gorann

Thanks a lot Damian! which one do you want me to leave? When I counted it, it seems like I on averade managed one image per week last year, so I am rather pleased. But check out Gary Imm on Astrobin - he posts at least one image a day. But he is retired and lives in Texas, where he has astrodarkness year around and clouds are apparently rarities....

Fast and deadly if we got in the way of a 1 km asteroid..... Nice capture!

I would not worry the slightest by that little distortion. A 5 min fix in processing if you are up to it (like me). Pixel peeping is in any case for us the imagers and processors (since we have to be exposed to it) and the audience could, would or should not care.

Thanks Steve! Yes, somehow that Ha cloud is messing up the PN, which I think makes the object more interesting.

I think the details in your Ha image are superb Damian! This is the start of a great image!

Full moon but at least a first clear night in a while so I put my trust into the NBZ filter to block most of the moonlight. I think it did a fairly good job in the 4+4 hours of clear sky I got with my dual-RASA rig before clouds moved in again. This is a faint magnitude 14.7 object but still I am rather pleased with the result. This likely planetary nebula is about 1000 ly away and is quite old. The white dwarf presumed to be its origin it is not in the center of the nebula and the asymmetry is thought to be caused by interaction with the surrounding interstellar medium, which drags the Ha emission behind and the presence of this medium is quite evident in this wide field image (so an advantage of using the RASA for a nebula that I thought might be a bit small for this set-up). The white dwarf is the small blue star below the reddish star in the center of the blue (Oiii emitting) area. But it may not be a planetary nebula at all and there is some interesting info here: https://www.spaceimages.de/en/astrophotos/nebula/sh2-174 So, caught before midnight on 17th Jan 2022 with two RASA8 with ASI2600MC on a Mesu 200. IDAS NBZ filter, gain 100, offset 30, -15°C. 47 x 2 x 5 min = 470 min = nearly 8 hours. Cheers & more CS, Göran

Good on you Steve to defy the bl--dy moon, and the result is outstanding given the circumstances. I also joined the moon-defiers last night since clouds finaly disappeared for a few hours, but I put on the NBZ filter to be on the safe side. I am about to post the result.

OK, that makes sense👍

I am a bit confused, why would you have a guide camera for a visual set-up?

You (including her) most liekly already have a kitchen, as pointed out. But your teleskopes have nothing. If you do it youself (digging, mixing the concrete, building the walls, etc) an obsy is a fraction of the cost of a kitchen. At least you should get a permanent concrete pillar to start with.

Not sure if anyone can see this but it is my dual-RASA8 rig capturing photons while the moon is conspiring. Fortunately, most of the clouds are around the moon and not where I am aiming........ CS, Göran

With that garden and distance to your neighbours - why are those scopes not in an obsy?

I use a similar procedure. First I stretch the image until I see what I have got. Then I use Star Xterminator on it and polish off any remaining star traces (Dust & Scratches filter on small things and clone stamp or spot healing on bigger ones). I then stretch the nebulosity until I like what I see or hit the noise. Finally I put the original image back as a layer in blend mode lighten and use a curve on it to bring out the stars to an acceptable degree. The latter takes a bit of fiddling with the curve to avoid dark ringed stars.

Skywatcher apparently only sells a flattener/reducer for the 72ED but if you do not want an even shorter focal length several people seem happy with the OVL flattener from FLO (if you read the comments): https://www.firstlightoptics.com/reducersflatteners/ovl-field-flattener.html

A great capture and excellent processing Dave! As said you caught even the faintest parts.

Pretty cool Wim!

How did you manage £850?

Thanks so much Anne!

Thank you both! Cheers Göran

Had some news about this image this morning that made my day😄 https://www.astrobin.com/x9lqz6/?

The denoise routines I know about works of a finer scale than the blotchiness from the DSLR so that is why I did gaussian blur where I can chose the pixel size. Also gaussian blur just reduce resolution and cannot induce artefacts like many denoise routines.

I am very impressed that you pulled this off with a DSLR! The background suffer as usual with a DSLR and distracts a bit. It struck me that a way to cosmetically fix this would be to somehow selectively blur the darker parts of the image so I gave it a try. This is what I did in short: 1) Made a starless version using Star Xterminator in PS. 2) Gausian blur (I think I set it at 12 pixels) in PS to make the sky more even. 3) Added the original image as a layer in PS using blend mode lighten, and then used a curve on this so that only the brighter parts came through (= the stars and structures in the nebula). 4) Used a curve to darken the darker parts (as I found the sky a bit too bright). 5) Run SCNR green in PI to remove the green cast. Cheers Göran

Here I caught three planetary nebulae in one frame just north of the Soul and Heart nebulae, using my dual-RASA rig. Looking through Astrobin I find that they are rarely (never?) imaged together. Of course their small size make each of them more suitable for longer focal lengths, but there are plenty of such images. From left to right the PNs are Heckathorn-Fesen-Gull 1 (HFG1) which is around 10 000 years old. Then comes the bubble-shaped blue planetary nebula Abell 6, which is faint (Mag = 15) and clearly emits more in OIII than in Ha. Finally, there is the strongly Ha emitting Sh2-196, which is rarely mentioned but often caught together with the Heart and Soul nebulae in wide-field images. No filter used so the ASI2600MC is quite good at picking up Oiii and Ha with a light bucket as the RASA 8 and a dark sky. The real challenge was to tame the strong star field, and I had to stretch the nebulosity on a starless image (Star Xterminator in PS) before I brought the stars back. Imaged in the early morning of 6 Jan 2022 with RASA8 and ASI2600MC on a Mesu200. 2 x 85 x 4 min = 11.3 hours. Processed in PI and PS. The annotated image (from Astrobin) only give PK number for the two blue ones and does not include the Abell or HFG catalogues. CS, Göran

Just to let you know that using PS and 16 bit does the trick more than well enough and that is what a big bunch of us are using and are happy with, whatever Valiv tells you, and it can even give you APODs and IOTDs. If you know PS stick to it, PI is a very different animal (I do cherry pick some processes in PI), or what do you think @ollypenrice.....

Thanks, much appreciated comment!