DaveS

If you're looking for slightly off the beaten track try imaging the Hickson Compact Groups. There are 100 of them but a lot are southern hemisphere targets. I have started my own project on them but lack of clear nights mean that I might be dead from old age before completing them.

With a square sensor, once you have it aligned orthogonal there's no need to rotate it.

I started off by collecting 3 hours of RGB in 300 sec subs but was unconvinced by the results so chucked the whole lot in a single stack with a 300 sec Dark to make a Synthetic Luminance. Even though I used Sigma Stacking I still had to get rid of a lot of satellite trails before stacking. The RGB was eventually collected as 2 hours of 120 sec subs. All the subs were Bin 1. Stacking and initial RGB combination was carried out in AstroArt 8 The 4 stacks were then run through GraXpert before moving on to PixInsight. The Luminance had BlurX before a gentle ArcSinH stretch to just reveal the core before Generalised Hyperbolic Stretch was used for the heavy lifting, keeping a close eye on the cores of the cluster and stars. The RGB stack had SPCC before BlurX, and a similar gentle ArcSinH stretch before GHS did the heavy lifting. No noise reduction was applied to either stack. LRGB synthesis and final adjustments were carried out in AstroArt 8 before saving as PNG and JPEG.

This was with the ODK 12 and Moravian G3 16200 with Chroma LRGB filters.

This is the JPEG, the PNG is huge, about 90 meg.

Nope, it was a total disaster, resulting in over 2 years of wasted imaging. The OOUK anodising was highly reflective despite being "black", it was thanks to Oddsocks here that the source of all my problems was located. A thorough treatment with Black 3.0 has cured the issue.

But I'm still dischuffed with OOUK, an ODK 12 isn't a cheap telescope.

I imaged that area last year, but the data was stuffed up by the uncorrectable reflections from OOUK's rubbish (Being polite) anodising.

I can still remember, shortly after moving here, pointing my 180 mak-cass (All I had available at the time) at M65 / 66 and seeing what appeared to be a pair of headlights in the dark.

Helps that I have SQI 21.66 sky.

Nope, not for me. EEA lacks both the organic immediacy of eyeball to eyepiece and the ability to go deep, especially on faint galaxies, that true Deep Sky imaging provides.

Ellie in Space has just posted an interview with the Muskrat, Beauty and the Beast.

62 is dreadfully young, RIP Greg

And it most certainly was! Never seen anything like that, incredible plasma, and both stages got all the way through their flight plans.

Excitement guaranteed 😂

1 hour ago, Xilman said:

Yup.  The outside edge of each lens is markedly thicker than the inside edge.

I too have considerable muscular imbalance needing quite strong prism. In fact my latest set of lenses could only be provided using the top end high index Zeiss lenses, RI 1.74. They would have cost me £860 if I hadn't already paid for new lenses at £715, the opticians admitted that it was their error which is why I got them "cheap".

I have a fair bit of astigmatism, so if I don't wear my glasses then stars appear as crosses rather than points.

If it's Boeing, it's not going.

You think that's aperture fever?

This is aperture fever 😂.

A couple of images of Stephan's Quintet with telescopes of very different sizes and budgets.

Firstly 12 hours LRGB (6 hours Lum, 2 hours each RGB) with my ODK 12, 0.3M f/6.8 at a nominal 0.46"/px from my back garden on the Dorset coast.

Secondly, 6 minutes RGB with the Liverpool Telescope, 2.0M f/10 at a plate scale of 0.30"/px from a mountain on La Palma.

*sigh*

As soon as I got about 5 mins in I clicked on Subscribe.

An "old girl" (By the title of the vid) Getting to grips with Astrophotography

I work on the same length of Lum as the total RGB, but collect the Lum as Bin 1 and the RGB as Bin 2, working on the principle that the Luminance is where the detail is, while the RGB just paints a colour layer over the top.

I schedule my RGB as either RGB or BGR depending on how bright the background sky is likely to be. I may also split the RGB to go RGBGR as 1:1:2:1:1 if the Blue is going to be collected when the target is highest in the sky.

I've watched a few of Claire's videos, she's one tough woman, and some kind of wonderful, great that she had such a brilliant experience..

I probably wouldn't bother with a near full moon anywhere in the sky unless I was doing NB H-alpha, and even then would use a 3nm filter. Anything else is just wasting time and storage space.

I normally start a run when the altitude reaches 25 degrees, but can push that to 30 degrees if the obsy walls are likely to intrude, and set the end for when the target drops below 25 degrees, again dependent on the obsy walls. I live in a nominally SQI 21.66 area, but do have areas of LP around the horizon.

Globular clusters could cut through the nautical dark if you can resolve the stars into point sources, otherwise wait until the summer NB targets become doablee.

This a (Not very good) image of the Lagoon and Trifid that i did with my old Fuji XT-1 on a Star Adventurer. back in 2020.

I'll either be moving to Narrow Band, which will mean changing the camera and filter wheel, or else Globulars which I can do with the current setup. The brighter / smaller globs should be able to cut through the nautical Dark, which is all I'll have between the 25th may and 16th July

Thanks Olly and tomato. No more data for this year but very definitely on my target list for next Galaxy Season.

In stretching I could see traces of tidal structures between the galaxies, but far too noisy to keep in the final stretch. More data, more better!

Oh, and I'll add that I used SPCC in PI for the colour calibration,