First light with QHY9 - M42 LRGB

[samir_ansari]

Last night I finally had a chance to try out my new QHY9 mono with filterwheel. As I was really pushed for time and this was mainly just a test I could only manage one sub of 5 minutes per channel and no dark or flat frames.

I am quite please with the result considering this was only about 20 minutes of data and were taken on a night with practically a full moon in central London:

And a 200% zoom and crop:

Still have much to improve on but it's certainly an improvement from my previous colour attempt last year with an unmodded 450D and a phd in 'I don't know what on Earth I'm doing':

[Catanonia]

Congrats fellow QHY9 Mono geezer

Lovely 1st light and it all goes onwards and upwards from here

Are you using the QHY9 2 inch filters ? and on what scope / guiding ?

Great stuff from a City too

[samir_ansari]

Thanks Catatonia, we gotta stick together!

Yep this was with the 2" QHY filters which I think are absolutely excellent considering they pretty much have LP blocking built in (however they don't block much of the light pollution below 540 nm). Because of the degree of light pollution I have here I still had to use a CLS filter aswell but I think if it weren't for the condition of the moon last night I probably cold have come away with a very similar looking image without the CLS.

Guiding was all done through my 9x50 finder and a QHY5 with Phd, I've done about 20 minute subs with this in the past and it has stayed rock solid so I highly recommend it.

[Catanonia]

Thanks Catatonia, we gotta stick together!

Yep this was with the 2" QHY filters which I think are absolutely excellent considering they pretty much have LP blocking built in (however they don't block much of the light pollution below 540 nm). Because of the degree of light pollution I have here I still had to use a CLS filter aswell but I think if it weren't for the condition of the moon last night I probably cold have come away with a very similar looking image without the CLS.

Guiding was all done through my 9x50 finder and a QHY5 with Phd, I've done about 20 minute subs with this in the past and it has stayed rock solid so I highly recommend it.

Fantastic mate and glad it is working right for you. I take it you got it from Bern @ Modern. I remember having the conversations with him when I got mine about LP filters needed.

I used to use a EOS clip filter in my DSLR and found with these filters I could easily take any length of sub without LP causing an issue. Now you are in the middle of London, so might not work for you, but have a go with a moon and see what happens.

Also ask Bern what Ha 8nm filter he got me for the 5th position in the wheel. I found it almost parfocal with the LRGB ones. And I mean a nats nut close.

[samir_ansari]

And a more aggressive stretch and reprocess this time with all the same data:

[Coco]

Now thats more like it

Only preserve a copy of the trapezium and stretch the rest more, its still too dark, stretch it until it gets noisy then back off a bit. past the trapezium layer back on after..

[martin_h]

Glad to see you got it all up and running, great 1st image..

[redfox1971]

Hi great first image,you say you use 9x50 finder as the guider could you tell me what settings you use in phd as I seem to be struggling to get mine to track good.

[nmoushon]

Hey Samir, great image! Very nice for just a quick test! Can't wait to see what you can get with a full night worth of data.

I borrow your image to show how much more data you can pull out of it and also that I can get some practice in on PS Hope you don't mind. Just did levels and curves and layer masks to capture trapezium area. Here's a link to some great PS tutorials if you weren't already aware.

[ollypenrice]

Hmmm, I'm mightily impressed and prefer your Trap to the rework actually. The Trap area should be bright, after all. Colour from the city!?! Bravo. This is quite an acheivement.

I wonder if you could pull out more blue? Do the top left of the histogram peaks more or less line up in each colour channel? That's not a bad rule of thumb for colour balance.

Olly

[samir_ansari]

Thank you all for the kind words and thank you nmoushon for having a play with it in Photoshop. I spend most of my day at work looking at pictures you have all posted on the forum which have inspired me to push my work a little further everytime so it means a lot to hear your opinions.

As for the colour scheme of my image it was pseudo-intentional. I didn't go for the standard RGB scheme and instead assigned the red to more of a brown and the green to have a tinge of yellow. This was inspired by an old image of M42 I saw in a book I used to have (Astronomica I think).

[samir_ansari]

Hi great first image,you say you use 9x50 finder as the guider could you tell me what settings you use in phd as I seem to be struggling to get mine to track good.

I set my binning to 2x2 and calibration steps to about 1750. Other than that I don't really touch the other parameters, so far these settings have been fine for every exposure length I've tried all the way up to 20mins.

[VigdisVZ]

Great great job! Really nice.