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....

Thanks - appreciate your comments.

Welcome Alan.

Welcome Steven- time to stop lurking - bw Tony.

Great - like the subtlety of image one-Tony

Thanks Jem and Chris- have used Pixinsights Image solve and Annotate scripts which shows a lot of PGC galaxies in the field but not all....

Hi Guys - after months of rain and cloud  and at the point of despair, finally got two weeks of moonless nights and got some data . This is the first image I have been working on. NGC 4565, a popular target and a great galaxy I think with those prominent dust lanes and just tilted enough to appreciate that it is spiral galaxy, ? barred. The distance is a bit uncertain as far as I can see, between 30 and 50 million light years, so the size is also uncertain either between our galaxy and the Andromeda galaxy or even bigger if  it is 50million light years distant. Anyway taken with a 12inch RCT QSI 683 and about 30x10minutes luminance and 4x10minutes for each of RGB.  Processed mainly in Pixinsight with a bit of Photoshop.

Hi-I have a 12inch RCT but with skies in the South of England I am not sure I would go bigger. I am not convinced from my imaging in the last 2 years that I have realised the true resolution of my scope with my seeing.I have seen images with 8 inch scopes at high altitudes and great skies that blow my 12 inch away.If I went bigger the focal length gets even trickier and the FOV  is small which is itself limiting and technically challenging. Guiding with a focal length of 2.4 m is difficult if the skies don't cooperate Just my perspective- of course exposure lengths of your subs or number of subs can reduce for the same result  but if the guiding is suboptimal there is no real gain -bw Tony.

Welcome Tom - hope you enjoy  SGL.

I have suceesfully realigned some Swift and other binoculars. If the prisms have small adjustment slug screws then observing any changes when viewing a star is an excellent way to go. The terrestial improvements were startling- Tony.

It probably leaks because it is bigger on the inside than the outside.....