gorann

Yes, you could allways return to it with an Oiii filter when astrodarkness gets back🙂

Looks great with nice details and quite a bit of dust! There should be some Oiii centrally in the nebula but I guess your sky is still too bright to pick it up. Cheers Göran

Thanks Olly! I will keep you updated.

Yes, the four concrete piers may one day puzzle the archaeologists - maybe one theory will be that it belonged to someone worshiping the sky🤣

No astrodarkness here yet so, while I am adding a second pier to one of my obsies here at the farm (current status shown below), I have not only been digging into the ground but also digging a bit into forgotten data on my hard drives to test the star fixing procedure in Star Tools recently advocated by @tomato. I found this Ha data that I have not posted before. The stars did not look too good in one corner which may be the reason I had put it aside but the Star Tools' star repair procedure helped a lot. There is obviously quite a lot going on among the Ha emitting nebulosity in this area. 5 hours from 31 August 2020 with a RASA8 and ASI1600MM and Baader high-speed Ha filter. Processed with PI, PS and Star Tools. PS. Olly @ollypenrice, the plan is to have the Mesu 200 I bought from you to be sitting on that new pier - I will go down to Lucas and pick it up in two weeks🙂 Cheers, Göran

Thanks guys! I also did not know how close they were so I caught the squid by accident. I had not even attempted to frame the image, I had just put the SY135 as piggy back on my RASA8 dual rig (aiming at the trunk) to allow the SY135 to catch what ever happened to be in its FOV, with the main objective to fine tune its sensor distance. My Bortle 2-3 sky helps of course.

I have not followed all the entries on this thread, so maybe this has been discussed: JWST is an IR telescope and I got quirious. Has anyone here tried IR astrophotogtaphy? Googling it gives rather few entries, but this one got me interested: https://www.cloudynights.com/topic/554666-nirha-preview-of-horsehead-project/

I got it to work! So now I have bought Star Tools, even if I maybe just will use it for fixing stars.

Thanks Steve! That is impressive and convinced me to have another attempt on Star Tools.

Amazing image and I could not find a single hot pixel😁. Does anyone know what filters were used and how they were combined to an RGB image?

Lovely! A rapid look at astrobin just showed close-ups and I just did not have the energy to go through the 87 x 100 pages of images of the Trunk. You and me may be among the few that aimed a Samyang 135 at it.

Great image Adrian! As I said I was sure there is some out there, and dusty it was👍

No astrodrkness for me, so I apart from mixing concrete to add a new pier to one of my obsies I have reprocessed some images. This one is 5 hours with my Samyang 135 f/2 captured in May with an ASI 2600MC and IDAS NBZ filter. I now looked in vain for any comparative wide field images of it, but could not find any (but I am sure there are some). It strikes me how much nebuosity it is around the major targets in this area - and if you do like I done here and lift the background a bit more than ususal with a curve there is no dark sky to be found at f/2. Cheers, Göran

Impressive Steve! So I downloaded the Star Tool trial and tried to fix stars in a RASA8 image (ASI2600MC with IDAS NBZ). I have zero experience with this program so I immedeately got stuck when I tried to make a star mask. The image was either all green or I saw no green. So nothing looking like a star mask. Before I make a major effort of figuring out how it works, I wonder if I could ask you to try the Star repair on my image. It has quite eggy stars in the corners, and if they can be easily fixed with this method you would have convinced and motivated me of making an effort to understand how to do it myself. So far I have been fixing eggy stars in PS but that is quite a time consuming process. The image (Sh2-160) has been moderately stretched, so it is not in the linear stage. Cheers, Göran 20220423-24 Sh2-160 RASA1 PS1(curves+GXMM+flipped).tif

Great result indeed! My only issue is the slightly confusing orientation. North is now to the right rather than up so I would rotate it 90°.

Yes, that is indeed impressive given your circumstances. I can understand that processing was a challenge, but those IMX571 cameras allow for great deeds.

Amazing, and I can see your point Steve but Hubble is shortsighted (like me) and where we will beat it every time is in wide field, like with a RASA, and even if we go close up with a SCT or 6" refractor we can chose objects Hubble has not done, and there is no lack of them. So, just stay out of Hubble terriotry, it is in any case rather narrow.

Looks very promising Rodd but as you say better seeing makes quite a difference at that focal length. Nights with average seeing I only do short FL imaging, and save the long FL for those rare nights with great seeing. But then I have the luxury of having both systems permanently set up. I can see that you hesitate to change scopes from night to night.

That is a striking image! I think I prefer the darker one: more dramatic as Olly said.

Perfect Olly! Here you really utilized the magic ability of the RASA to get the dark dust shining. Star XTerminator and Noise XTerminator are great for this type of targets and now constantly in my tool box. I do exactly as you to get the stars back but use blend mode lighten. I may try blend mode color dodge next time to see what it does. Like you I usually also give the stars a bit of gaussian blur. One problem I often run into with this method is dark ringed stars. If that happens I select the stars (Select -> Color Range) and widen the selction a few pixels and then use a curve to brighten the area around the stars. However, I cannot see that you had this problem with this image - stars look great (apparently even impressed Vlaiv😄). I just wonder why you did a two-panel mosaic and then cropped it back to the FOV of one panel? You ended up with the same FOV as I got with one panel on my go at LDN1251 with the RASA. Was it nothing more worth seeing? Cheers, Göran

Hi Miguel! Are you still happy with the camera? I am quite tempted by the price and have three questions: Does it have a heated front window? Does it have the HCG function that drastically reduce read noise at a certain gain (like the ASI and QHY variants)? Have you tried the Omegon software (Omegon AstroPhotoCapture) to run the camera?

Nice, especially for this time of the year. From memory I get a feeling it is a mirror image that should be flipped.

It is something you get with the ZWO and QHY versions of the latest sensors (IMX 410, 455, 492, 533, 571) and seen as a sharp reduction in read noise when you move the gain over a certain threshold. Something kicks in in the amplifyer. Not sure if it is built into the Sony chip or in the amplifyer used by the camera manufacturer. I use that setting all the time with my ASI2600 and 6200 to be able to get more subs out of a give time period and assume it will significantly increase my S/N I get that night. Here is what it looks like for your sensor on the ASI6200, so everyone would use the gain 100 setting. ASI and QHY give these curves for all their cameras (e.g, https://astronomy-imaging-camera.com/product/asi6200mm-pro-mono). ZWO writes "When the gain value is set to 100, the HCG high gain mode is turned on. We’re not saying it’s magic…but we’d like to think it is pretty close. With the HCG-mode turned on, the readout noise is greatly reduced, and the dynamic range is basically unchanged."

I do the opposit approach - I down sample when I am done with the image to a scale that does not reduce resolution. I tried a few times working on downsampled raw images and was not convinced it helped in any way, but....

This thread is getting more an more interesting and I look forward to ATIKs explanation of how it all works. It would be very odd if they did not provide the HCG option.