Nigel G

Nice one Bob. Worth a revisit for sure, I still have an hour or so to capture on this target. Hoping for a clear sky tonight for a change looks good so far but..... Nige.

A lovely image Peter, well done. Nige.

That's looking good Bob, with every sub added will be less noise and more detail, a great image with so little time I find the less you have to bin the better, with a good couple of hours worth of subs 75% bin gives me the best results, but it does take longer to process. If I have up to an hour I use 50% sometimes 30% binning. Your PHD graph looks a bit like mine. Nige.

Great image for 3 x240s Bob You both had better luck than me. It looked promising last night but the thin cloud didn't go away, finally gave up waiting at about 12.30am. Half an hour or so in bed and I remembered that I had forgot to close the back door, when closing it I noticed a perfect clear sky, to late to setup I went back to snoozeland. The story of my astronomy life Nige.

The background is looking much better, there's lots of good tricks to learn, I quite often reprocess past images because of new found methods. I hope you enjoy the journey Peter. Nige.

@Peco4321 Hope your finding ST ok. A recommended work flow for ST. This is how I start an image. StarTools likes autosave.fits files. Open file and bin 50% auto dev, this will look bad but will show you any stacking artifacts. Crop to required size. Select Wipe. use gradients first, put dark anomaly to about 8 pixels and select, DO, if your happy press keep. use temp auto dev for this. ( if you find ST very slow then bin 35% ) If you have vignetting, Select wipe again, select vignetting and repeat dark anomaly 8 pixels. if your happy select keep. Next Develop. reduce gamma to 0.90 - 0.95 and select home in until your nearly there, then move the digital develop slider till your happy. Next colour. I normally raise dark saturation to 8 and lower saturation amount to around 100%, play with the red green blue sliders to suite your image, this is quite sensitive so small ajustments. Life. Select moderate and do. if you like it keep, if not try heavy. Select life again and use less more or isolate, move the strength to suite your image. Then play around with everything to see what happens. Don't do any noise reduction until you turn off tracking, ( on the top bar) be bold with the grain size, about 18-20 pixels. Then raise the smoothness to about 80. The filter mode is a good tool. use filter mode- reject. zoom in and select unwanted colour pixels, usualy bright green ones. this reduces the chosen colours, can work wonders You should find it quite quick to learn. Any problems were happy to help. Good luck Nige.

Excellent blog happy-kat, thanks for sharing.

@mikey2000 Some good detail showing up, looks like a bit of moisture was in the air though. got to be worth collecting more data if the sky's allow I setup last night with a nice clear sky and a lot of hope, but on que the clouds rolled in Hope your sky's are better than South east corner Nige

Hi Peter. I like the dumbell it reminds me of Star trek, I see Captain Kirk and Spock trying to work out what this strange mass is drifting around the universe. LOL Have you trialed StarTools yet, its a free download and no limit to the trial, the only thing you can't do with the trial is save your final image but you can screen grab and crop it. A dedicated processing program will make a world of difference to your post stacking processing. There are tools just for removing gradients and vignetting which do wonders. If you like ST it costs about £30 to buy a license, Well worth its value and the funds go to charity. Theres no end of help here on SGL or tutorials on YouTube for ST. Easy to use, its always the processing that will make or break your hard work. Photoshop express is very limmited for processing but great for finishing an image. Worth a trial Nige.

2 or 3 hours on each frame. Last night I only got 1 hour 20 mins total out of 3.5 hours because of clouds. If a clear night happens soon then yes for sure, but not often happening unless there's a moon or I'm away :/ We will see I'm still after the bubble nebula as well as topping up the elephant, plus the other half dozen DSO's atm

Well I have had a re process and filled in the corners too Pro now I'm quite amazed at the amount of nebula emmisions for only 42 minutes each frame. 2 or 3 hours would be worth it I think for a cleaner image. The trouble is I have a list of DSO's to do so find it diffucult to spend many hours on one target but the times I have its paid off. This has flats and bias - no darks. Nige.

Finaly I got a chance to image despite the moon and few clouds. Its been so long I almost forgot how to setup the kit . PHD2 worked a treat last night too. A quick process of the Veil nebula, 2 pannels. Both 21x120s ISO 800. Modified 1200D, Equinox 80ED, EQ3 Pro. PHD2 guiding. Stacked in DSS, processed in ST. I'll have another go later after work. Cheers Nige.

Bob, The only things I can think of is a misaligned sensor which is most unlikely or a sloppy or loose fitting T-ring. The weight of a camera on a focuser can cause a slight problem, ( my star discovery 150p does this) cheap focuser. I would look at the collimation first then the focuser, see if the focuser moves when it takes the weight of the camera, not in or out but relative to its 90 degree angle to the OTA. The method of collecting flats could play a part too. I simply point the scope at a white computer screen, about 4 to 6 inches from the screen, snap off 30 or so on AV mode moving the scope slightly every shot, that's it. This seems to work very well for me. Nige.

@Peco4321 Is the bright spot in the same position every time? Or does it change when the camera is at a different orientation on the scope? If you take a flat then spin the camera 180 degrees and take another flat this will tell you whether its the scope or camera. Make sure the cameras auto orientation is disabled for this so the top of the camera is always the top of the image regardless of the cameras orientation. If the bright spot is in the same position its the camera but if its opposite its the scope.

Good effort Peter, the Veil is a tough one with short exposures and a moon around It is possible to get light leaking through the camera from the eye piece, canon supply a cap for this which is on the camera strap. If you haven't used it yet simply unclip the eye socket and fit the cap, torch light or any light behind could leak through. Nige. This was over a hundred 45s exposures with no moon and unmodified canon a year ago. Still waiting for a chance at this with my new setup.

I have always had per channel background cali set to no, and read to keep it that way with DSLR's so not sure about that Nige

I would stack them all and see the result, you can always start to remove the brighter subs if your not happy with the result Nige.

Some great images have been posted since my last visit here ☺ We are currently in Holland sailing, had 2 nights on a relatively dark island in the Veerse meer and captured a couple of milky way shots but forgot my camera lead so can't upload until I get home next week unless I sus out the wifi setting on my camera . Keep up the good work guys. Nige.

Very interesting an very noticeable difference, when I use my 135mm lens at F3.2 I gather a fair bit more light than my 150p f5 reflector which surprised me . These are same modified camera same exposures both with CLS filter, the 135mm has been heavily cropped for this post but there is far more dust visible in the 135mm image. Nige.

Nice Bob, colours good and good detail, plenty of nebulosity. I think you might pick up more detail if you centre the Southern half rather than centre the complete nebula. I loose detail around the edge with my reflector so try to get the most detailed parts in the middle of the frame. Maybe mosaic 2 images, but still well done. An example, here's the same last year with my 150p 45s exposures. Nige.

I had trouble with the unmodified 1200d camera, orange and pink being dominant but with the self modified 1200d and CLS filter the red responce is far better. I tried the modified without the CLS filter once but theres too much light polution washing out the images. Nige.

I have added an hour to the original NGC7000 image with a good result. 2 hours of 240s. Modified 1200d, Equinox 80ED. I don't know what the natural colour is but very little colour processing and this is the result. First is the 1 hour, 2nd is 2 hours. Nige.