Roy Foreman

25 minutes ago, michael.h.f.wilkinson said:

Really lovely set of images. Great processing too: very sharp, but not overcooked in any way.

Thank you Michael for you kind words. I've recently changed my processing routine to try and achieve a more natural look, and from your observations it seems to have worked. Many thanks.

50 minutes ago, Stu said:

Lovely images Roy, amazing given the seeing conditions. Great shot of Hadley Rille in amongst them. Can you post a picture of your setup? Don’t think I’ve seen a 10” CC in the wild before! 

Thanks Stu, and yes the 10" CC is a pretty amazing piece of kit.  There is now a 12" version, but I think the 10" fits a sweet spot of size, weight, and less affected by air cells, which average 10" in size.

Don't have an image of the CC in the observatory as it's too cramped to get a photo with decent perspective, but I have attached an image if it on an EQ6 AZ which I set up just for photo purposes some while ago.

Wow, three night of lunar imaging in a row, and in January no less.  None of the nights have had great visibility, but this was the most cloud free but with the most turbulence. The moon was dancing about all over the show. At 3045mm focal length it was a real hit and miss.

Telescope was a Stella Lyra 10" F/12 Classical Cassegrain on a Skywatcher CQ350 mount.  Love the scope, not too sure about the mount.

Camera - ZWO ASI 183MM 20Mpx with a Proplanet 642 IR filter.

30% of 2000 frames at 19fps.

10 panel mosaic for the whole disc, plus some selective enlargements.

Stacked in AS3 and processed in Photoshop.

Hope they are of interest, and thanks for looking.

Nice rendition.  This area is tough enough at my 52° location, so you are doing extremely well at 60°

Great work.

1 hour ago, pipnina said:

I really like the last one. It almost feels like I could fall into it.

Thank you and so glad you enjoy viewing, or falling into, my images !

1 hour ago, GasGiant said:

Great images. The moon is never boring. Ive really taken to viewing it

Thank you, glad you like my images. You are correct, no matter how often we look at or image the moon it always looks so amazing for an object that always presents the same face to us, albeit with ever changing lighting.

1 hour ago, Peter Drew said:

"No World class images this time" ?  Which world?        🙂

My world, I guess !  Always trying to beat my last efforts. It probably doesn't show on Web images but the originals show blurry areas where seeing changed between panels.

Thanks for your response Peter,  much appreciated. 

1 hour ago, Knighty2112 said:

Nice shots. Although the terminator had moved on past the best point to see them you can still make out the lunar X and V in the your image. I was viewing these at approx the same time on the 18th too visually, which was my first bit of visual astro since before Christmas.

Thank you.  I have to admit I was so intent on getting the panels to match seamlessly that I didn't search out these features, but will do so when next at the computer. Conditions have been really dire for both visual and imaging for some while. I've only had two proper clear nights since last June, the rest have been cloud dodging !

Second session of 2024.  Skies were really hazy and quite turbulent, so no world class images this time !  I'm just thankful it was relatively clear.

This image and it's selective enlargements were taken with a C9.25 and ZWO ASI 183MM camera with a Proplanet 642 IR filter.

30% of 2000 frames at 19fps, 5 pane mosaic.

Processed in AS3 and Photoshop.

As always, thanks for looking

Roy

Nice image. Good to see the flame nebula on its true colours, that is yellow/orange rather than red as depicted in so many images using lpr filters that filter the out yellow !

I love the area around Orion,  so much going on, and your image captures it nicely. Great work.

Looks good.  M78 has been on my 'to do' list for a while. Your rendition has inspired me to move it up the list !

The lunar imaging season is back - at least for part timers like me !

This image and it's selective enlargements were taken with my C9.25 and ZWO ASI 183MM camera with a Proplanet 642 IR filter.

30% of 2000 frames at 19fps, 5 pane mosaic.

The seeing was generally quite good, but as I was imaging in gaps between the clouds ( as usual ! ) there is some variation in sharpness between the panels.

Also, the degree of sharpening applied should be different for the whole disc and selective enlargements, but this time I got lazy and used the same for both, hence the selective ones might look a bit over sharpened !

In spite of these shortcomings, hope you enjoy and thanks for looking.

Roy

I prefer the first one because the dust shows up better.  I've imaged M45 many times with different instruments but never been totally happy with the final results. I might follow your lead and use my RASA 11 if the weather is ever clear enough for long enough to warrant setting it all up.

Nice image, love the dust !

6 minutes ago, Albir phil said:

Great images I'm thinking of getting a 150, is collimation a problem 

I didn't find it a problem. If you can collimate an F5 or F6 scope then you can do an F4 scope. The process is exactly the same. A good quality laser collimator makes the job easy and precise. For greater accuracy you can view an out of ficus star image on screen and tweak to perfection.

Glad you like my images, for which the collimation was only 95% perfect !

It was unexpectedly clear(ish) last night for about and hour and a half, so I thought I would give the Quattro 150 and airing. At F/3.45 it gathers a lot of light in a short time.

Chose a couple of easy targets to give a greater chance of capturing something worthwhile.  Given the hazy conditions I'm reasonably happy with them.

Clouds rolled in cutting the total integration time for the Horsehead.

Vital Stats :-

Skywatcher Quattro 150 with it's F/3.45 Coma Corrector

ZWO ASI 6200 MC Pro full frame OSC

61 x 30 sec at gain 400, no filters for M45

33 x 30 sec at gain 400, IDAS NB1 filter for Horsehead.

Both cropped slightly as the Q150 doesn't quite cover a full frame sensor.

Thanks for looking.

I sometimes get those single spikes. In my case it is usually because something has obstructed the field of view, like the observatory opening not properly aligned with the scope !

Very nice. I have something similar planned with an 85mm lens, and I am hoping to see a break in the clouds before orion disappears for the season.

I like this. Intricate structure and nice tones. Great image.

Still experimenting with this Antlia Quad Band and I have to say I really like the results.  Very natural colours for a narrowband, especially on stars.

Here's a couple of examples from last night - first decent night in 6 months.

Both taken with a Skywatcher MN190 and ZWO 6200 MC Pro.

Hope this is useful for those considering this filter.

Very nice details, and well done for extracting over 6hrs of data in our currently dire weather.

Apparently this galaxy looks similar to how our own milky way galaxy would appear if we could view it from a distance.

Superb image. I've only had one clear night in 6 months so images like yours with 20 hours integration are totally out of my reach, so I will just have to be content with looking at yours !

11 minutes ago, Sp@ce_d said:

Have you done any (aggressive?) checks for halos? One reason I’ve never tried optolong having seen earlier ones not handle them too well. I moved from astrodon to antlia on my mono setup a while back which I was happy with so antlia would be my preference. 

I haven't done any specific testing, but I have noticed that the optolong does tend to suffer from halos and other spurious effects more so than the IDAS. My Antlia filter is relatively new so no ling term data, but so far it has given me clean results, apart from its tenancy to be over red.

12 minutes ago, Sp@ce_d said:

Interesting as I’ve just started looking at these “multiband” type filters. I noticed this one recommends not to use on a camera with IR block which you don’t have on your 6200 but I do on my 2600 so I was considering the optolong quad version. I see what you mean by dimmer, I didn’t notice that on examples I saw on utube for the optolong quad one. I’ve been using an Idaz nbz for dual on OSC which I’m happy with for NB. However with my skies changing from bortle 3 to bortle 5 over the years a cleaner OSC would be nice. 

It's not that you can't use with IR block, just that you will miss out on some of the signal, which may not be a bad thing , especially with refractor, as not all are corrected for IR.

Certainly these multi band filters help with imaging things like galaxies in light polluted skies that we are all having to contend with these days

A few years ago I started using Optolong's L-Enhance dual / tri band filter.  Works well but to my eyes the colour balance seems to be a biased towards cyan.  Then I started using the IDAS NB1 tri band filter.  Much more natural looking colour and, to me, seems to be a much better filter all round.

Now I've acquired Antlia's Quad band filter and the images below are the first results.  M1 was taken with a 10" Classical Cassegrain, and M42 with an Askar 107phq and 0.7x focal reducer.  Camera was a ZWO 6200 MC Pro

Colour balance in the stars seems to be a lot more neutral than the other two filters, but the overall colour in nebulae seems to be overly red - easily corrected in post processing.  Although it is quad band, and theoretically letting more light pass through than the others, it seems to produce dimmer images. This, of course is very subjective, unless you do side by side images, which I have not done.

These are not world class images, just test shots to see how the filter performs.

Hope they prove to be a helpful guide to those considering this filter.