MarsG76

+1 APT

Hello and welcome to SGL... even if your visits might be infrequent.

Hello All, Sharing with you my imaging results from March 2023, the "Statue of Liberty" nebula (NGC3576) and NGC 3503, both are in the Carina constellation and very close together in the sky. The "Statue of Liberty" integration time was 22 hours and 15 minutes, where as NGC3503 proved to be considerably fainter so I had to spend more time in imaging it to get a workable SNR.. even after a total of 33 hours and 38 minutes, the noise level was still quite visible. Both images were exposed through a C8 SCT at f6.3, with a QHY268M, Baader filters and tracked using a hypertuned CGEM mount. Clear Skies, MG

Welcome, another member to see how deep is the astronomy rabbit hole?

Oh, and welcome to SGL....

G'Day.... if it was just a fuzzy blurry and fuzzy than it most likely was not Omega Centauri... the is a awesome view in even a 4 or 5" telescope.. What magnification are you looking through it at??? Start with 50-60X than dont go over 120X as a beginner observer. Omega centauro only needs about 50X to be an amazing view. I suspect that either you were looking at some faint nebula or your mirrors are severely out of collimation.... best way to test is to see how sharp the moon craters are during a crescent or first quarter phase... than look at Acrux, and see if you can clearly see the triple system.... Look at Orion nebula and see if you can see the trapezium of starts at it center... Believe me... when you see Omega centauri in your telescope eyepiece properly (especiall in Bortle 3 skies) you will not be able to stop yourself from saying "WOW"... and you should be able to see a great view even if your mirrors were abused, as long as they still reflect...

Awesome detail... makes me want to visit Barnard 33 for a close up also...

Weather is a pain for all of us that is why I built a permanent setup, so that I can be imaging within 15 minutes of noticing a clear sky, this luxury makes exposing more subs or re-shooting data is easier... and if I stars and clouds come, than it's not as much of a infuriating event as spending a hour setting up for every imaging session... and we all know that weather forecasts are hardly ever accurate. I find that processing each seperate channel independently gives me more fine details in the images as each filter records different details or parts of the details/feature. The luminance is one of two... either a "De-Saturated" version or a Grayscale version of the separately processed SHO image. Believe it or not those two versions do look different, more contrast than anything else tho. One looks better than the other, and this changes with images, so I keep the best looking version.

I imaged these regions in particular to compare the difference in detail recorded and overall image quality between my 8" SCT @ f6.3 and the same region imaged with my 80mm f6.25 refractor 2 years ago, almost to the month. The first image is a comparison of the same area of the Carina nebula photos between the image completed recently and the cropped section of the same area from the full resolution photo taken back in 2021. The image taken with the C8 at f6.3 was scaled down to match the actual full resolution image from 2021. The second image is a resolution and scale comparison of the same area of the Carina nebula photos between images taken with the 80mm refractor at f6.25 on the left and the C8 at f6.3 on the right. The image on the left is an unscaled full resolution image as recorded back in 2021 and the image on the right has been scaled down to 60% from the full resolution for presentation, effectively "BIN 2x2". Both images were taken with the QHY268M. and using the same filters. I think that the bigger mirror makes a bit of a positive and sensitive difference.

Hi Simon, My workflow is quite simple as I do not want to muck around with my data too much and always aim for the best original stack I can record, always manually quality controlling all subs and rejecting all but the best of the night. I re-expose subs if I my data is all particularly poor or if I do not have enough for me to be happy with the integration time. I like to aim for more than 30 subs per channel for more difficult objects or if imaging at over 1280mm focal length with my SCT. The difference is visible in these latest 4 images... the first two were made up of exposures: Ha:50x300s, OIII:46x600s & SII:49x600s (20h00m), the third (Carina's Face Profile) exposures: Ha:35x300s, OIII:28x600s & SII:38x600s (13h55), which delivered quite a noise free stack even though the object is fainter than the first two BUT on the other hand the Southern Tadpoles were made of of exposures of only : Ha:26x300s, OIII:22x600s & SII:31x600s (11h00m), and it's a much fainter object. The stacks resulted in being much dimmer, particularly OIII and SII was even weaker, and the stretched channels had a lot more noise which had to be dealt with... this particular nebula needs at least double the current image spent integration time and I will re-visit this object in the future. Anyway, here is my processing work flow point form: 1. I align all of the stacked channels in Nebulosity 2. Crop the aligned stacked channels to crop out undesirable elements such as stacking artifacts. 3. Run all cropped channels through Starnet V2 4. In photoshop create starmasks using "Difference" between the Channel and starless channel.. I do this for all channels. 5. Stretch and process each Starless channel. 6. Combine into RGB.. these images were SHO... (Red<-SII, Green<-Ha & Blue<-OIII) 7. Generate a luminance channel before any color balancing 8. Color balance the RGB channel with using the generated Luminance channel. 9 Add the stars from the generated starmasks. 10. Final blacks and gamma level adjustment before exporting the final image... noise reduction as necessary, but at this stage I rarely have any noise in the image which needs to be removed. Hope this was helpful, Clear Skies, Mariusz

Fantastic image...

Hi Astronomers... Sharing with you my latest completed astrophotography project which spanned across February and into March, targeting some close ups into nebulae within the southern sky constellation of "Carina". I imaged 4 images concurrently all with my C8 at f6.3 with the QHY268M and tracked on a hypertuned CGEM mount. All images are of objects within the constellation "Carina" but three of these images are closeups of the Great Carina Nebula, NGC3372, and the last image is the southern counterpart of the northern object in Aurgia, the "Tadpole Nebula", known as the "Southern Tadpoles" nebula, NGC 3572. Total integration time for the first two closeups into the Carina Nebula were 20 hours, the third close up (one that looks like a profile of a face) was 13 hours and 55 minutes, and the Southern Tadpoles was 11 hours (and would benefit with a few more hours exposure through the SII and OIII filters... next time.) All images were imaged in SII in the red, H-Alpha in the green and OIII in the blue channels. Clear skies, MG

Good choice.. I've been using APT for at least 10 years, since version 1.91, it has come a very long way and I'm not looking to change using it anytime soon. I wouldn't call it "only for beginners" anymore either.

Awesome

Hello, I haven't come across a app that stacks on an iOS device.

Absolutely fantastic image.. the extra hours shows...

Hi All, I don't know if you're interested in deep southern objects but here is another close up into the famous deep southern sky object, Large Magellanic Cloud. This region contains star clusters, double clusters, a super cluster, emission nebulae and a globular cluster (NGC1850, 1854, 1855, 1856, 1858) in the Dorado constellation, located in the northwest part of the bar of the Large Magellanic Cloud at a distance of 168,000 light years from the Sun... location of the imaged area is shown in the thumbnail image of the LMC. This is an unusual cluster system because the main distribution of stars is like a globular cluster, but unlike the globular clusters of the Milky Way it is composed of young stars. This object was imaged from a Bortle 4-5 quality sky and the inset shows the location of the frame in a 150mm focal length wide field image I imaged a few months ago. Integration time was 10 hours and 35 minutes in bi-color, Hydrogen Alpha and OIII narrowband color with a C8 SCT at f6.3 with a QHY268M astronomy camera. Summer down here is quite warm, and we have mostly blue skies during the day.. but unfortunately it's quite humid and more often than not the night is either clouded over, or some high altitude haze is rendering the sky transparency and seeing to such a level where subs look as if they're imaged through some wierd soft focus filter.... hoping for some drier weather soon. Clear Skies, Mariusz