Shibby

Originally, I only grabbed some luminance for M37 right at the end of another session. However, I found that this open cluster looked really quite pretty so decided to go back and get some RGB to finish it off. I felt like there was some sort of nebulosity showing up in the background of the luminance, so decided to get a few hours of Ha too but nothing showed up as far as I can tell. Perhaps it's reflection from the cluster itself? (That or poor calibration!) I deliberately allowed the stars to bloat without any messing about as I felt this might show them off better. LRGB ~4.5hours total.

Awesome image and well worth all that effort! Just shows how rich and colourful some parts of the night sky can be!

Looking good. Focus seems good, too. Flats are probably the most important in my opinion. The low number of darks can actually add noise to the final image, you may be better off without them depending on your stacking method.

I've been in exactly the same boat as you, so I feel your pain, however it's taken me even longer to return! Nice to be out there again, isn't it?

Many years ago I modified a D70 and used it for both terrestrial and astrophotography. If you want to to any terrestrial photography with autofocus, my understanding is that you need to replace the colour-balance filter with a clear one in order to keep autofocus working properly. If you want to do any astro imaging at all involving glass (e.g. refractors, coma correctors) then you need to use an additional IR blocking filter to prevent stars from bloating. This filter would be attached to your telescope adapter. If you want to do terrestrial IR photography, then the replaced (internal) filter should be clear so that it doesn't block IR. i.e. "full spectrum".

I wouldn't say it was flat, but I do like the new version - great detail.

Superb colour in your new image! Probably due to that extra luminance layer.

Really nice image, despite what seems to me like a pretty short integration time 👍

Incredible! I like your framing, it looks like the ship has just taken off

I think the problem is that first year of sleep depravation teaches you to grab sleep whenever you get the chance, then that's a difficult habit to drop!

I've been away from astronomy and SGL for far too long. I don't have a great excuse to be honest, other than having kids! How are you all keeping? Good I hope? Some great images knocking about on the forum The lovely skies last night finally tempted me back out there and I was pleasantly surprised to find all the hardware still working reasonably well (once a loose cable had been diagnosed). I kept it unambitious and decided to test out the kit on a quick grab of the nice, bright Pleiades. This is just 30x240s of luminance:

Looks very nice - plenty of the dark dust picked up, but I'm not sure how well that will print. Whenever I get something printed, the faint stuff always seems to get lost. By North, do you mean "down" - because I think your image might be upside down. Easy to turn a print around, though

You've done a great job with the central core! Nice one.

I realised how badly I had combined my channels last time I posted this back in 2018. Holding back on the Ha channel has really brought out some extra structure I had completely destroyed with my previous hap-hazard approach. So here it is again - it's a Bi-Colour combination of Ha and Oiii as a 2 panel mosaic. Acquisition Hα: 2x24x600s Oiii: 2x17x600s Equipment Optics: MN190 Camera: 460ex Mount: AP Mach1GTO Guding: Orion mini 50mm guidescope & QYH5L-ii

Very impressive results for completely untracked capture! What was the actual exposure length of each sub? Must have been very short!

Well my images are total crap then!! Awesome detail and I like the improved colour balance, especially since you improved the stars.

Fantastic result. Great work on the processing! Would love to have a try for the outer shell myself, but not if it requires 23 hours - that'd take me months!

A very fine image! The original seems the best to me, nice and natural. Good to see the difference that registar has made - I normally get the stacking software to align my channels but that's not perfect.

What a fascinating object! Thanks for imaging and posting it.

Really nice. I like very much the colour and carefully handled background field

Nicely done - I know just how difficult this is to process - there's a huge difference in brightness between the core and outer regions. The second version looks very similar to me, on my screen. I'm almost tempted to suggest you've posted the same image twice!?

When drift aligning my mount, I aim for below 4' (that's about 0.07 degrees) however I have a permanent pier and wouldn't want to do that every night!

Very nicely done Olly. Compared to my own attempt at M101 (which also looks too cold in comparison), it shows just how much further the galaxy extends than I thought it did!

Thanks! Here's a tighter crop:

Hello, everyone. Sorry for yet another M51 but it's always an enticing target, being so high in the sky and I haven't tried it with my current setup. It's been more than a year now since my last post - I've had a bit of a break from the hobby due to various reasons, including the recent birth of our daughter! Baby + astronomy = one very tired dad 😴 One victim of this equation was my Hα layer, which was taken with the Bahtinov mask in place! 🤦‍♂️ So this is an LRGB image which I've processed with very basic techniques in Photoshop. I decided to get decent amount of RGB to try and bring out the fainter colour in the background fuzzies etc. The RGB layer turned out almost as strong as the luminance layer! However, this is far from the best M51 you'll see - I really don't know how others achieve so much impressive detail. I threw away a lot of luminance subs that were taken before I drift aligned, which helped improve the detail but only so much. Perhaps I need to revisit collimation. Atik 460ex Skywatcher MN190 L: 32x600s RGB: 3x15x600s Calibration: Flats only (Total: 12.8 hours) Thanks for looking!