glowingturnip

I had some success in testing in getting my laptop and a tablet to talk to each other using teamviewer by using my phone as a mobile wifi hotspot and both connecting to it, but to be honest haven't used it in the field - I think just the pain of setting it all up and worrying it would upset everything else on the laptop outweighed the lesser pain of padding outside every other advert break

I've got another one actually - this one's a quintuple system in the middle of the Rosette:

I think we imagers tend to capture them by accident though - according to Wikipedia, about 1/3 of the stars in our galaxy are multiple systems, so I've captured hundreds of them  🙂

I did Albireo a while back too, but seem to have lost it.

Here's one that a lot of us may have inadvertently got - Alnitak and its double:

fair comment re the stars - I usually use a tone-map technique like this for merging my channels which gives the flat white stars as in my original image.  It does give me headaches on the brighter stars around my newt spikes though.

For the reprocess I actually borrowed some star colour from a previous DSLR image of mine - maybe it should be feathered in a bit more 🙂

23 hours ago, MarkAR said:

Both great images, the rework has a little more vitality and a slightly "stormier" feel about it. The original a little more peaceful looking.

I agree, I do seem to lean to the dark and stormy side at the moment - must be typhoon season in the Lagoon 🙂 

21 hours ago, MartinB said:

I don't think you should push it any more since I think you are likely to start encountering side effects.

Yes indeed, isn't that always the way !  Thanks for the nice comments all

Ok, I know it's not the right season at all for the Lagoon, but I fancied a reprocess of this data.  It was my first go at SHO narrowband, and I've got plenty of data, but my experiences processing narrowband since led me to think that I should be able to pull out much more detail than I had before, so here goes:

16 each of 600s Ha, Sii and Oiii taken over 3 nights in summer 2018, darks flats and bias, equipment as per sig, Pixinsight.

For comparison, here's the first version and the thread on it:

What do people think - improvement ?  Anything more I could be doing with it ?

Hope you enjoy,

Stuart

Only 3 photos for me this year (!), two of the below are detail shots, but I'm pleased with what I managed - loving my long focal length plus narrowband detail 🙂

Rosette (HOO):

Ced 214 (SHO) + detail:

Swan (HOO) + Ha mono detail:

Equipment as per sig

think you need to get yourself a cheshire eyepiece and sort that mirror out

14 hours ago, Magnum said:

Yes bi colour can be combined in a lot of different ways, but seems to work better on some objects than others. I just did a bi colour M42 but not much colour variation at all, yet objects like the rossette seem to show a wealth of shades from just the 2 filters.

what channel combination did you use if you don't mind me asking - HOO or something else, and did you boost the Oiii to match the Ha before merging ?

I've got a similar HOO picture to yours, but mine's much more brick-red, I like your colours better:

wow, you got that colour depth with just bicolour ?  Hmm, I shall have to revisit mine.

By the way, if you look at the body of the leaping puma (never hear it called that !) you can see that it's made up of several intertwined helixes - it's an elephant's trunk, of course, a dense knot of material protecting weaker structures behind it from the stellar wind so forming a tail, but this one has magnetic field and electric current running the length of it, causing material to swirl around it, making the helices.

There's a herbig haro object visible in that little light coloured cloud top-left - you can only see one jet, not the other

loving the dust - really get the feeling that it's hanging around in front of the main nebula, giving it a 3d feel.  I'd say your new camera works 🙂

Interesting, you have managed to get a bit out of it.

I know what you mean about the Oiii artifacts - I had some strange banding on them, as per this thread - 

That's the reason I decided to go for the 'natural look' colouring rather than an equally weighted SHO, ie I could hide the OIII better !  Mine was an Ha-HSO I think, or Ha-HOS or maybe a blend, I forget.

Funny, we've both spent our Saturday afternoons processing my data !  My lagoon data is a lot better, honest.

just an update on this for anyone experiencing similar - had a look inside the filter wheel, and gave them all a proper clean. 

Doesn't look as though anything was rubbing, but it could well be that the filter optics were pinched - the filter looked like it was slightly skew, and the screws holding it in were pretty tight.  I'm not a fan of how the filters are held in in that Moravian filter wheel, relies a lot on those little washers which don't sit level when the screws are tightened.

Anyway, made sure they're all mounted properly, but haven't managed to have an outing since, so don't know if I've resolved it yet

Will be interesting to see what you make of it.  I'll probably come back to it at some point, as the 'one that got away', but in the meantime I'm going to do a reprocess of my Lagoon, I reckon that's got a lot to give  🙂

Think I'm going to give up on this one - it's been in my processing queue for ages, I'm about half-way through, but, well, it's just not very interesting...  So a quick stretch, and here it is

23x 600s Ha, 15x each of 900s Sii and Oiii, darks flats and bias.  Probably needs a lot more integration time, especially in Sii and Oiii, it's quite faint.  I'd gone for an HSO combination in their respective natural strengths here.  Equipment as per sig.

Any decent pics of this out there ?

If anyone fancies a go at processing it, the calibrated stacks are here - Ha, OIII, SII

Cheers,

Stuart

Thor's Helmet ?

i like that a lot, lovely colour pallette.

Is it weird to say that I like how you've handled the noise... because I can see it ?  Hasn't been battered into submission

On 10/12/2019 at 16:33, Laurin Dave said:

I've found processing (and viewing) it in the dark helps with this one!

haha, I do that too, for my final stretches and whatnot, make sure I'm not being influenced by a tungsten colour cast.  Only drawback is I can't see the keyboard though...

nicely done !

There's a couple of cool features in there that don't often make it into Rosette pics:

the smaller circled is a Herbig Haro object, Rosette HH1, they only discovered it in 2004 (https://www.noao.edu/outreach/press/pr04/pr0403.html).  You can see one jet but not the other.

The larger one is a so-called elephant's trunk - they are caused when a knot of heavy density gas is able to withstand the strong solar winds from the stars in the centre of the nebula better than the lower density gas around it and protects the gas behind it in its shadow, causing the pillar.  However, what's special about this one is the helical nature - magnetic field lines and electrical current flowing along the axis of the pillar have cause the material to swirl around it, creating those 4 or more intertwined helixes that you can just about make out

edit: you seem to have mirror-imaged it though, I knew there was something bugging me  😉

hmm, I think you might have a point re something rubbing against the filters - the marks do look like they could be concentric about a point somewhere off to the left of frame.  I had a mini-panic a couple of years back after changing filters - I suddenly started getting huge long blooming-like streaks off all the stars, turns out that the ribbon connector from camera to filter wheel (I've got the internal 5-filter version) had become displaced and was fouling against the shutter plane.  It could well be that that ribbon cable is still causing issues, rubbing against the filters out of shot as they rotate past.  I shall investigate.  Hope they're not scratched.

I think I can rule out reflections - I shoot in a rural location and can control all the light around me, so no stray light at all, moonless, and those two were taken of different targets at different times of year, so different orientations.

Oddly I can't find the same pattern in the flats at all (there's an example flat segment in the first pic above) whatever kind of weird stretch I try to put on them.  Can't figure out why it doesn't show in the flats - can the filters have different transmission properties for very dim light over a long period vs relatively bright light for a few seconds ?  Maybe a good thing that the flats aren't correcting this, or I'd be none the wiser.

I think I got away with it on my CED214 below, but I'm not particularly hopeful for the SH2-206 I'm currently processing - it doesn't seem a very interesting target anyway, at least with my data, and now I've got a damaged channel - maybe I should go Ha monochrome.

any idea what's going on here ?

These are OIII stacks from separate targets, taken at separate times of year, and both show quite strong banding from top to bottom, strongest in the centre, and echoes of it in the same shape to either side. 

They've had flats subtracted (flats taken after each session, stretched sample shown underneath, no banding) and have had DBE done.   The effect is most noticeable with stars subtracted as here, and with a strong stretch.

I think I can just about see the same pattern in the SII for the one target, though not for the other and not in the Ha:

My equipment is as per the sig, and the filters are Astronomik 12nm (cheapskate, I know).

Obviously one test I can do is to give the filter a quarter-turn next time I'm out to see if the pattern moves, which I'll do, but if that really is the same pattern I'm seeing in the SII above, then it won't be that.

Any ideas ?

i like the composition on that - main area of interest off-centre, rule-of-thirds and all that, so you make a feature of the leg of brown dust etc - nice

17 hours ago, steppenwolf said:

Ah, the elephant in the room. 😇

hahaha, so I'm not the only one !  Never been keen on imaging it for that reason !

I like that - you've given me an idea, my focal length is much too big for all of it, but maybe I can do something like this  🙂