LuckieEddie

Here's my latest effort. This is my first shot without Astronomical darkness - my first summer season as I only took up the hobby about 9 months ago, you certainly don't get much in the way of darkness these days. All my shots would qualify for this challenge as I've been shooting unguided and so I default to 30 second subs. Progressing to guided soon. This is M63, The Sunflower Galaxy. Shot on 13/06/2021 under Bortle 6 (according to ClearOutside), 196x30sec subs giving 1hour 38mins total. SkyWatcher N200 (the old blue one), EQ5 modified with Onstep goto system, Full spectrum modified Olympus E-PL5, Baader UV/IR filter, Baader MPCC. Stacked with flats and darks in Siril, processed in StarTools.

Thanks John for the super quick reply. 👍

Please can one of you fine folks with much more experience than me identify which mount this is? I've searched online through all the manufacturers I'm aware of but can't find it. Thanks in advance.

I put in the true focal length and the sensor size of the camera and it seems to just work - what the simulator shows matches very well with the actual framing. I use a micro 4/3rds camera, not full frame.

Here's my first attempt at this target. This was about 3½ hours. I captured around 6 hours but there were a lot of poor quality subs that I threw away. Taken with SkyWatcher N200, Olympus E-PL5, EQ-5, unguided, under Bortle 6 on 12th April 2021. Stacked in Siril, processed in StarTools which I've only just started with. I'd welcome and comment/criticisms/processing suggestions, other than the obvious 'more time, more data' 😉.

Here's my attempt... My processing was entirely using StarTools (which I've only started with in the last week), other than final format conversion in GIMP. Workflow was: Compose>AutoDev>Bin50%>Wipe>AutoDev>Contrast>HDR>Deconv>Colour>Shrink>Entropy>SuperStructure>Denoise>Flux. Full processing log (minus mask data - default auto masks used) is attached. Iris.log

I just bought a couple of Baader filters last week (Ha & Oiii - thanks Francis). Last night was my first ever attempt at capturing something using a narrowband filter. I choose NGC7822 because of it's apparent FOV and because I can actually see it from my heavily occluded back garden. This was 1½hrs of Ha & 20mins of RGB. Taken with my Olympus E-PL5 (full spectrum modded) using a SkyWatcher N200, EQ-5 & Baader MPCC, unguided. Processing was an interesting challenge being the first time I've combined data sets. My workflow was: Preprocess, register and stack each data set separately in Siril. Then make a sequence of just the two resultant fits, and register those together, again in Siril. Photometric colour calibration of the RGB data set in Siril. Then into GIMP. Stretch Ha data. Heal the stars diffraction spikes, convert to 16-bit greyscale and export as .tif. Run the .tif through Starnet++, bring the result back into GIMP and colour using Colours->Components->Channel Mixer. Stretch the RGB data, make a starmask, add the Ha data as a new layer, using Dodge blend mode. A final bit of masked stretching with curves, and that was it. Not the sharpest or most detailed of nebula images but I'm quite happy for a first attempt and the lack of exposure time.

The detail in there is amazing. Even the tiny NGC5474 is really clear. 👍

Thanks both. That's weird, my profile signature isn't showing on the post. I've got a SkyWatcher N200 (the old blue type) on a EQ-5 I've modified with steppers & belts run by Onstep. The camera is an Olympus E-PL5 micro 4/3rds that I've full spectrum modified. Also used a Baader MPCC + UV/IR cut.

So, whenever I'm imaging I start to worry that maybe I've messed up something in the setup. The longer I'm on a target for the worse I worry that I might end up with a whole nights worth of rubbish. I seem to have got into a habit of tacking a 'easy' target on at the end of the session so I should always have something to take away. Last week I grabbed 13 minutes of M13 at the end of the night. I thought it came out quite well for a consolation prize.

I've just editing the original post to try attaching the image in a different way. Hopefully that's cleared it up. Anyway, thanks for all your positive comments on the image (once correctly displayed!) I'm very encouraged. So, my immediate takeaways are: You can never have too much total exposure time, and I need to learn more about how the forum works. 😉

Thanks Craig. I did deliberately push the blacks down to help squash the noise but I think the compression that SGL's applied to the image is what's actually completely clipping it. If I zoom right in on the uncompressed version in the link I can still see faint noise. I was having some trouble getting a link to show an image in this forum, maybe I've still not got it right.

Hi all, Here's my first effort with enough patience to get a reasonable total exposure time - just under 4 hours after I'd filtered out the worst subs. Please point out what you think I could improve in my processing, which is exclusively in Siril and GIMP. Sky was Bortle 6 (according to Clear Outside) but there's loads of local lighting surround me. I had lots background gradient to remove. M101

I use Telescopius. It's google cloud storage behind it but it does much more than storage - helping you to chose targets, simulate framing, and automatically creates downsized versions of your images as well as keeping the full uncompressed available. It's free as well.

Hi Cyril. I've just reviewed the new Tutorial for the whole image processing using scripts and I think that it's a great improvement on the previous examples. The format is nicely step by step with clearly highlighted images of the UI. I also like that in the Image processing 3rd part that there's a recommendation of tool sequence. It can be very hard to understand the influence of the many possible sequences of use of image processing tools on the final result. That's a general statement, not just about Siril. I also like the new website look, very clean. I notice the the Wiki still links back to the old site though. Thanks for your efforts, I appreciate Siril as a competent and open source tool.