M51 - A test of guiding

[JohnC64]

Hi all,

This was a result of me practising my guiding. I hadn't been bothering with guiding as I can only take 1Min subs with my Olympus EPL1 and could get that using just the mount. I had more time to prepare on Saturday and spent a the time on setting up the scope balance correctly and setting up the guiding on the finderscope. The results are noticibly sharper than my previous images so just need to practise and refine my setup sequence. New camera arriving this week so longer subs are are my next thing to deal with.

The Image is 60 x 1Min Subs and 10 x 1Min Darks Stacked (and a bit of processing) in DSS, and then tweeked in Gimp and a bit of noiseware for good measure.

The Unprocessed Stack is at http://dl.dropbox.com/u/49530954/unprocessed.TIF

If anyone fancys a go at processing it. It is very noisy data though!!

Cheers John

[Spikey]

I've had a quick play John but my processing skills are a bit limited so it's not much different.

I did notice that the RGB channels hadn't been aligned post stacking.

Maybe something to consider with DSS ?

I think some good flats will improve this image.

[Quatermass]

Had a go at it but there was a lot of noise in the image to deal with, my colours might be a bit strong as I am colour blind but there's still a fair bit of data in there to work with.

[JohnC64]

Hi Guys, Thanks for having a go with my data. you've both done a better job of processing it than me. Maybe its time I worked through your Video Tutorials QM. :-)

Cheers John

[Quatermass]

Also check out Annas on the imaging section of the forum shes got processing in photoshop down to a fine art and theres a load more in that section as well. I find using the hide all layer mask the most useful tool that and curves highpass filter and masking off my stars.

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