glowingturnip

thanks all ! Interesting comment re the stars, and I think I see what you mean. I use the Metsavainio Tone Map technique (http://www.arciereceleste.it/articoli/translations/75-narrowband-color-composition-eng) to avoid getting magenta stars in my narrowband, which I guess is why most of my stars are just plain white here, and I think it's that lack of colour that you're noticing. The exceptions are the larger stars where the tonemap technique doesn't work for me, I get artifacts where the star-bursts are different sizes for the different filters. Those large stars I've handled with the usual de-magenta-ing which has ended up giving them that golden-yellow colour - completely unnatural, but I quite like it 🙂 I've not done any star-reduction or anything like that, and there were no halos to start with (am certainly not going to add one)

Here's my take on the snappily-named Cederblad 214, part of the larger SH2-171 complex in Cepheus, in SHO, taken in the summer: Please click through for hi-res. And a detail here: 26x 10min Ha and about 12 each of OIII and SII, a mixture of 10mins and 15mins for those once I realised how faint they were coming in (bit of a battle with chrominance noise tbh). Equipment as per sig, Pixinsight processing, dark sky site in Spain. Not exactly a pretty nebula, especially the way I've presented it here - I wanted it to be dark and tumultuous (think Goya 😉 ) and to have all that tortured dust speak for itself. Possibly a little dark on this monitor, but I think better on other devices. Mind you, having said that, it does remind me of a big floppy dog looking straight into camera - the two brightest stars as eyes, the central black cloud as nose and the two banks of nebulosity either side as big floppy ears. So a dark and tortured big floppy dog. Either that, or Darth Vader... Cederblad 214 is a bright nebula and star-forming region in the wider SH2-171 area in Cepheus. It contains the star cluster Berkeley 59 (bottom-left of centre in this image). The complex is believed to be some 800–1000 parsecs distant, with the younger components aged no more than a few million years. Within Cederblad 214 is one of the hottest known stars in our stellar neighborhood. With a temperature of almost 45,000 degrees Kelvin, BD+66 1673 is over 100,000 times more luminous than our own Sun. It is fairly unremarkable in this image though, it's below and slightly to the left of the star cluster with a little bit of illuminated shockwave next to it. Hope you like it - comments and cc welcome 🙂 Stuart

ahaaa - yes, I've seen that and wondered about it too

yep, nothing wrong with that 🙂

at the risk of causing controversy, you could try doing without EQMOD altogether. There's an Ascom driver for Skywatcher mounts now that will work directly, 4th from bottom here - https://ascom-standards.org/Downloads/ScopeDrivers.htm . If you install that, you can get SGP and PHD talking to the mount directly instead of through EQMOD. if that doesn't work either, you can try connecting your guide cam to mount directly with an ST4 cable and setting PHD to guide 'on camera'

loving the zoom-in detail on that, very very nice

is it taking forever on the 'clearing backlash' step ? Mine does - there is actually quite a lot of backlash in Dec, even though it's belt-driven, try rocking it in Dec when the clutches are locked, if you can 'rattle' it by a small amount, that's the backlash. It is adjustable, have a look at Shane W's post, the 5th post in this thread: I've done mine, though I'd recommend you run the mount through 360 degrees both ways after adjusting to see if it binds anywhere. Mine now completes calibration after about 30 backlash steps, which I can live with. edit: If it's not that, it might be the driver you have installed, or Eqmod problems - try calibrating with an ST4 cable and 'on camera'

that last one's looking really good

I like that, especially the 2nd version. The blue star in the centre gives it a nice punch of colour contrast. I guess that's quite a large fov isn't it, too big for my set up

Oops ! I've reworded that now, so as not to denigrate my previous efforts, or by implication anyone else's... ahem. I was actually very proud of that version, it spent a good amount of time as my pc wallpaper. The framing is an interesting one - I wanted to present this as a tight crop to make that detail really pop out and to avoid that thing where if a detailed photo is zoomed out too far, then it just looks like over-sharpening rather than true detail. Interested to see what people think though, here's the same photo without the crop (just don't laugh at my coma): It's narrowband bicolour HOO, so false colour-ish. I quite like the redder tone, but it is subjective.

Swan Nebula (M17) in bi-colour HOO. I took this in the summer, but it's taken me a while to process it - various other hobbies and a nasty bout of flu got in the way ! Please click through for hi-res 🙂 And an upsampled detail in Ha monochrome: 17 each x 10min Ha and OIII, darks, flats and bias, equipment as per sig, processed in Pixinsight, taken in a dark sky sight in Spain. The Swan Nebula, also known as the Omega Nebula or the Horseshoe Nebula (M17) is an H II region in the constellation Sagittarius. It is located in the rich starfields of the Sagittarius area of the Milky Way. The Swan Nebula is between 5,000 and 6,000 light-years from Earth and it spans some 15 light-years in diameter. The cloud of interstellar matter of which this nebula is a part is roughly 40 light-years in diameter and has a mass of 30,000 solar masses. The total mass of the Swan Nebula is an estimated 800 solar masses. It is considered one of the brightest and most massive star-forming regions of our galaxy. Its local geometry is similar to the Orion Nebula except that it is viewed edge-on rather than face-on. The open cluster NGC 6618 lies embedded in the nebulosity and causes the gases of the nebula to shine due to radiation from these hot, young stars. It is also one of the youngest clusters known, with an age of just 1 million years. For comparison, here's my previous attempt, taken with a modded DSLR: Hope you like it, comments and CC welcome ! Stuart

shouldn't theoretically make much difference, so long as it's not pointing at ridiculously different angles, but I'm wondering if, since your guidescope seems to be a bit loose, could it be wobbling vs the main scope and throwing the guiding out ?

that works for me !

yep, full res that's a stunner

ooo, I'd still be tempted to have a go though - red channel as luminance in lighten mode through a super-nova-only mask maybe ? At least let us have a look at the subs with it in

was going to say that (well after my initial schoolboy response to say "they're stars!") - not enough white derringing in deconvolution gives that, I liken it to the fluff that builds up on a jumper after a while. I reckon the light and dark derringing on deconv is one of the hardest bits in processing to get right, for me anyway, more than once I've found myself struggling to process away subtle artifacts that shouldn't really have been there anyway. Cracking final image 🙂

I can see messier 7 through the bins from my deck in Spain, though it's a bit tree and pollution-dome limited for a proper pic - let me know if you want a cheat-shot !

very nice, and I like the composition - even if you did plonk the main subject dead-centre 😉. Those trails of dust coming from it make it look like a jellyfish on a mission. Agree re WhiteWall, I did an HD metal print from them and it's stunning - does come out darker than on your screen though, so you have to stretch it a bit more than you normally would

keep going !

ahem, just read the rest of the thread now, I missed the philosophical discussion ! This is without doubt a great forum, with a lot of great people on here, but it is easy for images to be missed. I myself tend to dip in and out, and usually don't go past the first page of images when I do. If other images are getting discussion going on, then off you scroll off the bottom 😞 . Maybe some kind of weekly/monthly gallery of all images submitted to the site would be the way to go, so stuff doesn't get lost. Astrobin I've got no time for - you have to pay to be on it and it's clearly cliquey. Instagram they'll like anything, might as well post up pictures of my breakfast. My secret is Reddit - there's an astrophotography subreddit on there that is mostly read by astro-interested lay people rather than detail-obsessed nerds like us, and the feedback you get there is much more useful - I've had 1500+ likes on some of my best images, but on other images of mine that I've thought technically good but not quite as photographically aesthetic as others, can find they languish in the 200's, then again, high scores on not particularly great captures but nice photos - I find that to be much more useful feedback than say 9 passing likes on a post on here that gets buried on page 2. Go on, give it a go, post up one of your images per day on Reddit and see what happens - I'll be watching 🙂

for me I'd say the first, but only presented in that kind of image-scale, it definitely starts suffering at full res. I like the detail in the clouds round the bubble that don't usually get brought out much, and the dark 'hollowness' of the bubble itself. The second is the superior shot on close examination, but for me it is definitely too soft. Did you deconvolute ?

i think this is the best I've seen of this target by a long way. Lovely subtle colours, and that dust really stands out

liking that, love the composition

you can make a mask for yourself with a craft knife and some stiff black card - generate the pattern here: http://astrojargon.net/maskgen.aspx?AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1 and then use it with Bahtinov Grabber (http://www.njnoordhoek.com/?p=660). I get critical focus every time in just a few minutes.

I like that - that little cluster looks almost lost in all that maelstrom doesn't it