gorann

Thanks Don - good luck and spend many hours on it, There is also some Oiii there that I had no time to capture.

Two votes now! I have to admit that I had to google Star Destroyer - always been more of a fan of 2001 than Star Wars (after all there is no sound in space), but I can see the resemblance.

I just love it Stuart! Thanks a lot!

Thanks Dave - yes I think this nebula deseves a name....

SH2-224 is a supernova remnant in the constellation Auriga, a remnant of an exploded star about 15,000 light years away. The nebula does not appear to have a proper name. Flying Bat nebula could be a good one, or Flying Cat nebula, or something more ghostly. This is data from Saturday night with the double Esprit rig. Esprit 150 with 0,79 x reducer and ASI071 for RGB (34 x 10 min) and Esprit 100 with ASI1600MM for Ha (48 x 10 min). Sitting on my Mesu 200. Processed in in PI and PS. In the RGB data there is not even a hint of the nebula, so this one is very very faint. I also post the RGB image. Would be cool do an image where you can flip between the two, but have no idea how to do it. Last image from Sweden for a while since I am off to Australia for a month. Will bring a travel scope. Comments & suggestions most welcome!

Thanks, yes it is a bit Christmasy😉. November has been as it often is up here, only rain, wet snow and cluds.

Friday night it finally cleared for the first time in over a month! I aimed my double Esprit rig on this collection of space oddities. I collected RGB with the Esprit 15e0 and ASI071 (0.79x TS reduser) and Ha with the Esprit 100 and ASI1600MM. 39 x 10 min of RGB and 51 x 10 min of Ha, so totally 15 hours. Most of the Ha whent into the red channel (blend mode lighten in PS) but I also used it a bit as lum. Apart from the major blob (Sh2-232) and the two minor blobs to the right (Sh2-235 and Sh2-231) there is supposed to be two planetary nebulas in this area. On is the small reddish dot in the middle of Sh2-232 but I am not sure where the other one is. Maybe someone knows and maybe it got accidentally lost in processing🙄? There is also a small droplike thing near the right edge - not sure if that one has a name/number. Comments and suggestions most welcome! Cheers Göran

Agree with most things said here. I never understood why guide scope rings are sold - you will always find a guide star wherever the guide scope is pointing. The important thing is that there is no flex in the system (those rings will introduce flex) so bolt it to the imaging scope as strongly as possible and naturally both scopes will point largely in the same direction. What I think you should not worry about right now it belt-modding the mount. Most likely it will work quite well as it is, especially at the rather short focal length of your imaging scope. Good luck!

Interesting! Could you tell us more about them Steve, like FL and aperture?

What I tried to say above is that you have some really great triplet apos with low f-values that apear to only use one ED element, like Esprit 100 f/5.5; APM LZOS 130 f/6; CFF 140 f/6.5; Astro-Physics 130 f/6.3, so could it be that using two cheaper ED elements (like FPL-51 or FCD-1) is novel way of makig great triple apos, if that is what TS and FLO are doing (they do not state what ED glass they are using)?

Yes, it is a very nice palette Ola! I am a great fan of your NB palettes. This may provoke some: I like it when green is kept out of NB images - no real need for it to be there, unless you really want to be "scientific" and keep the signals from the three filters as much apart as possible. We do not need to imitate HST, in that contest we will always loose, but by chosing palettes like Ola we can win aesthetically. And one could argue we also wim scientifically since both Sii and Ha are red in the real world😉

Good point Ben about the types of ED glass used. Nothing is mentioned about it on the TS site and I expect they would tell us loudly if there were two FPL-53 elements in there. Maybe two FPL-51 (or similar) are cheaper than one FPL-53, or easier to get hold of.

But there are some great and relatively fast triplet apos with a single ED lens. Like Esprit 100 f/5.5; APM LZOS 130 f/6; CFF 140 f/6.5; Astro-Physics 130 f/6.3 (at least they do not advertise double ED elements). I do not think the new TS 140 f/6.5 has a flatter field since they seem to recommend the same flattener/reducer (TS 0.79x 3") as for other telescopes, and they do not claim a flatter field.

There are many high class apo triplets with just one ED lens. Actually I thought they all only had one ED lens. Does anyone know if there are any advantages with two ED lenses - seems to be the new trend, see:

Thanks Wim! I really like your comparison to painters - at least I am not into astrophotography for any scientific reason but merely to make images that please me and hopefuly others. Our eyes and brains are very subjective regarding their sensitivity to light and colour and that leaves us a lot of freedom. Blue is blue, yellow is yellow, red is red and usually there is no green in space (except in Hubble images) but we can feel quite free regading how much we emphasize the blue, yellow and red. Indeed, I noticed on several occations that it is not only up to peronal taste but also intraindivisual taste - meaning what I like one week, I may feel an urge to adjust the next week,

Giorgio, you are just too kind. Thanks a lot!

There was a thread here on SGL years ago (I think I started it) about what we would see of nebulae and galaxies if we got close enough, and I think most were of the opinon that the closer we get the less we see of the shapes we can see at a distance. I assume that our own galaxy would look a bit like NGC 2841 from a distance, but being here it looks just like a lot of stars on a dark sky. Regarding the colour, it is blue (a lot of signal from the blue filter) but how blue is dependent on how much I saturate it. For the colours I was looking a bit on the NGC 2841 image by Adam Block: http://annesastronomynews.com/photo-gallery-ii/galaxies-clusters/ngc-2841-by-adam-block/

Poor you😱, but many thanks anyway Alan!

Thanks, much appreciated!

Thanks Paul!

Thanks a lot, and good luck with iTelescope!

Thanks! After eternal gray skies (probably 6 weeks here also), there may be some hope here next weekend. After that I am off to Queensland for a month. Could be cloudy there also but I will bring a SW Star Adevnturer, some lenses and a cooled CMOS, see how it goes. If the cloud cover persists here in northern Europe, why not log into http://telescope.livjm.ac.uk/ and give it a try👹

Thanks a lot!

This post may provoke some puritans here but it has been cloudy in my patch of the planet for over a month, so I finally allowed my itchy processing fingers to throw themselves at public data from the Liverpool Telescope - LT (http://telescope.livjm.ac.uk/). Wim van Berlo recently downloaded and stacked the data, and was kind enough to share the stacks it with me. Very convenient since down loading subs from their database is rather tedious, so thanks Wim and good luck with your knee surgery tomorrow! Some of you may know that Wim and I have on occasion taken comfort in processing LT data when our skies have prevented us from collecting our own data. And this beautiful flocculent galaxy is rather small and almost out of reach for most of us, at least not as close up as this with 20 meters of focal length. The telescope is a 2 m RC on La Palma Island, as I understand is much used for requests by UK school classes. Their data is public after a year. Data used: Red 35 frames (SDSS-r filter) Green 16 frames (Bessell-V filter) Blue 20 frames (Bessell-B filter) About 100 min total exposure time Processed maily in PS, and a bit in PI. No NR used at all.

An interesting aspect of your image is that is reveals why it tooks soo long before someone discovered the squid (forgot his/her name). Even at dark sites, NB imaging can make a difference.