Pompey Monkey

Good start!

5 hours ago, carastro said:

Just meant generally and should have added the lesser imaged targets. 
 

Carole

It was meant as a compliment!

Lovely job!!

Doesn't look very faint to me!

6 hours ago, Fegato said:

total of 252 x 30s over the two panels

Two hours. Amazing

Lovely image.

Here's my second "posted" image of this incredible reflection nebula in Cepheus.

Also catalogued as VDB 141.

Lots of hours of LRGB from E-Eye in Spain.

But this time I used StarXterminator to separate and un-stretch the stars. It was way easier than I expected.

I'm not 100% sure about the multitude of deep red stars, but I do like how the blue (seemingly real to some extent) compliments the browns.

Esprit 80 etc.

Does it correct your lights?

If yes, then all is good.

If no, then let the investigation begin!

57 minutes ago, Roog said:

I take your point @Pompey Monkey I will weigh my Astro gear once I have bought some Astrophotography gear in the mean time I did weight my Dob on its trolley it came out at 50kg! Needed to check for my back door lift capacity. :0)
 

no I wasn’t thinking of a person stash of data more a collective built up by a group with similar interests, like this very fine forum.

It's usually very friendly in this smidge of the internet, yes.

And @iapa has already shown what we can do.

I love astronomy and I love aviation.

This video, by the excellent "Mentour Pilot" off of the Youtubes, scratches both of those itches.

5 hours ago, Roog said:

Oddly I assumed that this might be something that loads of astro geeks might have done?

Most only have a few items and research what they are buying at the time, so there is no pressing reason to have all the weights listed in one place.

On the other hand, you are an astro geek too and you've stuck your head above the parapet now!

I eagerly await the definitive "Roog's" list of equipment weights...

I have an SBIG 8300M for about five years, three of which have been remote.

The mechanical shutter has never failed. 

I have no idea if this relates to the Moravian or not, apart from them both being "premium" brands.

4 minutes ago, Rodd said:

I did crop as you know. Then I extracted the red channel from my HaLRGB version (after aligning the images) and inserted it in the red channel of this version.  I reduced the red channel a bit with curves prior to insertion. I think I used a color mask to cover the  foremost core dust lane to reduce saturation ( it was too red) and a very slight curve adjustment to the core region.  

Wow! A lot more finesse than I can apply.

The end result is smashing.

4 minutes ago, Rodd said:

I decided to add the Ha. Subtle? But I think worthwhile.  If I had a stronger ha stack it would be nice

I like this - The Ha somehow adds depth to the image.

Did you tweak the curves on the overall image much?

Edit: Or maybe it's just the crop?

Either way, I still prefer the second.

I think that maybe this crop (with some careful work) looks much more dramatic.

So many options for separately processing and re-combining images these days*

It's mind boggling!

*Stewart Lee reference for those that still don't know these days.

That's brilliant for 15 hrs OIII!

I think you got the Squid to pop very well

I will have to revisit my old OU4 data with the newer tools like WBPP and NoiseXterminator! 

This is a crop of the Ghost Nebula.

I was inspired by Adam Block's image of this spooky target (Google it), and I've had a go at recreating it with our more modest, albeit well sited, equipment.

There is much more that could be done to improve it, I'm sure, but for an 81 mm 'frac, I'm happy to get this much detail!

40+ hours L

4 hours ish each for RGB

2X drizzle for the L

I must give credit to:

Adam Block's tutorials, especially for the LRGB combination;

Russel Crowman's NoiseXterminator;

And, last but not least, the excellent local normalisation that's built into PI's WBPP.

Full res on Astrobin: https://www.astrobin.com/o9cr8a/

Captured with @coatesg

Comments encouraged!

Super image, Olly.

I'm currently playing with 40 hrs lum on this from e-eye. 

Star and noise exterminator are both amazing. The noise reduction is very impressive when used carefully.

Combined with the awesome local normalisation module in WBPP, I've found that I can go a lot deeper into the data.

I'll post my progress tomorrow for critique. 

Can you go to 50% above budget?

There's an Orion Starshoot Pro v2.0 on Astrobuysell for £375. TEC, APSC sensor with nice big pixels that would work well at your focal length.

I have a BenQ PD2700Q, which is a 2k 27" beastie.

It also supports 10 bit colour, whatever that really means...

I think it hits the sweet spot.

Btw, i find that a smaller second monitor is great for viewng tutorials with interrupting the flow of actually using whatever software I'm grappling with at the time. 😀

53 minutes ago, Doc817 said:

@Pompey Monkey so a dedicate GPU is not essential then?

I guess it depends on what software you'll be using. I just assumed PI (apologies if I'm incorrect) and that does not currently* have GPU acceleration built-in. AFAIK, only the Starnet++ script has the GPU acceleration working. This is because it is calls it's own external executable that is independent from PI. 

I don't know if other processing packages support GPU acceleration.

*Apparently it's "in development", but I'm not holding my breath...

The CPU needs to be modern enough to support AVX instructions in the starnet code. 

I think youll be fairly safe with a modernish cpu, but you can check to be sure. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Vector_Extensions

GPU accelleration is reportedly impressive with nvidia's cuda cores, but personally I can't justify the price of a new one just to save 10 minutes every now and again.

More CPU cores, RAM and fast SSDs would give you more bang for the buck, especially for pre-processing the increasingly numerous and large subs that we all seem to be generating with modern CMOS cameras...

I replaced the foot on my Esprit 80 a few years back.

The foot has two threaded holes to accept bolts that go through the tube wall. The tube is not threaded.

To remove the bolts, you'll need to take the focuser off and get a small spanner or mini-ratchet drive of the appropriate size. It's slightly fiddly, but not too hard. And, of course, it's an imperial size...

The most difficult part of the process was sourcing some tube rings of the correct size for the Esprit tube! Eventually I bought some slightly over-sized ones. To make reduce inner diameter, I removed the original felt, cut up some 4" plastic waste pipe into semi-circular pieces and screwed and glued them into the rings. Bit of new felt on top and they work a treat.

I also needed to make a couple of riser blocks so that the dew-shield, focuser and other attached gubbins didn't foul the dovetail.

Apologies for lack of details, but I don't have the rig with me to take measurements, and I cannot find any record of where I got the rings to know the exact size!

Sometimes we are lucky to get to 0 degrees C at our remote setup in Spain. It regularly goes over 40 C in the daytime, and can stay in the mid to high twenties at night!

Do you use an electronic focuser? I found this article about methodically evaluating backspace and tilt using NINA's "Hocus Focus" plugin that might be useful: https://www.astrobin.com/forum/c/astrophotography/equipment/fixing-the-dreaded-tilt-and-backspacing-error-in-optical-systems-with-objective-analysis/?page=1

It describes the potential pitfalls of analysing single frames for backfocus and tilt too. 

Btw, your stars don't look too bad anyway!