tomato

Same here, my Esprit 150s have never had an eyepiece in them. I’d like to see someone stargaze with a RASA, it would be like a dog chasing its tail.

Since moving to an ASI678c to capture RGB data, I capture the Lum at 1x1 and then decide to downsample in the processing, judging each data set on its merits. Most of the time the down sampling is the way to go, but not always.

That’s a debate I’m still having. I have sort of settled on my Esprit 150/ASI 178 combination for small targets, but I still get the urge to trade the refractor in for a 14” or 16” RC and mate this to a IMX571 sensor and go galaxy hunting at around 0.5” per pixel, but then common sense prevails, knowing my sky can never do this justice.

Just to throw a bit more evidence into the mix, here is my 1.25" Baader blue filter of similar vintage on a very bright star (Esprit150/ASI178). There is a halo but it is at least centralised on the star, yours appear to be offset?

Great work! I have looked at Adam Block's image in the Cambridge Photographic Atlas of Galaxies (660 mins integration, 800mm reflector, SBIG STX-16803 from Mount Lemmon SkyCenter) and you have lots more detail in the spiral arms , all those hours make a difference!👍

Every time I finish an imaging session and I lock the dome and shed up I invariably look up (if it hasn’t gone cloudy) and gaze at the stars for a brief spell of contemplation so yes, I guess that makes me a star gazer.

That is a fine Astro camera you will be acquiring, it’s a premium brand version of this venerable CCD sensor, I have the Moravian Instruments version. I took 5 minute exposures for LRGB imaging and twice that or longer for narrow band. You will need to take flats, darks and Bias frames to calibrate your subs, and use the cooler as CCDs are inherently more noisy than the CMOS sensors. Having said that, there are a host of APODs out there captured with these cameras. Here is a mosaic of M31 captured with my KF 8300 camera:

That’s a cracking M31.👍🏼

How is the seeing and sky transparency? Is the focus spot on? You have a Mesu so you could try extending the sub exposure time. I think if you manually select a star while looping, PHD will use this star when you switch to guiding. Hope you get it working, it’s a real pain to lose clear sky time to issues like this.

I really like Burnham’s Celestial Handbook, I received all three volumes as a gift back in the 1980’s when I was grappling with film Astro photography. I still love studying the monochrome photographs, it’s a wonderful record of a different and significant Astronomical era.

Astro Pixel Processor is great on large, wide field mosaics, especially in removing individual gradients and smoothing the joins. It’s not free but there is a 30 day free trial if I remember correctly.

Seeing your request I dug out an image of the Pacman Nebula from January 2022 and realised it had not had the BXT and NXT treatment, so I have quickly reprocessed it. It is 346 mins captured with the Esprit 150/QHY268c combination, 139x 2 mins RGB and 17x4 mins with the NBZ dual band filter. A pseudo HST palette was created by making a new blue channel from 40% green and 60% Red with PixelMath, then assigning Red to L and R, Green to B and the new Blue channel to G. All of this data was captured under a full moon, albeit on the other side of the sky. You have a lot more blue than me, to be expected with your filters and my full moon, but might I suggest that your data could be slightly black clipped?

In my quest to identify the most perfectly formed spiral galaxies, here is NGC 3938 in Ursa Major. 14 hrs of data captured with the Esprit150/ASI178 dual rig over two previous seasons, and now processed with the Xterminator toolset. A little less lop sided than M101, perhaps?

Great mosaic, not seen this area stitched together before. Can I actually see some clear sky in there with no Hydrogen or dust clouds?😉

Thanks, it is always nicely placed in my sky so could be a fall back target if I have some time to kill.

First class, as always. On the amazing mosaic I’m seeing a hint of a vertical band about 10-15% in from the RHS, it has a very slight curve to it. Is this part of an immense structure or is it just my eyes playing tricks?

I remember a TV programme discussing the advent of digital photography (late 1980s I think) where it was resolutely stated that pixel counts would never match the grains in a film emulsion…

Wow, that’s quite a capture. There is something special about pointing the scope to image something that in the first instance appears invisible.

This is definitely the last one, thanks for sticking with it.

Thanks, the background is frankly a mess, due to massive mis-alignment between the old and newly collected data. I have had a go at cleaning it up but that faint red colouration on the background to the South is an artefact. Overall I'm not happy with the colour and I will give it another go without using SPCC.

Here is my final attempt (for now), 11.2 hrs of integration. Some of the larger background galaxies in the HST image may now be visible, although they don't have any red colouration. I try not to compare my images with the HST too often, otherwise I just despair...

It is indeed, spiral arms aplenty.

Sorry here is the link, I thought folks might like the thrill of the chase!😁 Big, Beautiful and Blue | ESA/Hubble (esahubble.org) Here is the image, I don't think any of the galaxies hiding in NGC 2336 are visible, but I got another 380 minutes on it last night so I haven't given up...

So I have managed to add about 4 hrs to it over the last couple of nights, as usual my lack of discipline over framing the target has made combining the data a bit of a challenge, hence the crop. I was hoping at least one of the distant galaxies so abundant on the HST image might be visible, but alas no luck. I need a bigger scope, or a decent location, or better still, both.🤔

Its like @900SL says, if your FOVs are very similar and you don’t get the rotation matching you will lose quite a bit of sensor real estate with the cropping. I have to do this on the dual rig each time I change cameras but if you are setting up from scratch each time you will probably have to allocate some time to making small adjustments. The cropping is not a big deal if you are targeting small galaxies or PNs, but it will be a pain on nebulae that fill the FOV.