First Light - M51 with MN190, 460EX and EQ8 - first session this year

[Gina]

You could consider using Astrobin tho. It's very popular and a very nice media site dedicated to Astro Imaging. Then you are sure nothing funky gets done with your uploaded image.

Yes, I might take a look at Astrobin.  I use Photobucket ATM which seems alright - don't know if Astrobin would be any better.

[Gina]

Your might also like to take a look at this hosting site as well which is pretty good for not compressing your images and losing quality

http://500px.com/ 

Thanks Mark

[Gina]

Good work Gina, coming along nicely.

Thank you Stuart   I'm liking this version more than the last

[Gina]

Thanks for sharing your workflow Gina, its really inspiring to see someone with such dedication as yours !

Always great to see something new from yourself and this is looking to follow in the same direction as your past work.

I think I'll give up on my M51 now after seeing this come together !

Cheers, Lee

Thank you Lee   Very nice comments   No, don't give up, we all have to learn and progress is often slow.  My early efforts were dreadful

[ollypenrice]

This is certainly coming right.

Your FWHM is always going to be lower binned than unbinned but it doesn't mean you have better real resolution. I thought the resolution of the L image was good.

The colour has maybe caught more outer halo through binning, though.

I'd be inclined to take a synthetic L layer from the colour and combine that with the real L for a deeper final L layer. If all things are equal (sub count, length and binning) I just weight the sythetic L as a third of the real L since colour filters block 2/3 of the light. In your case I'd probably put the Syn L and real L into Layers, stretch them initially to the same extent, and use the opacity slider to find out which weighting gave the lowest noise just by eye. Flatten and go for a hard stretch. For the outer halo I'd pin the true background sky in Curves and stretch just above that.

Olly

[Gina]

Thank you Olly

[Gina]

Managed about an hour of imaging last night before the thin high cloud obscured the sky too much.  It needs a better night.  Anyway, here's the result of what I managed to collect and process.  2 x 5m + 3 x10m + 1 x 20m subs binned 2x2 of Ha.  Just stacked in DSS and mucked about with in Ps with everything I could think of throwing at it but there simply isn't enough data.

[Gina]

Managed about an hour of imaging last night before the thin high cloud obscured the sky too much.  It needs a better night.  Anyway, here's the result of what I managed to collect and process.  2 x 5m + 3 x10m + 1 x 20m subs binned 2x2 of Ha.  Just stacked in DSS and mucked about with in Ps with everything I could think of throwing at it but there simply isn't enough data.

[BaNosser]

I was excited to see this post by Gina...  I have been doing tons of research prior to getting into astronomy, as it has been a major interest of mine for, well, decades... and have pretty much decided to go with  MN190 paired with a burly mount.. observing initially then getting into imaging (another hobby) so pairing them only seemed natural (I built a tower-fort for my kids yrs ago and have schemed of eventually confiscating it and then retrofitting it into an 'obsy')...  So seeing what Gina's MN190 was capable of redoubled my excitement...  

Then I read the following:

This is certainly coming right.

Your FWHM is always going to be lower binned than unbinned but it doesn't mean you have better real resolution. I thought the resolution of the L image was good.

The colour has maybe caught more outer halo through binning, though.

I'd be inclined to take a synthetic L layer from the colour and combine that with the real L for a deeper final L layer. If all things are equal (sub count, length and binning) I just weight the sythetic L as a third of the real L since colour filters block 2/3 of the light. In your case I'd probably put the Syn L and real L into Layers, stretch them initially to the same extent, and use the opacity slider to find out which weighting gave the lowest noise just by eye. Flatten and go for a hard stretch. For the outer halo I'd pin the true background sky in Curves and stretch just above that.

Olly

LOL... what the h was I thinking??   

.

. 

.

but.....  

damn.. that is so beautiful...  

[SnakeyJ]

Don't be put off - in a year or two this arcane language becomes second nature. The imaging route is a steep curve, but there's lots of excellent support, advice and encouragement here to help along the way. Olly's advice here was excellent, though pitched directly between practitioners.

typed on my mobile with Tapatalk

[Gina]

Don't be put off - in a year or two this arcane language becomes second nature. The imaging route is a steep curve, but there's lots of excellent support, advice and encouragement here to help along the way. Olly's advice here was excellent, though pitched directly between practitioners.

typed on my mobile with Tapatalk

I second what Jake said   Members here are very friendly and happy to provide support and advice for astronomers at all levels of experience   I have been doing this for over three years now and Olly a lot longer.  Plus he does it as a job - a real expert   We are always learning and I appreciate help from anyone.  Two things to bear in mind - you need a lot of patience and once "bitten by the bug" you will never be rich again - there are always better and better goodies you will want.

The MN190 (or 190MN as they call it these days) is a first rate scope and great for imaging - that is what is was designed for.  And yes, a good mount is even more important than the telescope.  You will also need a good camera to get the sort of results seen here.  I thoroughly recommend the book "Making Every Photon Count" by Steve Richards, who is a member here (Steppenwolf).  Available from First Light Optics or directly from Steve.  This is considered to be "the bible" for astrophotography

Having said all that you can get a lot of joy from using lower price equipment and upgrade as you get more into it.  There is great beauty out there   The universe is truly wonderful   Good luck and enjoy it

[BaNosser]

I second what Jake said   Members here are very friendly and happy to provide support and advice for astronomers at all levels of experience   I have been doing this for over three years now and Olly a lot longer.  Plus he does it as a job - a real expert   We are always learning and I appreciate help from anyone.  Two things to bear in mind - you need a lot of patience and once "bitten by the bug" you will never be rich again - there are always better and better goodies you will want.

The MN190 (or 190MN as they call it these days) is a first rate scope and great for imaging - that is what is was designed for.  And yes, a good mount is even more important than the telescope.  You will also need a good camera to get the sort of results seen here.  I thoroughly recommend the book "Making Every Photon Count" by Steve Richards, who is a member here (Steppenwolf).  Available from First Light Optics or directly from Steve.  This is considered to be "the bible" for astrophotography

Having said all that you can get a lot of joy from using lower price equipment and upgrade as you get more into it.  There is great beauty out there   The universe is truly wonderful   Good luck and enjoy it

Don't be put off - in a year or two this arcane language becomes second nature. The imaging route is a steep curve, but there's lots of excellent support, advice and encouragement here to help along the way. Olly's advice here was excellent, though pitched directly between practitioners.

typed on my mobile with Tapatalk

Thanks Gina & Snakey...   I very much appreciate the replays and the encouragement...  I pretty much knew there would be a fairly steep learning curve to imaging (easy to come to that conclusion while reading these imaging forums).. but I still plan on pushing forward and undertaking the challenge...  and will lean heavily on this the very generous members of these forums for assistance  .  Thanks again and I apologize for hi-jacking Gina's awesome thread...  I so look forward to following along with this thread and all the others the talented contributors here share.

Gina..  I looked for a gallery of yours but didn't find one...  I plan on going thru most of your previous threads (amongst others') but was wondering if you have a public gallery in which to view your work?

[BaNosser]

'replies'

[orion69]

Gina, any guiding problems with Lodestar and PHD, any spikes?

Just ordered EQ8...

[Gina]

Gina, any guiding problems with Lodestar and PHD, any spikes?

Just ordered EQ8...

No problems as long as the sky cooperates and in fact the guiding continued working afer the camera image became unusable   I had increased the PHD capture time to 5s though.

[Gina]

At last a night with a few hours of clear sky   Managed to capture 15 10m subs of M51 in Ha binned 2x2 before the sky became too poor to guide.  I will add this to my other data later.

Here is the result of stacking these frames in DSS and processing in Photoshop.  Just curves and Gradient Exterminator (to counteract the affect of the full moon), cropped and saved as PNG for upload here.  Guided with OAG, Lodestar and PHD with 5s integration time.

[ollypenrice]

That's very strong Ha signal. It will really make the spiral arms crackle. It's unusual for the star forming regions to be so evenly distirbuted around the arms. Maybe the close approach of the other galaxy sparked all this activity.

I really like the way you get your teeth into a project!

This galaxy is really well placed at the moment. Perfect timing.

Olly

[Gina]

Thank you very much Olly   Praise from a professional like you means a lot to me

I'm planning to try to get more unbinned luminance tonight if the clear skies remain and the moon doesn't proove too much.

[Gina]

A very orange looking full moon has just risen above the far hills

[Gina]

After a touch of gear trouble I finally got things going properly around 11pm.  Careful focussing produced an FWHM of around 2.5 unbinned luminance.  Now capturing subs of 5m duration and the centre of M51b is just saturating.

As a taster here's a single 5m sub with a bit of processing in Photoshop, cropped and saved as PNG.

[Gina]

Last night's Luminance subs - 56 x 5m unbinned, stacked in DSS and simple process in Ps, cropped and saved as PNG.

No time today to do any sophisticated processing - real life intervened (if that's the right word )

[Gina]

Since I don't feel like doing the full processing of all the data so far accumulated yet I'm posting the result of my last imaging session from a couple of nights ago.  This is just roughly processed 50x5m unbinned Lum subs, stacked in DSS with flats, quick play with Ps and saved as PNG in two versions - whole frame resized and most of the DSO cropped to about 1200px wide for upload here.

[Tinker1947]

And what are the other galaxies in the back ground.........middle left, bottom left, there not to close i suspect.....

[Gina]

I don't know - I haven't put it through the website to identify things.

[Gina]

A clear night and I feel up to some astrophotography   I'm taking RGB subs of M51 again.  Started off taking 5m subs unbinned to see how long I could go up to.  Max ADU was 33,000 ish on the centre of M51b so I'm mow imaging at 9m.  FWHM is running around 2.3 which is just about the best I've had

I have other data yet to be processed so I should have yet more for processing tomorrow.  Meanwhile here's a crop of the first 9m red sub.  No processing just cropped and saved as PNG for upload.