Datalord

10 minutes ago, ollypenrice said:

Sure. This is HaLRGB at lower res than yours, about 1.8"PP. It's a very tight crop but there are nice little things in there. Likewise your NB has found things that this didn't.

Yeah, that could be interesting. That might be one for next summer to augment this one.

4 hours ago, ollypenrice said:

Super image. That kit is working!

Thank you! Yeah, I've gotten to know the data it produces pretty well by now. One thing noone tells you about astrophotography is that the quirks of your gear is present throughout all your processing.

4 hours ago, ollypenrice said:

Are you tempted to try this in LRGB as well? There are entirely different things to see in the top of the trunk.

Hmm, I didn't think of doing this in LRGB. I think I would also be pretty apprehensive about adding another image and blending this one without ruining both. Do you have any examples of what I might find there?

I spent quite a bit of nights gathering data on IC1396 while the nights were short, so I managed to get a total of 23 hours. I boiled it down to 15 hours of the best frames and got a result I'm pretty happy with.

As usual at this time of year I had to point the scope on our glorious companion galaxy. I spent two nights and was very selective with the subs, so it's just 6 hours of data, but it turned out quite well imho. It's such a bright target, which helps everything.

25 minutes ago, DaveS said:

That's a very nice capture, one that's on my "to do" list.

I think the ring galaxy to the lower left, PGC69279 is now thought to be an outlier of the other 4, bringing it back up to 5.

Thanks!

Yeah, I think I read that somewhere as well. But at 300MLY, the distance between that one and the other four must be 10s of MLY. My trigonometry skills are not what they used to be.

24 minutes ago, rl said:

I wonder if that is down to the extra red shift?

I didn't think about that, but it does make some sense. 30 to 300 million, however, is not that much redshift. NGC7320 is redshifted at 800km/s, while the others are about 6500km/s. In the grand scheme of things that is not much when compared with the billions of years we otherwise see quasars at.

I've been waiting for this beauty to get up and with the latest moonless nights I managed to get some proper imaging time in.

It's 5 galaxies visually close to each other, but NGC7320 is "only" about 40MLY away, while the four main galaxies, who are most likely in the middle of merging, are about 300MLY away.

Just now, tooth_dr said:

Extensive tutorials on the website

Yes, that's fine once you have committed yourself to the software. I was hoping to learn some points about what APP does different/better than other software. Once convinced, I would see a load of tutorials.

2 minutes ago, tomato said:

I tried to create an aligned comet and stars composite in PI, but without success.

The CometAlignment process in PI works well. It's fiddly as you end up stacking 2 times, but it works. Used it on this.

I am watching right now and I have to say I'm disappointed in the decision to showcase an upcoming niche feature like comet-stacking, instead of trying to show off something that would convince a PI user like me to come over. Mosaic use and more regular mono workflows would have been so much more interesting. Yes, interesting, but definitely not making a convert out of me.

I'm not becoming a fan of narrowband. It completely evades my ability to make a good image out of it, even if the data seems to be good.

This is what I got our of 14 hours of 10 min subs:

Here's a link to the calibrated stacks. Nothing has been done to them: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/mp2cl08p3p976mu/AABfFvxPkhN1m4pbNbnc0OBpa?dl=0

Hmm, might be amp glow. but yeah, the lower right hand corner always seem to light up.

4 hours ago, x6gas said:

but won't do much to sharpen detail in the nebula.

I think I'll have to disagree with this one. Decon is a seriously good tool to sharpen nebulosity. So much so that I sometimes go a little too far with it, but it definitely works on nebulosity.

31 minutes ago, ramdom said:

this target has a vast amount of stars in the background

I have the same problem on all nebulae. They're obviously in the Milky Way and both the RC and RASA are photon buckets. Any substantial amount of integration time will have the image lighting up like a Christmas tree. I just reduce their size, but I very rarely go full starless. All those stars tell their own story.

On 10/07/2020 at 21:33, ramdom said:

Takahashi FC100DF Steinheil fluorite doublet apochromat refractor @ f/7.4

I can't help notice you have some pretty serious vignetting in many of your images. How do you calibrate the images?

On 14/07/2020 at 12:20, MarkAR said:

That's probably the cleanest starless image I've ever seen, looks stunning.

Thanks! I only had to do a few stars to clean up, otherwise Starnet++ did the heavy lifting.

2 minutes ago, AbsolutelyN said:

Looks amazing! 

Agree!

Looks like this data has been a sufficient challenge for everyone. It's really interesting to see just how different results we all get from the exact same starting point.

8 hours ago, ramdom said:

That's a beautiful starless - I'm surprised you were able to do it "accidentally" - I just learnt to do it and takes me about 10 minutes!

--Ram

 

Accidental because I didn't intend to do it, but the starnet result was so good I almost didn't have to correct anything. Definitely not 10 minutes as starnet takes about 20 minutes on each sub to finish. But yes, easy.

3 hours ago, MikeCM said:

I really like the deep rich colour which is accentuated by the lack of stars. Great stuff. What did you use to remove the stars if you don't mind me asking ?

Kind regards, Mike

Thanks! I used Starnet++ in PI. I had to correct the nebula in two places where the stars were too big for it to handle. I carefully clonestamped them out. 

51 minutes ago, geordie85 said:

That is incredible. Will you do a mosaic of the entire veil complex like that? 

Definitely not a mosaic with the RC, that would take me 10 years. But I actually did start to collect more data on the RASA for a full mosaic, but as that one is in UK, clouds and summer darkness stopped my progress.

I wanted to highlight the difference between the same object in the RASA in broadband and the 12" RC in narrowband at different focal lengths. So I started processing it and accidentally went starless and it turned out pretty good.

For comparison, here is the RASA version. And only 2h20m.

2 hours ago, ollypenrice said:

I think Ciaran has nailed it, with a result that looks fluffy and yet has all the detail crystal clear.

Agree, he nailed it. I'll have to try to do that myself.

21 hours ago, Xiga said:

It was a challenging image to process, but lots of fun too, so thanks again for sharing it. 

That's a beautiful and delicate image you managed to get out of it. Really well done! 

28 minutes ago, ollypenrice said:

With that budget you'd be far better off with three mounts!

Nah, the DDMs are a different league completely. I would happily have one of these over three others...

1 hour ago, Star101 said:

see this 

Wow. Doesn't even look that expensive. And getting 35 hours of data is suddenly just a matter of 2 nights. Brilliant result.

Interesting thought. But that would be fragile in the sense that if one of them had a problem, it can't be replaced. 

I suddenly remembered the dragonfly. I don't think they are taking pretty pictures with it, but it is interesting. 

4 hours ago, ollypenrice said:

Low res widefield, the multi refractor is a winner. At high res the flexure gets difficult.

Interesting. I can't grog why it would be any different from having just one? That's so un-intuitive to me.

6 hours ago, alan potts said:

A lovely image as I have come to expect from you, 7 hours on a globular is living up to your name, I do 90mins and think I gave done well, maybe why your images make mine look very second rate.

Alan

Thank you very much! 🙏

Honestly, you could call me lazy. Even with these globulars being pretty easy to process, it takes long enough that I want to make sure I have enough good data to get a decent final result. As such I can't be bothered to start processing on a smaller stack and would rather wait another night.