silentrunning

1 hour ago, Sterrenland said:

Stunning work...that scope is an awesome light-bucket! 😀

Affinity rings a bell...is it a PS alternative? I seem to recall a recent series in one of the monthly astronomy magazines where Nik Szymanek used it to good effect?? I recall its noise reduction, etc being praised.

Thanks. I bought Affinity recently after someone on another forum mentioned the Nik Symanek article and the fact that it's half price at the moment and just £24 one of payment. Absolute bargain does everything PS can do.

9 hours ago, Erling G-P said:

Very nice indeed!

Just love those 3 so different looking galaxies, but my imaging efforts so far is nowhere near what you have achieved.

Thanks Erling. Keep at it. It's taken me ten years to get to this point and I'm still just a small fish!

1 hour ago, geoflewis said:

This is a cracking image John. I saw it over on AB, so came here to look for it. I've never imaged these 3, so also had a look in Stellarium at how it frames with my C14 rig and it would work well with the correct camera orientation. I'm not sure how easy it would be now there is no astro dark, but definitely one for the future.

Thanks Geoff, I was quite surprised to find this nice little group of galaxies especially as I have to stick to relatively high declinations and there is very little down through the slice of sky I have access to - apart from the obvious gems M51, M13 etc. It paid off sticking to one target longer than I usually do as I waited for the Cygnus area to get above the fence and by then morning was upon us. Think that may be it for now for me. I usually push on through the summer but I think the scope, mount etc need a bit of attention so now is the best time to focus on that sort of stuff.

Thanks Bob, Yes capture with the GSO 12" RC.

3 minutes ago, Waddensky said:

What a wonderful, detailed and colourful image, thanks for sharing! Lots of background galaxies too. I didn't know about these either, are they in the NGC?

Many thanks. Here's the cat numbers etc...

Desperate to image something whilst waiting for Cygnus etc to get above the murk I have been concentrating on this little trio of galaxies that I hadn't heard of before searching the area for something to image. I managed to get 14 x 15m subs in Lum over a couple of nights and last night 6x5 mins of RG and B. 

Apart from the grunt work of calibration which was done in PI the finishing up was done in my new best image processing s/w Affinity in which I have achieved better noise reduction than I ever did in PI! Admittedly this is more data than I normally average on one object.

Wow, that does look awesome Geoff, wonderfully sharp. To my eye the core is spot on not over cooked at all. It depends on monitor settings. I left the core very bright on my recent image so as not to give the cluster a flat look but the core in my image does look a bit burnt out dependent on the angle my eye is to the monitor! If I look straight on it suits my eye and it's clearly not saturated with the very bright core being resolved.

I only ever used PI for all processing apart from final touch up in PS. No ones mentioned PI on here, is it a bit shunned upon!

Last night was possibly the best imaging conditions I have seen here in about 5 years. Absolutely still. 

Whilst waiting for NGC6888 in Cygnus to get higher in the sky and there wasn't much else to capture in NB I settled on that old time waster M13.

This is 1.5 hours of 5m Lum subs added to some old Lum and Colour data.

Really nice. Love the pastel shades, and so smoooth.

Excellent image especially as you point out obtained form a relatively small scope.

I say "wide field", it's the full field image of my original post but given how most of my images are galaxies that take up a small central region of the frame this is wide field for me!

The flats I finally got around to acquiring have allowed the full field to be sensibly processed and the result is the entire field of the chip, very unusual for my images not to be cropped.

Great vibrant image, lovely colours. 

Well unless we have a quick return to imaging friendly weather I doubt I will get colour data for this this year so I've done a quick process of the mono data.

I've tried noise reduction but it brings in artefacts I don't like and nukes the fainter outer spiral arms which admittedly are deep within the noise. This is 10 x 900s subs.

Very nice I had a bash at this the other night and got a very similar result...

Another great night last night though I fear that may be the end of a good run of astro friendly weather. Finished at 430am not long after the cameras started picking up the morning glow. Crazy haven't been to bed before 3am for the last few nights.

Most of the earlier part of the session was spent acquiring 3 hours of Lum data on M100 which I have yet to process but the last couple of hours was spent on M56, a lovely globuler in an incredible star field in Lyra. 

This is 25 minutes of RGB binned at 1x1. I was to tired to get flats last night but will hopefully get some regardless of the weather this evening when I stand a chance of getting the camera back to -20. Surprised how well this has come out without any flats. I've got used to imaging galaxies and having to stretch the image to the very limit, this was a nice change in that respect.

Last night was a bit of a cracker, seeing was better than average though not brilliant, but once again absolutely zero wind so guiding was spot on. Annoyingly the focus wasn't spot on and the image has suffered a bit for that reason. I'm not overly happy with the processing but NR in PI is a war of attrition at times and it's just about done me in so I'm settling for this for now.

This is full field from which the previous detail of The Whale was taken...

It wasn't dew was it? I have had something in the past that looked like that and it turned out to be dew.

Stunningly vibrant image.

Imaging conditions were pretty good last night, transparency was about average but it was very still, not a breeze. Guiding was as good as it gets. 

I needed to catch this object before it transited as my setup is narrow field with an OAG and finding a star requires a fair bit of planning and rotation of everything hanging off the back end which I try to avoid if possible, instead I try to find another object that has a guide star that will allow me to reuse the current positioning. Very lazy and a practice I need to give up on as 9 out of 10 objects do not have a candidate guide star in the same position as the current object!

So I had about 2 hours before the whale hit the meridian and I managed to image on two consecutive nights giving me just over 3 hours in total. 

The Crowbar Galaxy was in the frame as well but i'm finding them really hard to process together so for this one I cropped out the whale and worked on it alone.

Amazing for just 35 minutes, great colours and framing.

Really nice.

I got some data on these two last night, not really enough at the moment to start processing. What gear and frames does this result consist of?

Great image, incredible core detail. I found this object really tricky to process, burning out the core didn't help!

And the final object from a cracking session the other night...

Another image from an epic session the other night.

I was surprised to find I could get all three galaxies in the same frame given my rather long FL and high FR. Some acquisition details are given on the astrobin page.