geeklee

It's that time of year where we're seeing this pop up a lot. I think this will be the last broadband image until later in the year. Just 19 x 300s Lum and 6 x 300s each of R, G and B on the last clear night recently. Taken with my RedCat and an Atik 460EX. The lack of data is showing at full resolution (e.g. M86) but I've left it anyway. I'm loving M88 and some of the smaller NGC galaxies. Captured with Voyager, calibrated & stacked in APP and processed in PixInsight. Thanks for looking! @Rob63 showed a similar markup to the one below in another thread but here's the main galaxies labelled up anyway - keep scrolling down though! But it's this one that is just amazing. I was blown away I had so many of PGC circles with something very very faint in them - with ~3 hours!!

Adding an image I'd previously posted into the Imaging sub section... This is NGC 3718 (with NGC 3729 at the bottom, Hickson 56 at the right), taken over three nights at the start of April where the moon was rising well past midnight so it's effect varied as the early hours came round. Using the StellaLyra 6" Ritchey-Chrétien on a SW AZEQ6 and a ZWO ASI533, it was taken at native focal ratio of F9. Original image was ~0.57"PP, so this was IntegerResampled in PixInsight (2x) before starting processing. In total, 333 x 120s (~11 hours) of subs were integrated. Captured with Voyager, stacked & calibrated in APP and processed in PixInsight.

That looks fantastic Steve! Was that with the Esprit and QHY268? (On my monitor, the very dark areas have a little green in them.)

Lovely shot Rob and good colour. Loads to enjoy in the FOV. Absolutely. I have this vague memory of setting up and imaging by 6pm for 10-11 hours! That didn't happen often mind... Seems so long ago now

That looks excellent Andy, loads of detail to enjoy at full resolution. Some sizable amount of kit to travel with, can understand the challenge.

That will be an image worth waiting for. I hope you get the clear skies to dedicate to that. Close, I'm a little further south near Aberdeen, I've got a small amount left. There are dark skies close(ish) by but for me, it's suburban skies. You're right though, they'll be gone by May then nautical darkness gone not long after! 😁 It's the only option!

I hope commenting on images is OK in this thread - apologies if not. Just wanted to say (beyond a "like") how much I enjoyed looking at this image and the galaxies within - another fascinating interaction.

Thanks Peter. Those faint extensions you highlighted in your super stretched version aren't seen often but I can just about see the very start of them above. You're right, something that will take a very long time to reach a final outcome of the two galaxies!

That's looking really nice Luke, love the colour palette you've extracted from the OSC + L-eXtreme - your eye is really drawn to that "burnt" golden area in the bottom right.

That looks great Pete and I like your ultra stretched version. I'd done the same with mine and seen just how far that left hand side (in your image) starts to almost join up. Fantastic.

Another cracking image Tony. What a great set of galaxies to capture (added to my growing list of potential future targets). NGC 3187 is brilliant.

I tend to think of a field flattener typically for a refractor and a coma corrector for a newtonian. As far as I know all newtonians will suffer coma to some degree and for imaging a coma corrector helps those edge shapes that you mention. If you can wipe the gradient/background and get colour calibration I think you'll be happier with the image - although you should be already as it's got some great qualities to it. I'm in similar skies, perhaps 6 or worse in some directions so know what you mean. Another thing to remember with the CLS is because it cutting out a huge chunk of broadband light, thus letting less light in, exposures may need to be longer. Definitely worth trying without the filter but as I mentioned above you should be pleased with the image too - as it is and with its potential to get a little more out of it.

Excellent Tony. I had ~11 hours and struggled to get much from the fainter arms.

HI @Callum1985 I think the colour challenges are to do with the CLS filter. While being a light pollution filter, looking at the transmission graph, it seems more ideal for nebula as it cuts a huge range of broadband light out. If I remember these can give the image that green/blue ting you're seeing. A lot of it can be corrected in processing, but it can take extra effort. For the detail, I'm not sure - I think you've captured some really nice stuff there and M82 especially holds nice detail. I see artefacts in some stars - do you have a coma corrector in there, is collimation good and how was guiding on that big 200P?! Apologies, it's not via PS, but this has been colour balanced a little more. Hopefully a PS expert will jump in and add to this!

Absolutely fantastic @Rustang Love the colour palette and detail. Really well done persevering with the same target across 6 nights when just getting those few hours very early in the morning when it was at a suitable altitude.

I'll take that Adrian! I typically get a low key "mmhmm, yeah, very nice" Very much so. Imagine 4 out of 5 nights clear nights like recently but when astrodark is 10 hours+ ! You best get cracking if you're squeezing in another go! NGC 5195 and surrounding dust etc was the most surprising of the stack - very clear and obvious. If I do a ridiculous stretch on it, you can start to see the tails almost coming together the other way as well 😮 You can definitely process this a few ways @mackiedlm and I'll likely revisit over the summer. You can push the LHE and blend in some HDRMT versions to get a dark and contrasty image. If you're interested, here's the raw stack, with just an STF (but with target background reduced to 0.2 instead of 0.25) and a 1:1 crop before I resampled it to death: That main image looks a touch over processed when I compare again to the stack 🤔

Similar to last year, April has offered up more clear nights than we've been used to recently. Astro darkness is around 4 hours right now. This was captured over four nights with some fairly ruthless removal of subs where star shape or quality was poor. A second project for my StellaLyra RC6, with M51 being a brighter target than my first project (NGC 3718). I left it at F9, without a reducer. In the end 9.5 hours was integrated with 285 x 120s subs. Check out IC 4278 (just above NGC 5195) and IC 4278 (just above and to the right of NGC 5195). Very faint but clearly visible. Captured with Voyager, calibrated & stacked in APP and processed in PixInsight Thanks for looking and as always any feedback for improvements is welcome.

Excellent Adrian! When I got down to the starless version it blew me away even more - great way to show off the area even more! I won't unsee that now 😅

Those first two images look great @simmo39 Love the detail you've captured with the FRA400, the crop really showing it off. Very nice colours too with that blue adding a sparkle that really makes them both shine. There's still a little bit of a patchy gradient - not sure if it was too tricky to remove though, but thought I'd mention it. Lovely first light.

I see what you mean @tomato but it looks consistent with the library image - angle, how straight it is, where it finishes in reference to surrounding stars/faint galaxies (?). I think some optimism is definitely warranted. I hope you got it - great capture.

There's a few good tutorials out there. A quick win will be a Luminance mask (Image | Extract | Lightness (CIE L*) or clicking this - ) and inverted for noise reduction. Looking at the dimensions and a heavy stretch you may still have some stacking artifacts so take a few minutes to prepare the image with a DynamicCrop (this will also help with background removal).

Well done @Jonny_H I think that's on the way to a more detailed and balanced image in the second one. Tighter stars, more varied colour, still got the detail with more potential. You can try creating a range mask or even extract the Luminance and use that as a mask to brighten up the areas with lots of signal - this would of course impact the stars too without more masking! You can also work with curves to brighten up above the background level. If you used some noise reduction, it could maybe be eased off on the galaxy (with an inverted Luminance mask for example). I had a quick go at the attached PNG and the faint arms are still there and ready to be pulled out a little more.

Brilliant @Spongey Fantastic OIII signal across the panes - can't wait to see the finished image. Certainly an area I'd like to shoot in a similar way.

No need to apologise at all, it was more a comparison to the first image where the nebula was quite faint but the image was pretty balanced and there was lovely star colour in there alongside the double cluster and a great star scape when looking at the whole image. I remember my first DSLR image off a static tripod - I was blown away as it had areas I recognised in Cygnus. It's a journey and you should still be pleased with what you have so far.

Start with this 👍🙂 50mm will be a big jump in FOV again. The NAN (NGC 7000) will be small. If you have the clear skies, perhaps try both lenses and see what you get. Just try and maximise the amount of data you capture - if that's possible. I found an example on Astrobin with a modified DSLR and 50mm lens. Even at that speed and FOV, things are faint. https://www.astrobin.com/119548/?page=3&nc=user And another with 50mm but more integration https://www.astrobin.com/lgf6un/E/?page=3&nc=user Good luck!