don4l

Very nice. I really like the way that the colours have come out.

Lovely detail in the Quintet! That was well worth the effort.

I've been using ASTAP on Windows for about 6 months, and I have to agree that it is blisteringly fast. I like the fact that you can overtype the various info fields. If your fits headers are wrong, then you can simply put your own numbers in (all my older images have useless info in the headers). I also like the ability to replace whole chunks of the header. This allows me to platesolve a reference sub, and paste the header into a processed image which can be displayed in my planetarium software.

NGC869. See if it looks like a diamond ring.

Well done for capturing such a challenging target that I haven't heard of before. I think that the dark patch is real.

If the Esprit had been available when I bought my Tak, I am sure that I would have bought one instead. You might even benefit from not having to refocus every 30 minutes.

Thank you all for the positive comments. I nearly didn't post the image because I felt that it needed more Ha. The funny thing is that this is undoubtedly my best image to date. There is something about this camera that I cannot quite get my head around. The data doesn't seem to need much processing - and it isn't obvious (to me) why that is the case. It is also easy to see how more data will improve the image, in a way that didn't apply to me last camera. @ollypenrice has made comments about the data from his Atik 11000 camera being a joy to work with. I wonder if I am seeing something similar here?

[EDIT] No longer 5 degrees in southern UK - so not so important. People should be aware that the magnetic north pole is about 5 degrees west of the true north pole.

This is 55m Ha and 130m OIII taken with a G3 16200, Chroma filters with a Tak 106 with 3,6 reducer. I was hoping to blend in some SIII. but my 12nm SII filter is too noisy in my light polluted skies, and it produces huge stars! The camera is still new to me, and after 55m Ha I thought that I couldn't improve by taking any more. It looks like I was wrong. The OIII data is much deeper and cleaner. This is a completely new problem for me - but a very nice problem to have. I will probably come back to this next year and get some more data. Feedback (good and bad) on how the image looks would be appreciated.

Well done for capturing the bubble. I tried and gave up when I couldn't see anything.

I thought that I had already answered - sorry, I must have forgotten to click the submit button! Moravian G3-16200, Chroma Ha and OIII filters, Tak FSQ-106 with F3.6 reducer. Acquired with CCDCiel, calibrated with CCDStack, and post processed in the Gimp. The camera is new and I am learning how to use it. For some reason that I don't understand, the data needs far less processing that my last camera (an old STL6303). I'm getting far better result than I ever did before, but there are also some "funnies" that I will have to get used to. I didn't plan the colour scheme in the images above - it just turned out that way.

Thank you. And thank you for the feedback about the brightness. I've got two different screens, and my images look completely different on both - so I really have no idea how they look to other people. I do tend to do things manually, but I'm not a complete Luddite! I'm now imaging from my breakfast room using Indi, Linux, Astrometry.net, and various other stuff that I hadn't even heard of 18 months ago. I will be changing ISP soon, and I will probably have another go at APP then. There is only so much time that you can spend trying to get software to work.

Thanks. I think that the software is APP (Astro Pixel Processor). I downloaded the trial version about a year ago but I couldn't get it to work on my setup. From what I hear, it is indeed very good.

This is my first attempt at a colour mosaic. Despite the join being obvious, I am still very pleased with it. I've done several mono mosaics over the past 18 months and been surprised at how difficult it is to match up both contrast and brightness along the edges of adjacent frames. I thought that going to colour would make the problem much worse. It has made it a bit more difficult, but it isn't as awful as I expected. Processing and combining was done in the Gimp. Each panel is Ha, O, O for RGB. The OIII data for the Soul is binned 2x2. Any advice on doing these using Photoshop or Gimp would be much appreciated. All sorts of other comments would be welcome too - especially about how it looks on peoples screens. I have a strong suspicion that my screen is too bright, so I might be posting very dark images!!!

This is the Soul taken with my new 16200 camera. I should really have taken it at F5, but I am doing a mosaic with the Heart, so I wanted the wider FOV. Exposure: Ha 85m 1x1, OIII 50m 2x2 Equipment: Moravian 16200, Chroma 3nm filters, Tak FSQ106 at F3.6. EQ6 S/W CCDCiel, CCDStack, The Gimp There isn't much processing in this image. The frames were calibrated, aligned, and colour combined in CCDStack. The Ha was used as Lum in the Gimp, and the contrast was enhanced using Overlay mode to combine a duplicate of the image itself. I would have had to spend hours processing this with my old camera. There just doesn't appear that there is much to be done with the data from this new camera - or maybe I just need to up my game. I can certainly see how more exposure would make the image better in a way that I just didn't understand before. Comments would be very welcome.

Here is what the centre of the image looked like before using Starnet:-

I've taken a few days to reprocess the image because I had to go back to scratch. The camera was only at -2C for these images, and I had to shoot new 10m darks!!! I've used Starnet to remove the stars from a new colour image. I made a separate colour image of the stars ind CCDStack with unstretched images (Ha, G, and B). The stars were then added back as a "Lighten" layer in the Gimp. I haven't done much other processing. I honestly don't know what to make of the result, so comments are very welcome (Even "Hate it"). Anyway, here it is:-

I tried this last year and I never got a decent result. You have done far, far better. It does look noisy when displayed at full resolution, but the image is coming up at over 5000 pixels wide. Does your camera really have this many pixels, or has the image been upsampled somewhere along the way?

I remember when you brought up this subject last year, Rodd. I've been looking for a new camera, and this question seemed very pertinent. I am not a mathemetician, so the following might be nonsense. My new camera has a 16200 CCD, and I have an FSQ106 which, if I remember correctly, is the same as the scope that you used on your Heart image. To my simple mind, there will be no difference in exposure time when you are imaging at F3 compared to my setup imaging at F5. We will both have the same FOV (roughly). We will have a similar resolution. The pixels in my camera are bigger, but at F5 they will be collecting the same number of photons from the same area of the sky. So, any differences in exposure time will be down to QE and noise.

This is 6:6:6 min of RGB M34, shot on 9th of this month. I haven't imaged many open clusters, but I was very pleased with it.

I've played with it, and I must say that it can produce stunning results with remarkably little effort. [Gimp users can find the function under "Colours -> Auto -> Equalise"]

I imaged M34 and M39 last week, and I was very pleasantly surprised with the results. I'm not sure that I would have done any better on a "perfect" night.

I have a few methods. The simplest is to just use Gimp. I take a screen grab of CdC as a base layer. I paste a copy of my image on top and then simply line up using the bright stars. The next method is what I use all the time. I platesolve one of the first subs that I take. I then paste this header into a processed image which CdC can display if it is in a directory selected under "Setup -> Pictures -> Image Archive". I use ASTAP to do the platesolving and the pasting into the stacked (and scaled) image. I also use ASTAP to bin the image to reduce the size. CdC slows down if the images are too big. This method is remarkably accurate. I can click on one of my stars, and CdC will identify it! I can then use CdC on subsequent nights to make sure that I am properly centered on the target.

The vertical line is a bad column in my CCD chip that didn't calibrate out. There were four of them, and I had to use the "heal" tool in Gimp to get rid of them. I didn't do a very good job of it! The STL6303 is an old camera that seems to have suffered terribly from 8 years of storage. My best guess is that cosmic ray hits have caused the damage. The dark frames are truely awful. The biggest problem is that the strength of the hot pixels and bad columns seems to vary from one night to the next. What is interesting, is that an Atik 16HR that was stored with it has suffered no visible damage at all. It's dark frames are the same now as they were in 2007.

Your FOV will be about 1/3rd of this image. There are a couple of parts that would make a very nice image, and your stars would be much easier to deal with. (My camera's pixels are too big for this focal length).