Hallingskies

Can't be bothered with technology tonight, it's that sort of weather. Got my little C4 mak on an altaz and doing some visual for a change. Have almost forgotten how to star hop, but have found the sad remains of Neowise (can't believe how that has crashed), followed up with the Ring Nebula (haven't seen that for years, clear as anything with a 12mm ep), M13 (still a thrill through an ep) and now the rings of Saturn. Sitting outside by the light of the moon (and an iPad). V. relaxing. I find imaging a bit stressy sometimes (will all that stuff will keep working?), why bother when its warm and you can be comfortable outside? Whatever works I guess. Teamviewer was a pain, kept accusing me of commercial use or something like that, and shutting me out. When my other half got another laptop, I had her old Vista one which had Remote Desktop on it. Microsoft can't be bothered with Vista so no stupid updates either. My obbo is a bit too far from the house and wireless is a bit flaky, so I ran 20 yards of cat 6 to it and poke the wire through a window at the house when I need it! Been spot on to date.

Windows Remote Desktop and a few yards of Cat 5. Works every time (touch wood) - and in real time.

My own area of Kent is Bortle 5-6 and my own experience of a CLS filter is that it doesn’t seem to do an awful lot for you. I wouldn’t bother in Bortle 4.

That's a lovely rendition as usual, but I am a bit surprised at your observations of the ease (or lack of!) picking up the X1 bubble. It showed up, faintly but distinctly, in my own less distinguished effort under a Bortle 5-6 sky from less-than-sunny Kent, UK. I would agree that it is more prominent in OIII but it did show in my Ha data as well. You've really made it stand out, though. Is that using your wizard wheeze of blending in equalised data (a trick I am grateful you shared with us)?

They are both beautiful images, well worth the effort you obviously put in.

Just a few guys lounging around looking at their PCs. It was boring - how it should be I suppose, but it looked so easy (a mark of how much work and innovation had gone into it all, no doubt) that it makes you wonder why we aren’t going to the moon on an excursion basis. Compare that to the tension and drama generated by the hundreds of support engineers in NASA’s launch control centre back in the Apollo days, and the sheer spectacle of a Saturn V launch. Technology has certainly moved on...

That works for me really well too, but I find I sometimes have to apply a tiny bit of Gaussian blur (0.7 or so) to the star layer to avoid the stars looking “painted in”. Hardest problem I had with Starnet was finding a computer in the house that it actually ran on. But for the price you pay for it...

Apple-type device screens are unforgiving, although your M13 looks very good indeed on my iPad right now. What are the RGB values on the little colour sampler thingy in PS if you point it at some dark bits? That’ll soon show if there’s any excess red. I try and aim for 20/20/20, although it depends on how light or dark you like your backgrounds.

It seems the beast has a 5km wide nucleus, so hopefully it won’t crash in brightness too much in the next couple of weeks. According to predictions to date, it should still be third magnitude right through to August. Good luck with the trip, hope the Cloud Goddess is kind to you...

The “equalise” function in PSP (or PhotoShop as well, I think) shows up anything that might be hiding, you can then selectively layer in the stuff you want with a bit of tlc. Thanks, but it really doesn’t hold a candle to some of the recent ones on here, or here... https://spaceweathergallery.com/index.php?title=neowise Now the comet is rising into darker skies there should be some cracking shots to be had soon - skies permitting...

That is superb, up there with anything I’ve seen...

Thanks. Really needed a darker sky to do it justice. I had to crop out about 50% of the frame, the gradients were that bad. Might have another play to try and blend with some earlier wider field subs I took.

From around 3.20 a.m. on July 11th, 10 x 4s each for LRGB (Esprit ED100 and AtiK 460/EFW2 combo), stacked in Astroart and absolutely hammered in PSP to reduce twilight gradients and stretch out the ion tail which was hiding in the murk and background noise. Still pretty ropey but I have now got square eyes from trying to process this.

Thought last night's subs on NGC 6820 were a write-off but after sorting the bloated stars out I think they may be usable if you don't look too closely. Looks a bit mushy still. I don't know. Will try and get some (binned!) OIII and SII to add to it - but not tonight...

Well, five hours pretty much wasted last night. Started off by trying to take a few 600s Ha subs of NGC 6820 but they were really noisy and badly framed. The seeing was diabolical and the sky too bright for a faint target like that, I think. Then thought I'd grab some shots of the waning moon, but when I worked them up this morning I found the focus was miles out - as were the subs of NGC 6820, which probably explained why I was seeing so little detail. Tried to round the night off with some LRGB on the comet, but by the time it cleared my tree and house-lined obbo horizon, the comet was immersed in the dawn twilight, giving some funky colour gradients and blurring out any tail details. All in all, a bit of a wash-out. Ho-hum. Still, the Mark 1 eyeball view of the comet and Venus rising was well worth staying up for. Also nice to see Mars high up in the sky again.