M1 - first attempt with modded d400

[malc-c]

Having just pulled all the internal filters out of my Canon d400, and installed a CCD-CLS clip filter, the clear(ish) skies last night gave me the chance to do some testing,

Initial focus was Betelgeuse, mainly to confirm that there was no IR halo and that the CCD-CLS filter was cutting off the IR - all was fine and focus set.  I have never been able to capture M1 from my garden in town, mainly due to the brightness of the background sky, but also as the un-modded camera effectively cut out the emissions.   I captured around 15 x 300s subs @ 800 ISO, but the the sky started clouding up so I parked the scope and ran off 20 darks of the same exposure and iso.

This morning it was nice an bright, so using the white t-shirt method, ran of some flats, checked the histogram in Pixinsight and all three peaks were in the middle.  I stacked 15 x lights, 15 darks and 5 flats in DSS and was disappointed at results.  The peaks for RGB were very sharp, narrow and hardly had any data.  Through some experimentation it seemed that this only happened when the flats were used.  Stacking just the lights and darks the end result had nice wide based peaks with lots of data.  Anyway, the stack of 15 lights and 15 darks were saved and then I used Photoshop to post process.  I've never been good at tweaking in PS so I bit the bullet and purchased Noel Carboni's plugin and below is the result.

I'm still experimenting with the camera, and the original subs had some gradient in them, hence the cropped image.  I would welcome comments and if anyone would like to check my data I can create a dropbox folder and upload files.

[wxsatuser]

Looks quite good to me.

Could be there is a bit more to squeeze out in processing or may be more subs are needed.

[Steve777]

Looks really good!

[Russe]

Looking good!! Would you know if a modded Canon could be used with a Ha narrow band filter?

[malc-c]

I would of thought so...at least with a "full spectrum" mod where there are no internal filters in the camera and so you are reliant on the range the CCD can handle.  The CCD-CLS filter allows h-alpha wavelength through, so I guess if you fitted a Ha clip filter It should work (he says having looked at the website

One thing I did notice with my camera the other day, was that it's now not possible to so ant solar imaging with the Baader solar filter film in place - the exposures were dramatically reduced and there was a lot of light scattering.  Looks like I will be webcaming for future solar work.  Oh and on the subject of solar imaging, according to the blurb, fitting an H-alpha filter in the camera doesn't work with imaging the sun