Heart & Soul Nebulae in NB with WideField Triple Imaging Rig

[Gina]

Last night saw clear skies that lasted until dawn and I was able to get over 9 hours of imaging time.

The rig consisted of :-

1. Hannimar 135mm lens at f2.8 with Astrodon 5nm Ha filter and Atik 460EX mono camera
   
2. Asahi SMC Takumar 105mm at f4 with 3nm OIII filter and 314L+
   
3. Asahi Super Takumar 105mm lens at f4 with 5nm SII filter and 314L+
   

First subs showed poor OIII and SII so I decided to increase the time to an hour and hope for the best. That lost me some time on those but I managed to get 27 x 20m Ha and 7 x 60m OIII and SII. So that's a grand total of 23 hours imaging time last night Only trouble was that the guiding was not quite up to the hour long subs and I shall need to do better on that. I want to get AA5 running for guiding as I'm told that is a lot better than PHD. There are other things to try too such as reducing the aperture further on the guide lens and maybe defocussing a bit more. I'm using 2s integration time and it may be better to reduce the image brightness and increase that. I'm using a 200mm lens at f8 ATM and SX Lodestar with PHD.

Here is the result of :-

Ha - 27 x 20m

OIII - 7 x 60m

SII - 7 x 60m

Stacked in DSS, aligned with RegiStar then combined and further processed with Ps to give the Hubble Palette. Lights only - no darks, flats or bias subs.

[fwm891]

Image won't open Gina (for me)

[Gina]

I'll upload it again...

This is 1200 pixels wide and 5.69MB

And a smaller version 1024 px wide and 4.15MB

[Martin-Devon]

Well done Gina, that's a serious batch of data and it shows with the quality of the image - I love the colours as well.

Martin

[Gina]

Thank you Martin Have to say I'm quite pleased with it - I thought the stars were a bit oblong but the final image doesn't look bad. I'm wondering if more data would actually add anything to it. I know it's usual to assume the more data the better but there's a point of diminishing returns and it's better to move onto something else.

[cfpendock]

I agree with Martin about the colours. I also like the stars. I am not expert, but is there some noise in the image? Maybe it's my screen. Nevertheless, it is a very nice image with excellent framing.

The other thing I wanted to say is that your "small" image at 4MB is enormous for my internet speeds....

Chris

[Gina]

Thank you Chris

I couldn't see any noise but I'm not saying there isn't. I'm viewing it full size of 2480x1841.

Here's a JPEG file at 1024 width which is only 390KB...