wimvb

Lovely data which can take a beating. Here's my attempt, processed in PixInsight

It sure is.

That was my first thought as well, but I didn't have an image at hand. The other creature that came to mind was the Hammerhead in Shark Tale

Well, we can't do much during june, so prolonging the competition a month or even two, won't help much. But if the start date could be pushed back by, say a month (1st of March), that would allow us to enter projects that we started earlier. Remember, good images require a lot of data, and we've only had 3 calender weeks to collect that data. For me, imaging season is over. Astro darkness doesn't return until August, and the moon is high in the sky. Changing the start date by one month would make it easier for anyone living further north to enter the competition without rushing things.

That would be a challenge. Unfortunately it will have to wait untill next spring. Astro season is over here, it's snowing (!) and raining atm, and the target is very low in the sky for me. Even with M87 at about 42 degrees altitude, guiding was really bad due to moisture in the air. I image over a forrest across a field, and if I point the scope low, guide rms is usually high. 3C273 is at 32 degrees, 10 degrees lower. But I may try it late winter or early spring.

In any stacking software you should be able to select a reference image that is not going into the stack. If you can’t do that, it’s time to consider another stacking program.

Thanks, Lee. I agree that the best view is the original image when viewed at full size. The inset is more of an apetizer when viewing in a scaled down size.

I updated the original post, and included the final processed image.

It is available for the SDSS R9 catalogue, but not for PGC.

Nice to see you back here, hope all is well. This is a great comeback you present here. 👍

Great image. Fyi, the PI annotatw script can save the list of objects in a text file. You can also limit the magnitude span of pgc objects, so you can exclude empty circles.

Unfortunately clouds spoiled the fun after the meridian flip. I managed to capture red and some luminance, but not as much as I had intended. Still, this should make for a nice image of the jet.

Update at the end of this post. Includes final image Inspired by a post by @tomato I'm doing this quick project. Astro season is at an end here, and I have bagged the last data for my last project. So, just for fun, I'm pointing my telescope at M87, in order to capture the jet. While it's not completely dark yet, I collect through a red filter (increasing contrast), but after midnight, I will collect L. No colour intended. The complete sequence is 30 x 2,5 minutes Red, and 40 x 2,5 minutes L for a total of almost 3 hours monochrome data. Here's a stack of 4 x 2,5 minutes as a test image, calibrated but without pixel rejection. This is a crop from a wider field (MN190 with ASI294MM). Guiding isn't great because the galaxy is rather low and there's moisture in the air. I have an RMS of 0.8 - 0.9", which is close to my pixel scale (0.96") Update: of the intended 30 x R and 40 x L images, I could only collect the Red filtered images and 12 L images. Of the red images, only 25 were usable. The 12 L images were ok, but had more noise (expected). I decided to only use the good subs for the final image. This is M87 with its jet and several globular clusters, imaged during one night. 25 x 2,5 minute exposures with a red filter. Processed in PixInsight. A decent finale of the astro season.

Very nice. This glob keeps on giving, because the more data you add, the bigger it gets.

Nice catch. Now comes the fun of processing the image. First step: align the histograms. Good luck

Thanks, but this was taken before the "main event", luminance on ngc 3972. Here's the Ekos summary for last night The timeline panel shows the various events (tracking, guiding, focus and capture). The red, green, blue and white markers before 10 000 (seconds) are the capture events for this M51 image. The other events are capture events for ngc 3972, mostly luminance, but some blue and red towards the end. The Statistics panel shows guide results. Yellow is SNR, which drops when there are clouds, while white and red are tracking error and RMS. The best sub from the M51 sequence had a guide rms of 0.44", the indicated sub had an RMS of 0.47". Not bad for a skywatcher mount, imo. You can see from the yellow line in the statistics panel, that there were high clouds during the capture of the M51 data, but that it cleared up at about midnight, when I started collecting ngc 3972 data. The gradual drop in SNR from 3.35 am is caused by twilight. Astro darkness ended just past 2 am, so apparently we can safely capture data an hour or so past that time, which is good news.

Guiding RMS was <0.5" - 0.6" (with a dip at 0.38" for a minute or so) throughout the night last night, and I let it run until the sun came up. 🤩

simbad and aladin https://aladin.u-strasbg.fr/AladinLite/ Enter M101 in the target field en hit enter. Then move the fov to the suspected quasar. Activate SIMBAD on the right hand side of the display. Use the bulls eye (left hand side of the display) to get more information on any target. Or click the small boxes that are activated with SIMBAD. Other than that, just play with it.

Thank you. It is somewhat cropped to exclude a bright star that suffered from the high clouds.

This is about 9% of maximum brightness on a computer screen. It is dark but not so dark that you can't seen any subtle details. If you make the background much darker, you risk clipping the data. I use levels for the first stretch (histogram transformation in PixInsight), then adjust with curves. For the initial stretch, I aim at a background value of about 10% (25), making sure not to clip any pixels, but in the final stretch, I usually lower this to about 6 - 8% (20) by using an S-curve stretch. A darker background tends to give more punch to the target.

While waiting for astro darkness, I aimed my telescope at M51 and collected about 2 hours of data (LRGB), 20 x 2,5 mins L, 10 x 2,5 mins RGB (per channel). Only luminance was collected during astro darkness, but with high clouds. Simple process in PixInsight. This object deserves more data, but astro season is coming to an end up here, and I still have an other project I want to finish. Maybe next season.

It’s family friendly. Unfortunately , it does the same in private communications, resulting in ordinary Swedish words being removed from messages. btw, your image looks a lot better now.

You can see on the weak stars that you have poor focus. Can you let the software pick a star to focus on? You probably selected a saturated star, which the software can’t use for focusing

Very nice. The galaxy has a green cast which shouldn’t be too hard to remove. What capture software do you use?

Ok, no kidding this time. The setup just before lights out. But still a long time before action, since astro darkness doesn't start until 11 pm up here. Fortunately, the moon is out of the way, still. One more week and imaging season will be over here.