MarsG76

Hi All,

This is my first time ever imaged Thor's Helmet Nebula, NGC 2359, located in the constellation Canis Major.

This image is not my finest so far but was a bit of a challenge with the Australian bushfires raging on for many months now and sending a lot of smoke into the atmosphere, blocking out a lot of the sky, crippling seeing and transparency and as a result causing me to throw out a lot of failed subs.

The subs I used for this image are a total of 35 hours 7 minutes and 30 seconds, these are a selection of the best subs for this image but I have spent a lot more time in tracking this nebula from 30 November 2019 until 4 January 2020.

This image was exposed through a Celestron 8" SCT at 2032mm focal length using a astro-modded and cooled Canon 40D DSLR.

This consists of HAlpha and OIII only, combined as HOO in RGB channels... I was going to capture SII also and create an SHO image but seeing the amount of time I spent on this object so far, I decided to stick with wht I have.. I might revisit this object next year and create a SHO image of NGC2359.

BTW the fires are not looking like they're about to go out but we have had a considerable amount of rain yesterday and today so hopefully soon enough the fires will go out...

Clear Skies,

MG

Great result.... I like your last color image the most as well as the original mono image.

Looks artsy...

Beautiful image Ivo.

On 23/12/2016 at 21:06, topgearuk said:

general life and a new baby make sure of this

I hear you.. in the same boat.. with 2 now... Setting up and tearing down would all but kill any time I have with the scope.... but this is why I could see no reliable option than to build a small hut to house my setup permanently assembled. The whole structure is small and I have my PC in there also so starting imaging is literally a matter of a few minutes, if continuing exposures on the same object.

 The problem I have with the covered up solutions is that a lot of humidity and moisture will get in under the tarp and ultimately cause oxidization on the mount.. even the PCB... there would be times when its raining for weeks and this might be too close to leaving in in the elements.. just prolonged damaging effect.

Observation is something I haven't done for almost a year, it's all imaging, but at least this much is possible.

7 minutes ago, gorann said:

At least there are no major forest fires nearby - I hope you are ok here you are. Your sky must be rather hazy now.

I'm OK... I'm near the coast so it's mainly clear as the haze tends to pass north or south of me... some haze but not too bad.

27 minutes ago, gorann said:

. Right now the weather reports keep changing from day to day, or hour to hour...

Welcome to the Southern Hemisphere tropical climate...

Even with the hurdles to jump over, you have a very nice result.. the star bloat might have been caused only by actual seeing.

5 minutes ago, gorann said:

Thanks! Much appreciated comming from an Aussi. I am just barely on the southern hemisphere at 14° south so there are many of the obvious southern objects that are below the horizon here. I think I have now bagged the main ones suitable for 300 mm FL but maybe you have some suggestions? Everything below the Running Chicken is really too far south. I may also do what Dave suggested and go for some wider field shots of the Crux - Carina area with my wife's consumer-class zoom lens, but I am afraid what it may do to the stars.

So, I have started pointing upwards to objects I can see from Sweden but that are usually too low on the horizon for getting a good image. Here is the first one so far - it is a 2-frame mosaic so I could fit in both the Witch and Rigel shining on her. 90 s exposures on the Witchhead and 30 s on Rigel. Totally 255 min. I could never get this deep on the Witch from back home, and I had almost no satellite trails that mess it up when shooting at it from Europe. I have tried to go as deep as I can on this faint object and I used a bit of Olly's @ollypenrice trick of bringing out that last part of deep dust from an "Equalize" layer in PS. It even brought out some Ha. One challenge was of course to tame Rigel. For the first time here I even had a gradient issue, but not from light pollution but from Rigel, so natural in a way. Gradient Exterminator in PS could not handle the blue band created by Rigel across the image so I hade to learn how to use Dynamic Background Extraction in PI. After some trial and error I think I made it do what I wanted it to do.

Amazing Witch Head....

See if you can capture the "Statue of Liberty" nebula.... it's between the Carina and Crux....

awesome collection of some familiar objects...

Looks awesome

Amazing..... I though that sunspots were soooo 2012.

Awesome images.... memories....

Good news is that we're only a few years away from another solar maximum.. but the bad news is that the maximum is expected to be a fizzle not a BOOM!!!!

17 hours ago, lux eterna said:

Great result ! It´s hard to believe you had F10 and so little integration time. Nicely processed.

Ragnar

It's a quite bright object, there were objects where I spend more than 25 hours, NGC300 is one, and narrowband total exposure in excess of 56 hours... the fighting dragons of Ara, both at F10.

That looks great.... well done

12 hours ago, assouptro said:

bought a second hand Atik 314l+,

So did the Atik improve on the clarity & resolution when comparing to the DSLR at the same focal length?

2 hours ago, Xiga said:

Amazing. Most people say not to even bother trying to image with a C8, but your images show that it's capable of so much in the right hands. 

As a fellow C8 owner, i'm definitely feeling some 'sky & mount' envy right now! lol. 

Great image. 

I heard that too, but I always wondered "why?"... I think it's because of the native focal length and the difficulty of accurately tracking at such high magnifications. But the CGEM does track at accuracy at below the "/pixel res so this detail might be the limit of my sky & camera.  

On 07/12/2019 at 08:55, MartinB said:

Terrific, I love all those dust lanes.  The CGEM has done a good job taming the focal length.

One thing I plan to improve next is the crispness of my images at 2032mm focal length.

The 40D already being 1.16"/pixel on the C8 at 2032mm fl and consistently tracking at RMS below 1", it might not make a difference and this might simply be the limit of my equipment???

As Tony said you do need a controller. My AstroZap uses PCM to control the temperature instead of voltage control but you do need some kind of controller. Once installed you will no longer have any dew problems.

I got a 12V 5A PSU and changed the connector to a female car cigarette lighter plug and plung my AstroZap controller in that for power, and it's been worked like this for a few year without issues.

3 hours ago, tooth_dr said:

What an image MG. Fantastic! The 40d is formidable 

Yeah, I like my 40D.. makes me think that I do not need a "dedicated" astrocam.

4 hours ago, assouptro said:

Thanks for the reply MG

Thats a lot of subs with a varied time scale and would present a challenge Calibrating and stacking (for me, that is)

Did you match all those lights with darks? 

cheers

Bryan

The more subs the better the SNR will be in the final stack, so I try to get as many as possible.

I expose various length subs simply to expose for the brighter and dimmer parts of the object being imaged. When all of these subs are stacked into a 48 bit image, than the data is embedded within the 48bit stack but the levels are displayed linearly and I'm able to use levels to stretch out the image with great control on both the brighter and dimmer parts of the object.

When it comes to preparing the subs for stacking, I only use 20xBIAS frames and 20X Flats taken through the corresponding filters that were used for the subs. I do not use darks at all.... when I tried using darks, the result was worse, but this could be that I'm a DSLR imager and I can't exactly control the sensor temperature so no dark frames for me.

What I do is I use a 2 pixel at threshold 30 Dust and scratches filter on each sub after it was converted from the CR2 raw to 16 bit TIFF and pre process them in Nebulosity 3.3. Stacking is also carried out in Nebulosity 3.3, and it's remarkable easy to do, even then the subs are dithered, where my imaging is always dithered.

One thing I plan to improve next is the crispness of my images at 2032mm focal length.

45 minutes ago, assouptro said:

Hi MG 

Good job! 
Can I ask, what were the length of the subs? 
thanks for sharing 

Bryan 

Hello Bryan,

First I started imaging the galaxy through the UV/IR filter and ended up with subs 8x90s, 7x150s, 7x300s, 6x450s, 6x600s but they were on the overexposed side. The following night I used the Neodymium filter, AKA " Moon & Skyglow" filter instead of the UV/IRCut filter and did 1x900s, 1x660s, 2x600s, 11x540s, 1x420s, 4x300s @ ISO1600, totalling exposure time of 5h 41m & 30s.

I did stack all subs to process the final image.

MG

On 07/12/2019 at 13:23, Vox45 said:

Very nice picture indeed, I did not know this galaxy, amazing details !

What software did you use to frame your picture and write your signature and info on the target ? It looks quite nice and adds a nice touch when sharing with others  

Thanks... The original framing template was generated by an action pack called "Astrophotograhy Tools" for Photoshop.  I modified it slightly for my liking and use it for my DSO images.

Gives a basic description of the object, such as the name, ID and date imaged along with my watermark.

I do recommend the action pack as it does have some useful and effective actions/features.

Thank you all for the comments.... very much appreciated.

Fantastic image.. superb