Nigel G

I used Astro pixel processor for stacking, there's a bit of a crop but not much, Here's a single exposure, no crop.

Sorry for late reply, these are single exposures on a static tripod. I have since stacked 22x4 second exposures 135mm lens static tripod

I visited a local boatyard to see and photograph comet Neowise. With a good view to the north it's perfect. This also was my first chance to photograph noctilucent cloud which I have only ever seen once before, so a great night for me I ended up taking 1600 images also making a time-lapse. Camera and lenses, Canon 1300d, stock 55mm & a 135mm f3.5 lens Thanks for looking.

Wow, I have a fairly good image showing this Quasar, superb

Thanks for the info. I must attempt this

The most distant known object I have captured, even further than IC 1101 at a mere 1.04 billion light years distance. Some of you may also have caught this large galaxy without knowing about it. IC 2729 in the Leo triplet of galaxies, near the Hamburger galaxy NGC 3628 1.09 Billion Light years distance. The light captured here left IC 2729 over 900 million years before dinosaurs roamed the Earth. Cheers Nige.

The lum channel was taken with a Canon clip in Ha filter. I layered this with the colour data in Star tools layers module.

Hi Ed. With darks, I recommend a minimum of 22, but more is better. Warm weather always made the banding worse, and darks worked on a small % of images with the bands but not much. To be honest darks didn't do much for my DSLR images as temperature would fluctuate a lot, flats and bias did however but not with bands, Longer subs will make the banding worse unfortunately, but there's several processing options, Star tools has a good banding module which works well most of the time, and a photoshop plugin, Astronomy tools, pretty cheap and works in PhotoShop CR2 free version plus all the paid for versions. You shouldn't need to take bias every time you image, once a year I would make 50 new bias frames. Using narrow band filters did help, its the layering of different filtered images that reduced it quite well, but filters are not cheap and the money better saved for a camera upgrade if your heading that direction. It's rare that the banding couldn't be processed out, once you find a good method, it tends to work on most images. Heavy dithering helps also, as your moving the banding around a little on each sub. A meridian flip worked very well because the bands were flipped on some of the subs, stacking removed pretty much all bands, but that all depended on the target. Hope this helps in some way. Best regards Nige.

Hey guys. Star tools is coming along good, with quite a few new tools. Has anyone tried the new 3D module in Star tools. It works very well with nebula, still trying to work out settings for galaxies atm. It's great for FB posts, also 3D glasses or viewing on web browser. Nige.

Hi. The 130PDS is on the absolute limit for this mount so would need to be balanced perfectly. With a good polar alignment and balance you could possibly get 2 minutes. But 60s-90s should be doable at a fair keep rate. A refractor would be a better choice but quite a bit more expensive. Consider re greasing the gears if your handy at taking things apart. I did this with my EQ3 with a good improvement to smoothness of tracking. Good luck and most of all Clear skies.

Thanks for your kind comments

Thanks & Well spotted Olly. I had not taken flats for NGC891. The circular artefact is the secondary mirror reflection from my 200PDS, which is partly why the black point is clipped Cheers Nige.

Thanks Ian Thanks

Sadly the weather has been pretty poor for astronomy and astrophotography, but I have made the most of what clear skies there has been. Working on my narrow band imaging and processing and my first LRGB image. I'm enjoying the new process, combining data, experimenting with data, personally finding processing easier than I had expected. First NGC 7000 SHO, 30x240s each filter. 80ED. Second the Heart nebula SHO, 3 panel mosaic, approx 1.5 hours each filter - each panel for around 14 hours. 80ED. Third the Monkey head nebula SHO, 30x240s each filter, 200PDS. Fourth NGC 891 LRGB, 15x240 each filter using artificial L from RGB. Several smaller galaxy's can be seen with NGC 891 ZWO ASI1600MC, sensor temp -10, 139 gain, ZWO 7nm filters & EFW. Thanks for looking.