tomato

Yes, very impressive colour and detail for less than 5 hrs integration.👍🏼

Get them all set up in the same location, it would make a great photo and bring a smile to ZWO retailers everywhere.☺️

That's a different take on the Witch Head Nebula, I don't recall seeing as much Ha in and around it on previous images.

Thanks Lee, I've sent you a link to a couple of files.

Hi Lee, I won't be offended if you decline this offer as it isn't up to much... 139 x 1 min captured with the RASA8/QHY268c, in the mid summer of 2022. The peripheral stars are cr*p and imaging in a barely dark sky has clearly resulted in a lot of issues. If you still want it let me know and I'll PM you a link to the un-processed fits file or whatever you want. Steve Resolution ............... 1.947 arcsec/px Rotation ................. -0.360 deg (flipped) Reference system ......... ICRS Observation start time ... 2022-06-15 00:59:59 UTC Focal distance ........... 391.88 mm Pixel size ............... 3.70 um Field of view ............ 3d 17' 40.2" x 2d 4' 20.8" Image center ............. RA: 21 07 26.244 Dec: +68 09 35.98 ex: +0.070080 px ey: -0.025240 px Image bounds: top-left .............. RA: 20 49 01.935 Dec: +69 08 33.01 ex: -1.640886 px ey: -1.510391 px top-right ............. RA: 21 26 00.133 Dec: +69 07 25.02 ex: +0.375231 px ey: -1.611691 px bottom-left ........... RA: 20 50 29.509 Dec: +67 04 49.33 ex: -2.742360 px ey: +1.469371 px bottom-right .......... RA: 21 24 15.848 Dec: +67 03 37.32 ex: +0.130141 px ey: +0.866581 px

That’s a fine image of NGC 2336, I’m especially impressed with the colour .👍🏼

Indeed, I haven’t forgotten about it but after frying my RisingCam camera in January, I need to allocate some of my Q1 astro budget to the repair.😒

I’m in a Bortle 5/6 location, poor horizons to the East and West, and lots of neighbours with intermittent security lights, although they are only really a problem for visual work. I do like targets that stay above 70 degrees altitude all night.

It will be a challenge. There were some breaks in the cloud last night and as the moon is now starting to intrude I went out to try and get some more subs. I captured 12 minutes worth…

Images of this galaxy are like buses, you don't see one for ages then two turn up one after another.😉 My current target doesn't currently rise above the murk until around 11 pm so when I saw @wimvb's excellent wide and deep image of this target I realised it is well placed from my location to image in the early part of the night. This is 8.47 hrs made up of 123x 2mins Lum with the Esprit 150/ASI178, and 131 x 2mins with the Esprit 150/ASI678c, down sampled x2 then processed in PI and Affinity photo. You can see why Wim put 30 hrs in on this one, 8.5 hrs shows the extensive spiral arms, but only just. I'll try and take this one out to 20 hrs+ as an interesting comparison.

Why is the night sky black? Better not ask that question to Paul and Olly...👍

Please let me know when your Deep Sky Photographic Atlas is going to be published so I can put my name down...👍

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?