The Ring Nebula

[radioactive]

Hi another thing I played on last night is M57 I am real rubbish at trying to combine the 15 subs I have on this I just get a white blob instead of a ring so here is a single frame its around 30 seconds I believe I will continue to play with maxim but I have no expectations that I will be able to combine them so if you have any tips with doing this in maxim

[MartinB]

Congratulations Martyn. That's the first ring I've seen this year. Summer's on the way!

[blinky]

Martyn,

Have you tried stacking with Deep Sky Stacker? It's free and I find it easier to use (I have never managed to stack in maxim )

[centroid]

Hey, come on Martyn, that's not a bad result, especially for just a single frame.

Your 'stacking' problem might be an alignment issue, so try a manual one or two star alignment. Also, once the images are 'stacked' you'll have adjust the 'stretch' to suit.

Do you have Photoshop?, if so, then save you image as a TIFF in Maxim, and do the 'stretching' in P/shop, using the 'Curves' function.

Dave

[Kaptain Klevtsov]

Ddin't realise that was on the menu so soon Martyn. Nice capture indeed!

WRT Maxim, have you played with the screen stretch window ( Ctrl+H )? Could be your overstretching the on-screen image, or maybe using sum in the combine routine instead of average or median? Maxim is ace for stacking once you get used to it.

Kaptain Klevtsov

[jcm]

Nice image.

What happened to Winter and Spring?

Stacking with DSS might be easier and plenty of people on this board use it , so lots of advice available.

John

[RobH]

Well done Martyn....you must have been up late to get that

Cheers

Rob

[radioactive]

Ddin't realise that was on the menu so soon Martyn. Nice capture indeed!

WRT Maxim, have you played with the screen stretch window ( Ctrl+H )? Could be your overstretching the on-screen image, or maybe using sum in the combine routine instead of average or median? Maxim is ace for stacking once you get used to it.

Kaptain Klevtsov

Ahhh Cheers KK now then that sounds like what the problem is Cheers mate I am just going to have a go at another target I aimed at last night as well good old M56 looks good stacking it as you said meriden watch this space!

Well not quite it will be on another thread big smiles here now

[steppenwolf]

Crikey, that's an early M57, Martyn! Maxim should be able to stack this just fine - try using 'Manual 2 stars' and select stars at opposite corners of the frames. Don't use 'sum' to combine but try SDMask instead (at its default settings). The 'Screen Stretch' controls may be over-stretching the image if you are just getting a white blob so have a really good play with this control.