Pacman & Jelly under the full moon

[jsigone]

Got a nice night out but the archnemesis full moon was up. Still tickering around with setting with the "new to me" CCD, seeems to be coming along nicely with more practice. It does have allot of hot pixels I haven't figured out how to get rid of yet. Darks helps but doens't clean them all the way but the uncleaned ones are smeared across the image. Currently doing a median noise reduction to each frame before stacking. This does take away from the detail quite a bit....

Anyhow, here's my images for the night

NGC 281 Pacman Ha with full moon by jsigone, on Flickr

9x10 subs for the pacman before it got to low

IC 443 Jellyfish Nebula with full moon by jsigone, on Flickr

4x10min & 18x6min subs for the jelly. This closer to the moon and the gradients are starting to show with the Baader 7nm filter.

[Zul]

Very nice images!

[RAC]

They look really nice. i like the processing - not to contrasty and very natural looking.

What stacking program do you use?

[vdb]

Nice pictures, nice telescope ;-)

[jsigone]

Thanks. I use nebulosity2 for stacking and cs4 for processing. Astroart came with the camera for capturing, still haven't dived into it for any stacking or processing needs.

[Beyond_Vision]

Thats a great couple of images. You should be able to get rid of the hot pixels by using a sigma clipping or auto-adaptive weighted average method in your stacking. Might be worth trying out Deep Sky stacker which is free and contains these methods.

Regards

Kevin

[jsigone]

I haven't stacked with DSS in over a year. I might give them another try with this camera as I shouldn't have the noise problems I battled with the Canon.

[vdb]

You kan SD stacking in Nebulosity as well, you first just align all the subs with the option to save each file, and then when you rerun align you can select no align option and then SD becomes available ... there are more detailed instruction in the manual I think, ones you get it it's really simple ...

[jsigone]

Thanks for that tip!! I gave it a quick try with 1.75 SD and it fixed most of the hot pixels. Still a few to clone out. But now I have more control of how much NR i want to apply.

[vdb]

with 1.5 I think you loose more and 1.25 even more ...