MarsG76

Excellent results for a start.. now that you caught the imaging bug, you can never let it go, but as time goes on, your images will become deeper, and you'll find yourself chasing that perfect image.

Thats crazy, heat strap actually catching on fire!!! As mentioned before, definitely caused by a short out.....

Fantastic image... love it...

15 hours ago, Michael Milligan said:

Thank you James and Michael. I was hoping it was repairable because it's $314. I get the  "No Response 16" and "No Response 17" errors.

The weird thing is Celestron tech support people never thought of the problem being the main board. In fact, after they replaced my new StarSense which, of course, didn't work either, they still wanted me to try hooking my StarSense hand contoller to the StarSense camera, then a cable from the camera to the hand controller port. They never mentioned the main board. I just googled and found it.

My telescope is an A-P EDT 130. The image sharpness and detail are indescribable. Now I fear I'm stuck with a less than adequate mount for astrophotography purposes.

I'll bite the bullet and replace it and hope it doesn't happen again.

Thanks again.

Hi Michael,

Before you deem your main PCB to be the culprit, I recommend you disconnect all accessories, like the StarSense, from the mount and try a different power supply. If you mount works at any stage before failing than it's not your PCB, and also it if works with accessories disconnected than again its not your PCB that's at fault.. but if you determine that the main PCB is faulty than it's not too expensive to fix.... I got my replacement board for $250... so not the end of the world kind of expensive... working fine until today... and the PCB in the CGEM II is (most likely) the same as in the original CGEM....

I'm surprised at Celestron tech support, they should have told you to first disconnect the Starsense and test the mount.... 

Hello astronomers,

I'm sharing with you my latest complete image of NGC300, aka The "Southern Triangulum" Galaxy.

It is located in the constellation "Sculptor". Known as the "Southern Triangulum" because resembles the galaxy M33 within the constellation "Triangulum" which is not visible from the far southern hemisphere latitudes.

NGC300 is located approximately 6.3 million LY away.

This image was captured across multiple nights between 28 September and 24 October 2019 for a total exposure time of 51 hours, using my full spectrum modded and cooled Canon 40D DSLR connected to my Celestron 8" SCT at 2032mm focal length.

Clear skies,

MG

What a well spotted and great idea.. 

Great data & image.. HSO looks preferable to me..

4 hours ago, StuartJPP said:

I do the same.

Once I started to dither my subs I ditched darks, good riddance I say. I did experiment and found they did nothing for me other than waste time and disk space.

You have to make sure that your dithering is adequate though.

And I found that it can actually introduce "reverse noise"... black single pixel dots..

Personally I dither and never use darks.. I only use bias and flats.

I find that all thermal noise (and only the noise) gets eradicated by the "Dust and Scratches" filter in photoshop.. set to 2 pixels at threshold 30.

Attempted taming of the run away red hue...

19 hours ago, alan potts said:

can't say I can see a spider though.

I guess that what happens when an object is long exposed, the general shape that gave it its nickname gets lost.

Looking at it in the eyepiece it does look like a spider with thick hairy and spindly legs, seeing it in the eyepiece it is very obvious why it got its name... it is a very great looking object observationally, and huge, bigger than the Orion Nebula even though it's 100 times further...

19 hours ago, MartinB said:

That has some real depth to it.  I like the delicate narrowband colour scheme.

On 12/11/2019 at 04:27, Adreneline said:

I like both but prefer the first one - it seems to have more depth.

Thanks for sharing.

Adrian

19 hours ago, alan potts said:

Two fine images MG, I like both of them with the first just winning the day, can't say I can see a spider though.

Alan

1 hour ago, DaveS said:

Prefer the delicate colours in the NB image, which also shows more of the structure.

Thank you for the feedback... I agree that the narrowband does look better than the very red pseudo RGB image...

I also put together a quick pseudo RGB image from the narrowband data... it was very red heavy (for obvious reasons) and I toned down the red a lot but I couldn't get it looking quite right.. I still think that the SHO image looks more aesthetic.

Hello Astronomers,

Sharing with you my latest complete image, this is the Tarantula Nebula imaged in Narrowband and processed in Hubble Palette colors, SHO.

This image came into existence because I didn't want to waste perfectly good half nights. Basically I started imaging the Helix nebula but it was obscured by 1 am, and since I didn't want to waste the nights, I chose an object rising in the south east to image until sunrise.

Unfortunately the moon became too bright to continue to image the Helix, and so it was put on hold until the moon is gone, but the moon was on the other side of the sky from the Tarantula, and the narrowband filtered subs were not affected by the moon light so I completed my imaging aimed at the Tarantula.

This was imaged at f10 through my 8" SCT with my cooled and astromodded Canon 40D DSLR. Filters used are the Baader SII, HAlpha and OIII 7.5nm filters.

Clear skies,

MG

26 minutes ago, Starwiz said:

Thanks.  Yes, I was a bit undecided about that.  When I tried decreasing the green, I started to lose detail in the Ha component, so I left it as it was.

I also have two laptops and it looks different on each and different again on my phone.  One day I'll work out how to calibrate the displays.

John

Monitor display differences are a big factor when color balancing photos.. astro or otherwise....  

to preserve the detail, try desaturating the image and use the gray scale as a Luma channel.. the color can be used as a color channel, (even gaussian blurred slightly), and you can easily adjust the hue without losing any detail, which will be preserved by the luma gray channel.

10 hours ago, John said:

I came across a short movie on youtube of an unboxing of a number of Explore Scientific eyepieces by the Lowell Observatory. Having recently visited the observatory I did notice some ES stuff around. I hope the observatory gets it at a good price or even as a donation from ES !

Anyway, a couple of the boxes contained one of the 30mm 100 degree 3 inch format eyepieces and one of ES's 3 inch format diagonals. I've seen the eyepiece at a couple of shows but I've never seen it in a 3 inch diagonal before. This still from the movie really brings home the size of 3 inch format kit

WHAT!!!!???? That looks like something I'd do pullovers with at the gym and get a crazy anterior delts, upper chest and front lat pumps...

ARGHH you reminded me... I was going to observe and image Mercury and Venus 11 days ago... they were almost next to each other.. life made me forget about it...

Very nice image.. personally I'd try to decrease such a heavy green hue.... but great image nonetheless.

2 minutes ago, Adreneline said:

Thanks for the kind comment - glad you like it.

Adrian

The great thing about HOO is that the end result looks natural color wise...

15 hours ago, Gina said:

I might give up astro!!!!

It wouldn't be long before you miss it....

Very nice rosette.... good imaging.

2 hours ago, Alien 13 said:

I have PS CS6 but it is pretty much useless with my new Canon camera as it does not support its RAW files so I switched to Affinity Photo and to be honest its hard to tell the difference.

Alan

Adobe DNG converter will change all new CR2 Raw files into 16bit DNG that can be opened and processed as raw in any photoshop version. 

Great Result.. this galaxy is very similar the NGC300.... 

3 minutes ago, andrew s said:

Doing the calculation first would have saved you the effort but at the price of the fun in trying it 😀.

Regards Andrew 

I did... but I didn't want to believe it.. and until I saw it for my self I would have kept on wondering... for example, what if the official distance to M42 is wrong and it's not really that far away?

8 minutes ago, johninderby said:

drop in demand

Thats what happens when power is priced out of affordability.