tony210

Great image - effort has paid off- Tony.

Lovely image - great detail- Tony.

Great image - beautiful complex galaxy.

Some great points here- I think star alignment as with telescopes is the best way to go and was very satisfied when I realised I could bring the star images together- as the above shared article mentions when you get near your brain aligns the images so perhaps this will hinder perfection but most misalignments are gross and not minor in those binoculars I have aligned- Swift 8x42s have an excellent push pull screw system that made the process easy and they have stayed aligned. Interesting area but I would agree that as with many things the learning process is at least as enjoyable as the result -hopefully!😀

Hi-I've collimated binoculars several times now and it is fairly easy with good quality pairs as they have adjustable prisms and using a star and doing slight adjustments on ONE prism only you can get there - if not sometimes rotating one of the objectives will achieve the same result - anyway always go slowly and do nothing you cant reverse- hope that's some help - best wishes Tony. Incidentally it improves terrestrial viewing dramatically if you get it right.

Hi and welcome Mr T- I managed some great observing when I was in London with a home made 8 inch Newtonian . Your scope will see a load of interesting things despite the light pollution- have fun- best wishes Tony.

Great image - I have wondered about narrow band as it offers a partial antidote to light pollution - a lovely result - Tony.

Great image - you have captured some nice detail here which is the thing that makes galaxy images work I think.

Great image with good star fields !- The Wizard is asleep - dont really blame him currently.... Tony.

Great image Steve and I like it in monochrome. Tony.

Thanks Mark - was not an easy target and some of my subs were not great but made me look at Pixinsight in much more detail so that's a benefit I guess. Not sure it looks like a Waterbug though...

Here is NGC 5033 a Seyfert galaxy in Canes Venatici- about 40million light years distant. I took this with a 12inch RCT in Worthing in April- about 30x10mins luminance and 4x5mins RGB each. Processed with PixInsight and Photoshop. I has a lot of difficulty processing as the galaxy’s arms fade into background sky and I had to deal with gradients and noise very carefully with multiple techniques. Also, the core is very bright and getting core detail is challenging. My set up is oversampled and deconvolution is very important so I had to try to master decon in Pixinsight. I found the script PSF Image very useful and once I had a good PSF and had worked on the local deringing settings it worked pretty well but this is a far as I could go. I might try binning 2x2 next season as this would bring the image scale up to 1.3 arcsec/pixel which is more realistic for my skies but when I tried this in the past the results were not great not entirely sure why.

Hi Robin - interesting - I suspect you are at the 'lucky end' of the normal distribution- I dont think I get the best out of my 7x50mm bins now but have not measured my dark adapted pupil size as others suggest so maybe I should check it......

Yes -I think that is an important distinction and certainly is the impression with reflectors and low power eyepieces that give a large exit pupil.

Hi - interesting topic - over 50 your looking at less than 5mm in most cases- so in my case although I always wanted 7x50 binoculars - 10x50 or8x42 will best fit my pupils now- such is life....