My First M33 in OSC

[lensman57]

Hi,

After nearly two weeks of clouds and rain, last night at about 12.30 am weather improved. It took me nearly an hour to set up and get things rolling. I opted for M33 as I wanted to do a galaxy and picked M33 as I had not imaged this one yet . Guiding was good, flat line graph in PHD so I set the Artemis capture to do a run of 21 subs of 450s each and I came in for a cup of tea at about 1.30 am, after about a 1/2 hour I returned to check how things were going only to find out that for some reason Artemis had failed to save the subs to the folder. Any how I almost packed up , but decided to give it another go. The attached image is the result, 23 subs of 450s, No darks, Flats and Bias frames. Atik 428 EX OSC, SW ED80 @ F6.4, IDAS LPV2, Baader UV/IR, HEQ5 guided by PHD and GPUSB, 50 mm guidescope with ASI 120mm. Processed entirely in StarTools and PS .Despite doing the flats there is still a large darkish patch that has not been corrected. Thanks for looking

Regards,

A.G

[Adamar98]

Nice one! I like it. Can't see no dark patch?

[poogle]

Very nice indeed! Love the colours

/Patrik

[lensman57]

Hi,

I have done a reprocess the data and I think that it is an improvement, a more effective star mask and less saturation to help prevent the magenta halos round the brighter stars. BTW if anyone has a pointer as how to process the file in Pixinsight I would be grateful as my 45 day licence is about to expire. The data was processed in StarTools and finished off in PS. I have reduced the size to help quicker upload.

Many thanks and regards,

A.G

[michael.h.f.wilkinson]

Nice image. The reprocess is better. This is a very difficult object, of low surface brightness. There are still some issues with noise because of that (cannot be helped with a short run of data).

I do wonder sometimes what noise reduction method is used within star-tools/PS. I have a feeling that some of these shrink-wrapped image processing tools introduce artefacts that might be avoided (which is why I like to use tools like MatLab and ImageJ, or write my own code in C(++)).

[Astrosurf]

Lovely image. Why not have a crack at doing some darks, if you can be quite sure they're close to the same temp, to add to the image to reduce noise? A lot of people use master darks for later use.

Alexxx

[lensman57]

Lovely image. Why not have a crack at doing some darks, if you can be quite sure they're close to the same temp, to add to the image to reduce noise? A lot of people use master darks for later use.

Alexxx

Hi Alex,

I already have done them this morning, I guess that this is an advantage of a ccd with setpoint cooling. I will reprocess and post a new image if it is a significant improvement.

Regards,

A.G

[Astrosurf]

Excellent. Good luck!