Nightshift Nob

Galaxy season is officially here. I launched my campaign about 10 days ago with this modest effort from the Bortle 7 light polluted battle zone of south Manchester. 

M81 (Bode's Galaxy) & M82 The Cigar Galaxy) and NGC 3077. 

3hrs 40minutes total integration time. 

Skywatcher Equinox ED80 Pro unguided working at 400mm and f5 with Televue focal reducer/field flattener.

Celestron CGEM mount.

Stock Canon eos 600D.

IDAS lps P2 light pollution filter. 

Calibrated and stacked with DSS and processed with Starnet++ and Photoshop CC.

14 hours ago, Roy Foreman said:

Better than my first attempt at the DC - well done !

Surprised you are getting blue halos. I have an Equinox 120 ED and never get blue halos. I often get red ones when used with an astro modified DSLR (Nikon D810a) in combination with a IDAS LPR filter, but I think that is quite common.

Nice image

Thankyou.

I too was using a now older IDAS LPS p2 filter that night and it was the first up on the suspect list for the halos. Probably a good place to start further investigations...👍

16 hours ago, MartinB said:

I like this!  The double cluster is one of the few targets which I think, generally, looks better through a scope than when imaged but you have managed to retain a sense of vibrancy with the bright, slightly bloated (a good thing!) blue stars.  Nicely processed.

12 hours ago, Gerr said:

Good effort - Nice round stars with good colour too.

I have a similar camera (650D) which is Astro modded so trying to achieve good and true star colour is a challenge for me. Always difficult to process without losing colour and bloating them. Then there are the halos!!! 

Gerr.

Thankyou!

I tried the arcsine stretch approach for the first time. Pretty sure I've not got it nailed down and some more reading up on it required but for the most part it makes a good job of keeping the stars under control. Just the blue halos seem to go mental so will look into that. 

My first attempt at the Double Cluster captured over two nights during the snow moon at 96% and 98% illumination from a Bortle 7 zone 8 miles south of Manchester. 

skywatcher Equinox ED80 pro

Canon eos600D  

On 01/03/2021 at 09:25, BCN_Sean said:

Best thing to do is to try and get the image under the compression threshold of the social media.

The method I do for single images (it can be automated if you are that way inclined), first off is make a copy of the image on the computer, and then open that in Photoshop.

First off, if the image is a stack or in 16bit/32bit, flatten the stack and then convert to 8bit.

From there in to the image menu, image resize and set the longest edge to ~1920 pixels using bicubic resample.  That'll give a nice size to view on most screens. Next, filter menu, Unsharp Mask with the settings of ~120%, 0,4, Levels : 5.  After that, in to the file menu, export and save as JPEG with an image quality of somewhere between 70% and 80%.  Then close the master image without saving.

On 01/03/2021 at 09:06, happy-kat said:

Have you tried using png or even jpg instead, they may work better as are the formats often used in mobile uploads. Tiff isn't realty web friendly.

Many thanks for the suggestions, ill be sure to give them a try when i get some down time...Working off a laptop probably doesnt help things either with only the very basic screen calibration options availabe. A monitor is on my eventually to do list...

Morning all. New member here. 

So!...after virtually exhausting Google and finding absolutely zilch on the subject can anybody give me any advice on tiff export settings in Photoshop so I can share photos to Facebook? The compression is absolutely savage and just destroying everything I try. I know it can be done and see some stunning photos posted but im just not getting it. Any help greatly appreciated...