Herzy

That's a good point. I noticed that my pictures are very red. Not just the DSO's, the actual background is much more red then before. I think you're right. I'll be ordering an IDAS LPS filter to see how that helps.

The difference might be the CLS filter. I stretched my 3 min sub and I can just BARELY see the horse. Really it just looks like a dark patch because you can't see any features. All of my 3m subs are bright orange.

Nige, I'm very interested about your horse head nebula. Last night I couldn't see even the slightest trace of it in 3 min subs. I don't understand how you got that much detail with such short integrations. Would you mind posting a single picture for me to compare to? Thanks, Hayden

You seem to have a lot of patterned noise. Are you dithering? If you look closely it looks like there is a checkered pattern to the noise. That may be a result of drifting of the object in your FOV.

I have a modified T3i shipping to me right now! can't wait to try it out at a dark site.

You're right. The moon was way to bright to do anything, so I packed up.

Does anyone have any ideas of what I could image tonight? I want to image away from the horizons and I don't know of any bright nebula that I haven't already done. I've done the Eastern and Western veil, the Bubble nebula (although this could use 10x the integration that I have right now), the crescent nebula (this could use a lot more integration as well) and the Wizard nebula. Any ideas? Andromeda galaxy might be an option, although I'm not sure if 4 hours would do it justice. It might need far longer integrations.

You should try putting a blanket over the setup while taking flats. There is probably a lot of stray light getting in that will effect the accuracy of the flats.

This was 76 minutes from an AT72ED mounted on a SLT mount. It was 15 second exposures and my computer couldn't handle the amount of files I took in RAW form, so I had to use JPEG. This was just mainly a test with my alt/az while my EQ was packed away ready to move houses. I had to crop in really bad because my AT72ED is giving oblong stars in the corner. Speaking of the AT72ED, the CA is really easily corrected. I used a few methods to remove it on the bright star in the middle and it was gone in seconds. It did leave a few aberrations that I had to blur out, but that was still really easy to fix. Overall, I've found imaging with an altaz MUCH easier. Other than hundreds of files that I have to work with, it works great for short exposures. I'm worried about imaging really faint objects, however, because the read noise will probably overwhelm the object signal. It isn't a beautiful image, but It's not too bad.CC is welcome!

That's what I suspected. Sorry, misread your post. Good luck! I'll go ahead and delete my post. BTW, how has that mount been going for you? Is it stable? My old mount would always shake for some reason. That's not something inherent to alt/az, just something my specific mount suffered from.

*deleted* I misread the post and thought he hadn't bought anything yet. I can't figure out how to delete the post so just ignore this.

Both images are slightly out of focus. Other than that, it's a good image.

Light pollution is just awful. That picture of the light pollution is so ugly yet that is the case for most of the population.

Did you have gradients to deal with? I had trouble processing this target because I couldn't differentiate between noise and small gas structure. There are so many small gas clouds in the galaxy that look like noise. I would have gradients with heavy noise on one side and smooth on the other so I couldn't get anything out of it.

I haven't been able to test out star tools yet because our family is moving houses and everything is packed up. Is it easy to remove halos? The AT72ED gives slight blue halos on bright stars (generally only 3-4 pixels wide) that might annoy me if I was shooting something like the Pleiades with lots of bright stars. Could you go into more detail on how you manage to tame the halos?

I recently bought an AT72ED. It fits in my SLT mount holster and is pretty light so it should do well. I have an EQ mount, but the thing is so heavy and I get fed up with taking it out to a dark site (I have to separate it into many pieces and wrap them all in blankets), so being able to use the alt/az, which is much lighter, will be nice. As for CA on the scope, it's not that bad. It's an ED doublet refractor (not fully apochromatic). I would highly recommend this to anyone wanting to get into refractor astrophotography on an altaz mount. --- Just a short review incase someone reading this thread was thinking about getting a refractor.

Is your camera modified? I'm really surprised you pulled out that much data from such short integrations. That's making me think I should give it a go too.

Beautiful image, Ian. Love the detail in the edges of the Galaxy! Do you have the stack? Ide like to mess with it because this is something I want to go for soon and some processing practice would be great.

I always have trouble with color in Startools. I usually do color balancing in another software and do the rest in Startools.

IKR! The craziest part is that all of that data was from a dark site. I'm not sure how close they live to the dark site, but for me that is an hour and a half drive... That would take many many months for me to get data like that. I found a link to the thread. It was 130 hours and the image is just beautiful. I'm not sure I can share it because it's on another site completely. Do you guys know if that's against the rules?

Nigel, That object is really really faint. I can almost see the nebula coming out in only two hours. May I ask why you're going for such faint targets though? I saw a thread on a different forum where they had nearly 100 hours (a hardcore imager) on this target worth of 30m subs. That should tell you just how faint this is. Why not go for something like the veil or something else much brighter?

I remember posting a thread concerning one of my pictures and the lack of detail even though I integrated 4 hours. The object was very faint, but I thought my integration should've showed more detail than it did. I was informed by wimvb that my exposures (60s) weren't long enough to do the object justice. He said that the reasoning for longer exposures making a difference is the amount of signal vs the amount of noise. If I recall correctly, he gave this example: Consider a REALLY faint object. It gives you roughly 1 photon (1 signal electron) per minute. At the same time, your cameras read noise will contribute 1 electron. It doesn't matter how many frames you take, your signal will remain 1 because stacking doesn't boost signal, it justs removes noise. SNR = 1. Now consider you are imaging that same object with 10 minute exposures. Your capturing 10 signal electrons/photons and 1 read noise electron. SNR = 10. Longer exposures give you more signal, and more of them give you less noise. The combination of long exposures and lots of them give you a really good SNR. So in that regard, an alt/az mount user is limited. They can always remove more noise, but can never boost their signal much without field rotation. That doesn't mean they can't produce wonderful images - they certainly can. They are just limited to bright-ish targets.

You could probably get an old cardboard box and flatten it out and tape it with a small frame to the fence to keep the scope hidden from the streetlight. The light is most likely spilling into your frames and causing nasty gradients. This will be especially apparent if the seeing isn't great (i.e. A lot of dust and fog in the air) the light will start lighting up the surrounding air near it and you will be within that area.

Last night the skies were incredible. The light pollution took the night off for some reason. I don't even know how it's possible... My single 2m subs of the crescent were showing more detail then 2hrs of it I took a month ago. Unfortunately, some clouds rolled in and I couldn't get anything worthwhile. Tonight is looking good. Anyone else go out last night?

I see. Even though I work with an EQ mount, I still use 30s subs for the most part because my mount isn't the most reliable. I usually end up with like 500 images, which causes trouble for my computer when I try to stack. I see what your talking about though. I dealt with the same problems not very long ago. Just keep in mind the potential of your setup if you were to go for "hardcore imaging" of several hours. Although it'll be difficult, the results are rewarding. --------------- Btw, Steve, those images of Andromeda are pretty awesome. I've heard it's bright, but is it an easy target? I've never imaged it before and I'm thinking of giving it a go.