gorann

All may not be lost! I just found that when clicking on some of my sad face thumbnails and then go to Edit basic infomation and just go down to the bottom and press Save, restored the image and everything!

Just realized that my avatar was not showing so I uploaded it again - easily done. Many of my images just show a question mark as thumbnail and no image come up if I chose it. So I uploaded a new one for one of them, and suddenly the old version appeared.... So a question mark may not mean that it is lost.

Well, let us hope that those who stay are those of us that count! I trust that Salvatore will do everything to assure that this cannot happen again.

Just read a message Rodd @Rodd sent me after I went to bed last night - he says 90% of his images on Astrobin have been lost and when I look at his page that may be true. I worry that he may not have backup for them all - I know he had a hard drive dying about a year ago. My situation seems a bit better, with maybe 30% lost but it is hard to tell since the site is now very slow and many thumbnails just show an hour glass. I will sit and wait until Salvatore tells us that they are indeed totally lost. Because I have 340 images there, even a 30% reload will be a lot of work. Good thing is that the image info should still be there and many of my poor early versions will no longer be there as an eternal hall-of-shame🥴. I do have all images on at least two separate hard drives. Of course, I feel more sorry for Salvatore than me. I hope this does not mean that a lot of people abandon the site.

Yes, that v. 2 is nice - I do not think it is overdone.

Thanks a lot for that Gav - that is the type of instructions I needed! I will give it a try asap.

Yes, that is a very nice Dumbbell! So much details in the cetral areas. I also have to learn to use Starnet one day - there is no PI plugin version that I can use on my Mac and I have so far not figured out how I get the stand alone version to run. You could try the "Equalize method" that Olly @ollypenrice invented and described here a few months ago to tease out more of the outer shell. I had a crude go at it with your posted 8 bit image to see if it could work (hope you do not mind and it would be better done on the 16 bit of course). I first used the Equalize adjustment (Image -> Adjustments -> Equalize). I then did a rather strong NR and some gaussian blur on it and then added it as a layer to the original image, just letting about 5% through with the slider, and finally suppressed the brightened background a bit with a curve. There was quite a bit more shell to be seen.

While waiting for clear skies (may happen Wednesday here, maybe) I have entertained myself with reprocessing data from the autumn. This is Ha (10 x 15 min) and Oiii (18 x 15 min) from my Esprit 150 with 0.79 x TS 3" reducer and ASI1600MM (gain 139, offset 50. -20°C). So totally 7 hours. I initially put Ha to red, Oiii to blue, and made a 50:50 mix of Ha and Oiii for the green channel. Then I tweaked the colours in PS towards an "RGB look". I endeavoured into doing a bit of HDRM and deconvolution in PI before I escaped back into my relative comfort zone, which is PS. Finally, I boosted the dust a bit by adding a few % of an Equalize layer in PS (a method suggested by Olly @ollypenricehere). I think the image shows a rather unusual amount of detail and I hope I have not over cooked it. Or have I? Cheers, Göran

I can only agree with all the others - incredible amount of work and amazing result! Perfect reference also for finding interesting objects to image, so thanks a lot Tom for bringing this to the AP community! What scope(s) and camera(s) did you use?

I also vote for the laws of physics, who would not unless you are a current US president, so a shorter bar with more weights is the way to go, not the least because it reduces your chance of stumble into it. So whatever you do never buy a bar extension.

I also suggest you go mono. If you have low light pollution like me a OSC will probably give equally good RGB results but it will not give as good NB results for the reasons already stated. I now use a double rig with a mono ASI1600 on one telescope and ASI071 (OSC) on the other, and combine the data (usually HaRGB), so that is an option for the future. But right now I would argue for a mono for you, and then the ASI1600 (or equivalent from other manufacturers) is probably the best you can get on your budget. Like Olly suggested, I would go for Baader filters. There are better filters (Astrodon or Chroma) but they are much more expensive. At least the Baaders I have are very good and they are all of the same thickness so I do not need to refocus between filters (I usually focus with the Lum filter and then switch to Ha or Oiii without refocusing). I have 2" filters (to be future proof) but I understand that 1.25" will work with the ASI1600. The major drawback with that camera is microlensing which makes very bright stars look quite odd. It is caused by reflexes between the microlenses in front of the pixels and the cover glass of the chip. It has a Panasonic chip that is much worse at this than Sony chips, but there is as far as I know no mono Sony chips in that price and size range. In images without bright stars you will not see the microlensing artifacts.

Friends, here are some of mine 2019ers. More images and info on them on: https://www.astrobin.com/users/gorann/ Cheers, Göran M100 and as many neighbors as I could squeeze in. Home obsy with Esprit 150 and ASI071 on Mesu200. 7.1 hours. NGC 7331 and Deer Lick group. Home obsy 2. First light with the mighty Meade 14"LX200R (ACF) on EQ8. Canon 60Da for RGB and ASI1600MMcool for Lum. 5 hours. Cave Nebula (Sh2-155) HaRGB. Dual rig in home obsy with ASI1600 for Ha on Esprit 100 and ASI071 for RGB on Esprit 150, on Mesu 200. 14.8 hours. Some space oddities. The major blob is Sh2-232 and the two minor blobs to the right are Sh2-235 and Sh2-231. Not sure what the fourth and smallest blob is called. I collected RGB with the Esprit 150 and ASI071 (0.79x TS reduser) and Ha with the Esprit 100 and ASI1600MM cool. Dual rig on Mesu 200 in home obsy. 15 hours. Finally, one image from my trip to Lizard Island on the Great Barrier Reef in December. A two panel mosaic of the Witchhead Nebula (IC2118) lighten up by Rigel, taken with Canon 300 mm f/4 USM and ASI071 on a Star Adventurer travel mount. 4.2 hours on a very dark sky far from "civilization".

Another way to get micro control of the movement that I sometimes use it to upscale the image size first, e.g. 4 times (if your computer can take it). In PS you do it under Image->Image size. After you have done the move you can scale it back to the original size.

I like it a lot! Quite an effort and a striking image. Maybe, as Martin says, you could stretch it a little bit less. I also noted that you appear to have had some guiding problem making especially the smaller stars to appear as lines rather than round. I hope you do not mind that I downloaded your image and used the usual treatment for this in PS: making a copy layer of the image and then blend this with the original in darken mode, moving the top image using the move tool. That made the stars smaller and roundish and thereby supressed the apparent brightness of the star field, which made the IFN stand out more. I post a blow up of this before and after the star fix. Then I suppressed the stretch a bit with curves, and finally added a bit of noise (apparent in the blow up) since your image almost seemed too smoth (a bit to much NR?). This may have helped making it a bit more dusty (not sure about that though). Cheers, Göran

Your image have gone from very good to really outstanding. Impressive how you managed to bring out that extra Oiii in the second image. While many astro images are quite dramatic this one have a nice and calming feeling. I bet watching even lowers my blood pressure.

I assume you all know that in the US these two Long-Perng triplets have been sold by Orion since 2016, but obviously not checked by Es Reid so I would of course get mine from FLO. These youtube videos are quite convincing about the performance of these scopes. There is a thread on CN on the Long-Perng 80 f/10 but it has until now apparently not been sold outside China, even if they tried to pursuade TS to import it, so that is a real novelty that FLO brings over here. https://www.cloudynights.com/topic/557492-80mm-f10-ed-refractor/

Thanks a lot Bryan!

I have done it again although I know I should really have gone to bed since I had to work next day, and it is obviously better to image small faint nebulae on dark nights. Nevertheless, I had a go at this one on Sunday night with my double Esprit rig. I even had to fight with clouds so I only managed to catch 30 x 5 min of RGB with the Esprit 150 and ASI071 and 9 x 15 min of Ha with the Esprit 100 and ASI1600MM (Baader 3.5 nm filter). I actually went to bed around midnight when there were plenty of clouds around and I only had a handfull of subs, but I left the rig shooting away and apparently it cleared for a couple of hours. To my surprise, and after much processing, it became a relatively presentable image. I had no gradient problems as I was pointing away from the moon but the sky was too bright too allow me to tease out the faintest structures in the dusty background. Yes I know, @vlaiv may tell me that this is how it is all the time to image from urban areas and I am spoiled having my obsy on the dark country side. The Small Rosette Nebula or SH2-170 is the dot in the Question Mark Nebula and not that much imaged on its own. I really should get back to it on a dark night.

That explains it, but it does not make the image less incredible!

Incredible image Martin - I think I said something similar when you posted it on Astrobin. I wonder if anyone have seen (or rather imaged) this area like this before. I would never have thought that a 24 mm lens could capture that much detail, including the dark globules in the Rosette. EDIT: Your image got me going on globules and I found a recent thesis from a fellow Swede. Very interesting reading, at least the parts I could comprehend: Globule thesis.pdf

Does that mean that it coud be run as an APS-C, so 60 Mb files? Will the ASICAP program give that possibility?

Hi Ole Alexander, that camera has been on my list of "things soon to buy" since I first heard of it, but ZWO seems to have had some trouble delivering it and dates have steadily been pushed foreward. I am now waiting eagerly to see your oppinion about its performance!

Thanks a lot Alan. No, I have not got around to do any PEC or to use Eqmod for my mounts. I use Cartes de Ciel for the Mesu and just the hand controller for the EQ8. As I understand it PEC may not contribute much when you use guiding and some say it may even come in conflict with the guiding. At least with the Mesu I do not think PEC is recommended since the direct drive makes the periodic error very smooth and easily adjusted by guiding. This image was taken by one of the two scopes I have on the Mesu.

Here is the Ha data collected for the image I posted yesterday. A bit wider field since it was collected with the ESPRIT 100. I added a very slight touch of reddish tint to the image since I thought it looked a bit better - after all it is a Ha image. Here is the thread for the HaRGB image:

Yes, Dave, you nailed that nebula! I need to try that StarNet. It is a [removed word] that it does not work on my Mac so I would have to go back and forth on a Windows machine.