M27 First Try, 428EX First Light

[lensman57]

Hi,

After nearly three weeks of cloud and rain and hazy nights up here in Manchester, last night I got a "reasonable" night for imaging., though still a little hazy and quite a lot of moisture in the air.As a relative newbie I usually go for Galaxies for my DSO imaging but last night I decided to try the M27, The Dumbell Nebula and it was an opprtunity to try out my newly aquired Atik428 EXc. Any way here is the result. It is just a plain stack of 25 subs of 240s, no darks , no flats, and no bias so it does look a little blotchy. It was taken with my SW E80 Blue at F7.5 on an SW EQ5 pro guided with a 50 mm dedicated guide scope with an ASI 120MC, PHD guiding. I did a 3 star alignment followed by 3 polar align routine . I did not get even a single duff sub, the PHD graph was really flat. The processing was in StarTools and a little tweak in CS2 for Jpeg conversion. Hope you like it.

Regards,

A.G

[LukeSkywatcher]

Nice. Great colour and detail.

[Epicycle]

That's a very good first light for the Atik. Lots of details showing there, particularly in the outer halo. The star field looks fine except the big stars, you might be able to fix those in startools with the repair module/warp. You can also inject some colour in the stars with a star mask and the color module,

cheers

E.

[Matt Scunthorpe]

Love the detail in the image, and the colour is really amazing. Great image.

[Astrosurf]

That's really lovely. Good detail.

Alexxx

[michael.h.f.wilkinson]

Very nice first try

[lensman57]

Hi,

Many thanks to you all for your kind comments. Will do my best to improve the image. One positive outcome was that I now know how to reduce the star size in PS using colourrange.

Regards,

A.G