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Hi, great looking item! I didnt see in the listing, but collection from whereabouts please? Thanks!

Thanks for all the help and tips. This is a first crack at colourising it myself.

Well thanks very much! I have done a bit of planetary imaging before and had tried in vain to use a dslr on the PST previously, so for a first effort I'm really pleased.

Thanks for all the help, I do love a tutorial too. I kind of thought there would be an exact value of colour to add to the image (or something), since we know the precise wavelength of the light collected. But, nice to know it should be straight forward to do. I don't currently have either PS CS or PSP. I keep getting emails from Corel though and had seen the price, pretty tempting. I think I'll have to buy it now, can't afford PSCS and I tried Gimp too and found the 8bit limit an issue. I assume it'll be easy to invert the image with PSPx6? Thanks again!

Hi all, just taking my first steps with my PST and it's not amazing but I'm pretty pleased with my first attempt. PST, QHY5l-ii + Coronado 2x barlow. What I'd like to know, and I'm sure this is schoolboy, is how to make my mono image the orange red, and for my CaK the violet blue, that I see in everyone else's images? I have played briefly with the saturation, hue and other controls in registax, but it didn't look like it was going in the right direction. All help gratefully recieved.

Hi Steve, Okay thanks. Clearly registax does this a lot? I had never seen it before. Thanks again

Hi all, Processing some pics of last nights double shadow transit on Jupiter and noticed these strange shapes forming. Interesting is the area around the moon to the right brightening, while the area around the moon to the left is darkening while Jupiter itself sits in a parallel, diagonal dark channel. Is this caused by reflections in the tube and through the Barlow and CMOS or is it a recording of poor collimation. The image train is a 6"f4 newt, baader 2.25x barlow, QHY5Lii. I noticed the effect in normal wavelets processing in Registax but have pushed them all all the way to make it easier to see. Thanks in advance

AndrewLuck, DanielK, Billhinge, Longarms et al, Thanks all very much for your efforts and tips, while following your advice earlier today, I reopened the tif in DSS and rebalanced the RGB and played with the Luminance etc, it made a huge differance to the final image! Only when I opened it in GIMP, the opened image still did not even resemble the image I had just saved in DSS. When I clicked 'Revert' to reopen it from the disc it came up with a message saying the file is 16bit and GIMP will only manage 8bit! No wonder I was only getting the attached. Does anyone know, is there a way to convert the saved DSS TIF into an 8bit image without losing any quality, or can I only process a 16bit image with suitable software? Completely aside, with regard to the focus, I used the live view and zoomed in to 10x and after 3-4 minutes of playing could not get the focus any closer than it was. I used to use APTs FWHM to achieve best focus but have noticed halos on almost all the bright stars in all my images ever. I wondered if this might be a feature of the F4 system, a collimation error, a reflection from the UHCS filter and/or the corrector possibly, some sort of pixel overflow or if it the result of a combination of all the above? Its just difficult to believe I never once got the focus right!

Hi guys Thanks all for your comments. Thanks also for noticing it's M27 and not M57. I did realise just after posting but couldn't see how to edit the post. Anyhoo, thanks everyone for your your feedback and comment. As I thought, the image is as it should be. Either I'm just doing it wrong (not the first time I've been accused of that...) or there is a problem with how gimp reads my image. How do you save an image as a thumbnail on this. I attached image m272 above, the colours or light just pools into big blobs when I try to use curves. Any ideas what's wrong or what I'm doing wrong?

Hi Bill, Thanks very much. I'm definately going wrong somewhere, this is what ive got. I tried clipping the right end of the histogram, not clipping the right end, lots of gentle curves, really steep curves, cropping/not cropping the edge off before getting started on the levels and all the combination of these. All the time, it just seems to sort of 'puddle' into blobs of colour on top of each other with no detail in between. I'm missing something simple i'm sure but I cant see what. I thought it should be: Levels if required Curves Levels Curves (and repeat until you can see the nebula) Ive done this until its quite bright and also til I can just see it Set final black and white points improve local contrast between levels sharpen/ blur thats as far as ive been previously and been happy (for me!) with the results. But no matter what else happens, when I apply curves, the light/colour/whatever just starts 'pooling'. What am I not doing? Many thanks! m272.TIF

Oddly, or not, my images of m42 are almost identical. It was a long time ago, but I think someone told me the halos were reflections and to do with collimation. I was using an 8" f4 and an unmodified 1000d. I took the blobby stars on mine to be coma, particularly as it was an F4 but since you have it too I don't know. Did changing the sigma help?

Oddly, or not, my images of m42 are almost identical. It was a long time ago, but I think someone told me the halos were reflections and to do with collimation. I was using an 8" f4 and an unmodified 1000d. I took the blobby stars on mine to be coma, particularly as it was an F4 but since you have it too I don't know. Did changing the sigma help?

Hi All, I rarely get out anymore but I recently managed to get a couple of subs before the batteries went. However its been more than 2 years since I tried to process an image and I dont have the fabled PS to do it with so have been trying to use GIMP. This time I cannot even stretch the histogram properly and just want to see if its me or something Ive done wrong. The image is a stack of 6x 3min subs of M57 no flats or darks and I know they will help but Ive achieved better results than this before with fewer, shorter subs. Please have a go at it and post what you get. Its over 100mb so please get it from here: https://www.dropbox....70ymq0/m572.TIF Many thanks Liam

Thanks again for your replies. I just looked at the instructions again and would you believe the point above is highlighted with a BOMB!! It seems this is about preventing electromagnetic interference, but still, what does that mean? Especially when highlighted with a bomb? I cant attach it but here's a link. http://www.skywatcher.com/swtsupport/Instruction_Manuals/EQ5%20SynScan%20upgrade%20kit.pdf Since I connect a laptop to the control box ( to use eqmod) and not the hand box, could this potentially cause 'electromagnetic interference' that results in the mount not working?

Hi Daz Thanks for your message. The instructions explicitly state that the motor control box (that the hand controller, power cable and ra motor is connected to) should be placed in its holder and attached to a leg of the tripod. The holder has a contact point that connects the control box with the SS leg of the tripod. Since I want to leave the mount on a pillar permanently, I don't have a tripod leg to connect the motor control box to. When I set up the control box just hangs by the ra connection cable. What effect do you think this might have?