M57 in 0.25 to 120 seconds

[Martin Meredith]

On Friday I had my first view of the Ring through the Lodestar-C. I took a series of shots at different exposure lengths to try to judge the sweet spot for near-live viewing through a small scope. These are all unprocessed apart from the usual live gamma etc. I tried to maintain the colour balance between exposures -- not easy -- so don't read too much into any differences between say 60 and 120s. For an object like this where the 'signal' is obvious, the main effect of increasing exposure is to reduce the noise background. So for this object with my scope not much is gained from 5s onwards. And no central star...  Anyway, its an experiment I plan to repeat for other objects/observing conditions.

The Ring has a little brother just next door in Cygnus. This is the much fainter (mag 12.3) planetary nebula NGC6894. Here's a blown up shot (60s) when it was only 10 degrees above the horizon. This is one to return to  in summer!

Martin

[nytecam]

Interesting test Martin - I've tried it from time to time and a way of understanding your gear - keep 'em coming :-)

[ollypenrice]

Thanks Martin, that looks very interesting. Is there some way you would stack or integrate the frames?

Olly

[Martin Meredith]

Paul81 (SGL member and author of the LodestarLive software I used for this) is working on live stacking at the moment and I know some other video people do use live stacking (Miloslick) though I've not tried it. Give it a month or two and I suspect most of us will be doing it... 'video' is definitely coming of age!

Martin

PS there are other M57 shots on this forum from nytecam to show what's possible in brief exposures under LP with a larger aperture/faster scope