red dwalf

i rather like the first image

a beautiful image, you must be chuffed with it, well done

struggle looks worth it, looks amazing on my screen, lots of detail too

first time i`d tried this but apart from the computer struggling to save the file at the end it went fairly well, 54 x 2 minute subs with a 30 second gap between subs.

brillant bit of kiot isn`t it, i also use astro tortilla to exactly centre on a target, a little more fiddly to get working correctly but well worth it, check out the light vortex website for install information  

it think i still have a dropbox account, i`ll see if i can upload it all, be nice to see what someone else can get from the data

excellent, i love getting tips on how too, loads of videos on youtube but they never cover everything and until you mentioned it i had not notice the halos but they do look a lot better, i really wanted to bring out that faint spiral arm in the galaxy but struggled to do it, any ideas on that ?

More thann likely, I'm a little red green colour blind, drives me made at times and so frustrating especially in this hobby.

was not happy with my previous processing of M101 so tonight  i had another go using Startools and i think it looks a lot more natural.

there is a compose module in 1.5 plus but i`m having difficulty using it, i did try with the image above but i must have gone wrong somewhere as it came out monotone, had to process them individually and put them together in photoshop, plenty of time on my hands at the moment so will give it another try

13 hours ago, happy-kat said:

A swirl of space floss, very nice.

Are you using StarTools 1.6 version?

version 1.5 i believe at the moment

been a bit of a trial to process this image, some channels did not like dark frames added, some did not like dark frames or bias frames added, blue channel was a pig, but i finally got to a reasonable looking image, around 60 lum subs and around 38 RGB subs, all of 3 minutes each sub, stacked in deep sky stacker, processed each channel in Startools, then combined and tweaked in photoshop cs3.

i`ve recently been saving as 32 bit/ch - integer as advised by Startools website

been trying to get a nice image over the last week or so, i have taken 33 x 3 minute light frames at -15, 31 x flats frames at -15 and around a third of the way along the histogram around 24000 ADU, 15 dark frames at -15 although i`m not sure i need them with this camera, 31 x bias frames at -15 and i`m still getting dust bunnies, any idea what i`m doing wrong.

camera is an Atik 460 mono and i`m using deep sky stacker to stack fits files and saving as fits files.

wow i wish i could get that amount of detail in 2 hours, excellent

You'll need to lower the exposure time to get a histogram reading to the left, increase it to go to the right.

last nights were 10 minute subs in HA, so much of the rubbish that Luminance might pick up, HA should reject.

many thanks for the help, much appreciated

here is last nights endeavours under another less favourable sky

very true, i think we are all striving for perfection under less than perfect skies

4 hours ago, vlaiv said:

Might be that seeing is indeed poor - I see you are doing M31, and I'm guessing it is still in the east when you shoot it? What sort of landscape do you have due east? Might be that there are heat sources there that create local seeing effects (houses, road, large body of water) - that impacts your FWHM significantly?

 

 

i`m unfortunately in the middle of a housing estate between two big cities, Nottingham in the east and Derby in the south west, plenty of houses around here and in this hot weather i`m sure there are plenty of hot tiles on the roofs, in fact i had trouble cooling the Atik 460 down to -10 degrees even at 2300 hours.

i can see some light cloud around this evening, graph looked a little flatter earlier, i usually go for 3 or 4 second exposures but last night phd guiding assistant recommend 2 seconds 

here is tonight's phd graph and and the single sub

1 min lum m31-1_006.fit

had a little time last night for a few test images as not been out much this summer with virtually no real darkness, 1 minute subs on M31 with much the same values as the other, checked and did a nice polar alignment and guiding seemed to be good.

finally had a minute to re process some earlier images in deep sky stacker, 3 minute lumiance subs, and here are the results for fwhm, what would be my sampling rate ?