't afford it, you can't afford it. Wait till you can. Download some free data and start to learn processing. Olly

Deep, clean, sharp and well composed, with the objects seeming to race away from each other. We don't stop down at all with our Samyang... Pedal to the metal!!! Olly

Go for it. Put it in the middle of your frame and shoot some data. The asymmetry of what you've posted makes it look promising and not just star bloat. Olly

This is Photoshop, right? Go to Window - Channels and open the channels. If all is normal it will look like this, but you may have an extra channel as indicated by the green arrow. This is often the cause of problems when trying certain operations on an image. Just delete the extra channel if it's there. Olly

Things to check: 1) Are you in Mode RGB? 2) Open Channels and see if you have an extra channel like a star selection or other. 3) Do you have a selection in place, possibly hidden? Ctrl D to deselect. Olly

Oh yes! It's not just about orchestrating the assassination of heads of state... Olly

Very good. I'm pretty sure there are processing tweaks still available to you, as well. Most beginners bring the black point in far too far and clip out faint data. I think your black point could come in a bit and give you more contrast - but softly, softly! Maybe ease the green down a whisper as well? Olly

Spain? Spain? Never heard of it! Olly

To enable important communication along the lines of... Waitrose. Waitrose. I'm in Waitrose. Near the beans. Here, I'll send you a seflie. Hang on. There we go. Oooh, hang on. I missed my nails. I went to Nailgun next to Macdonalds. What do you think? Union Jacks ahead of the rugby semi finals. I wanted to please Darren. Oh, listen to me, I mean Dave. Don't go to B and Q. Their nailguns don't look safe to me. Olly

Capture, stitching and pre-processing by Paul Kummer, my post-processing. About 3 hours per panel, RASA 8, EQ6, ASI2600 OSC. It's a big image but if you'd like to check out the RASA's resolution of nebular detail (which I think is very good) there's a large one here: https://ollypenrice.smugmug.com/Other/Emission-Nebulae/i-CgQFbZK/A Olly

The only adjustable saddle I know of with any hope of holding your OTAs parallel is the Cassady T-Gad, now out of production. I have just sold my own example. There is no problem inherent in the separation between the instruments. It took more than a century of positional astronomy to detect the parallax of the Earth's 200 million mile shift in position over six months of its orbit. Nor is it the end of the world if you don't have perfect alignment: you just have to edge crop. However, this assumes a good alignment device. You have the additonal problem of mirror flop. My honest opinion is that it would be nigh-on impossible to make a long FL dual reflector system work. Peter Goodhew uses twin refractors at high resolution, aligned to each other, one carrying the guider and the other using an active optics unit. I seem to remember his saying on here that it worked and that the slave scope with AO unit actually got the better FWHM. It really might be more productive just to use two mounts. Olly

Indoor plumbing? You mean - ahem - waste products - flowing through the walls of one's house? How disgusting! Far better to stroll outside and empty the body while filling the mind with the perfect Platonic purity of distant starlight. All this while relishing the cool, moist morning air ahead of yet another day of blazing October sunlight under crystal skies. Toy binoculars? How dare you! My loo roll binoculars are quite outstanding and nothing I've ever used from major manufacturers has replicated the naked eye view so perfectly. lly

The use of Ha in green and blue will replicate Hb for the reasons given by Dave and Alan. I did experiment with this years ago but the problem is that all it does is alter the hue of the red channel. It doesn't bring any new structure into play. Being cynical, you can adjust the hue of the red channel without going to the bother of adding a new layer! Actually, I think most imagers will tune the hue of the red channel in any HaRGB image... Olly

The very one! Thanks. The 'silver braid' does imply nebulosity, I think. Very little LP here and, though I didn't measure it, it will have been SQM22. That's the best we get and the night was truly of the best. Olly

Thinking about this a bit further, a useful exercise might be to take a very good amateur image and set yourself the task of identifying ten good points about it. This would oblige you to focus on, and distinguish between, different aspects of the image. Background sky (my personal starting point), stars, colour balance, colour intensity, noise, presence or absence of visible processing (sharpening, noise reduction), framing, depth of faint stuff, originality... etc. Olly

I thought that naked eye observation of nebulosity was recorded a long time ago, but can't remember the source for this. I'm also pretty sure that there's line about it from in one of the Romantic Poets but, to my embarrassment, I can't find that, either! If I'm right, that would be pre-photographic. I've never found aperture to be much help because, with it, the FOV diminishes and you need some background sky for reference against which to detect nebulosity. I think that this is why my view the other morning was so convincing. I had a vast region of very dark, dry sky with the cluster in the middle of it and the cluster itself did not have a dark background. I suppose it could be bloat from the densely packed cluster stars but the bins are good - Leica - and give very pinpoint stellar images. I was convinced, certainly. Olly