The "No EQ" DSO Challenge!

[SilverAstro]

2 minutes ago, Nigel G said:

Unfortunately another couple of hours data will make the stack around 400 to 500 frames and on my pc that's about 6 hours or more stacking on DSS 

237 frames took over 4 hours ☺

Eeeek. Can a previous stacked image be added to by the new frames, or maybe stack the new and add the result to the stacked previous , ah Ken is typing on similar , , ,

Is it my imagination or can I see a bit of a similar rectangle in @Filroden's Cat very like that in the ESA pic,,, that would be coincidence if it was due to secondary/spider ! hmmmmm and are those isophots in the middle genuine or an artifact of me using the jpg ?

 

[SilverAstro]

PS to save having to restack the whole set from sq.1 I mean ?

 

[Filroden]

Here's another attempt. I think I've lost a little of the emission trying to reduce the noise but I think I've got more detail in the fuzzy above it.

i separated the image into its RGB components and treated each with varying degrees of levels/curves then recombined to a full colour image. I definitely prefer the star colours now so I might have to try that same technique on my own images.

Edited September 16, 2016 by Filroden

[Herzy]

Nigel,

That object is really really faint. I can almost see the nebula coming out in only two hours. May I ask why you're going for such faint targets though? I saw a thread on a different forum where they had nearly 100 hours (a hardcore imager) on this target worth of 30m subs. That should tell you just how faint this is. Why not go for something like the veil or something else much brighter?

 

Edited September 16, 2016 by Herzy

[Nigel G]

2 hours ago, Herzy said:

Nigel,

That object is really really faint. I can almost see the nebula coming out in only two hours. May I ask why you're going for such faint targets though? I saw a thread on a different forum where they had nearly 100 hours (a hardcore imager) on this target worth of 30m subs. That should tell you just how faint this is. Why not go for something like the veil or something else much brighter?

 

I like to push myself behond the limits and see what is possible, I haven't finished with this dso yet, I believe from a dark site and with my equipment I can get this dso with as little as 1.5 hours of exposure,  I know it will not be a great image but I will find more emissions.  I have set myself this challenge, its what I enjoy, a tough challenge.  I love imaging dso's and continually get blown away by what we can capture.  There's plenty of time. 

Nige.

[Nigel G]

3 hours ago, Filroden said:

Here's another attempt. I think I've lost a little of the emission trying to reduce the noise but I think I've got more detail in the fuzzy above it.

i separated the image into its RGB components and treated each with varying degrees of levels/curves then recombined to a full colour image. I definitely prefer the star colours now so I might have to try that same technique on my own images.

Ken,  it's looking good,  It's in there I can see the faint outline of the nebula,

 I'm going to give it a go with photoshop CS2,, I've not used it yet so not sure how well it works with stacked images. I think I need to save as tiff file though.

Thanks, all information is greatly appreciated. 

Nige.

[SteveNickolls]

Nige,

I just had a further attempt in StarTools with your image-

Very delicate balance between the faint nebulosity and the noise. It will be fascinating to see what you get after even more exposures. I managed to play with the image in the LIFE module with a mask and isolate option. I used mask to cover just the centralpart of the PN and the little blue fleck at seven o'clock. There was just enough in the halo for StarTools not to 'push it back' into the background like the surrounding stars.

Good luck.
Steve

Edited September 16, 2016 by SteveNickolls

[SteveNickolls]

3 hours ago, Herzy said:

...I saw a thread on a different forum where they had nearly 100 hours (a hardcore imager) on this target worth of 30m subs. That should tell you just how faint this is. 

 

Wow, I could only dream of being able to spend so long on one target. They must have excellent conditions (lucky people).

Regards,
Steve

[Nigel G]

20 minutes ago, SteveNickolls said:

Nige,

I just had a further attempt in StarTools with your image-

Very delicate balance between the faint nebulosity and the noise. It will be fascinating to see what you get after even more exposures. I managed to play with the image in the LIFE module with a mask and isolate option. I used mask to cover just the centralpart of the PN and the little blue fleck at seven o'clock. There was just enough in the halo for StarTools not to 'push it back' into the background like the surrounding stars.

Good luck.
Steve

Steve, that's a nice clean image, thanks for your good efforts,  there all better than mine, I have a lot to learn with StarTools,  I'm re stacking and saving as a tiff file to see what PS can do. The stacking alone without registering is taking just over 2 hours ?. 

Cheers 

Nige 

[Nigel G]

5 hours ago, The Admiral said:

Well, by some very heavy cropping I managed to graunch it through, to get this:

The centre of the nebula seems to be saturated.

Ian

Ian,  I like it, good colours and the nebula is there, Under dark sky's will make the difference I think, I hope ☺. We'll see soon enough,  I hope. 

Cheers

Nige 

[The Admiral]

Thanks Nige. Actually, looking more closely I think that there is a bit of red nebulosity close in at the 10 o'clock position.

Good luck with the dark sky exercise; it's just a pity that the only control we have over it is to drive out, some way in my case I think.

Ian

Edited September 16, 2016 by The Admiral

[SteveNickolls]

36 minutes ago, Nigel G said:

Steve, that's a nice clean image, thanks for your good efforts,  there all better than mine, I have a lot to learn with StarTools,  I'm re stacking and saving as a tiff file to see what PS can do. The stacking alone without registering is taking just over 2 hours ?. 

Cheers 

Nige 

Thanks Nige, I've only recently started following some advice Ivo made on a forum about using the isolate option in the LIFE module, it really 'pushes back' the background. Some objects respond well to using mask and your data had just enough for StarTools to process the area immediately around the (masked) centre not as background and left it as a wispy area. As I mentioned before with more data this should become easier for you to pull out. You really should be pleased with what you have imaged. The great thing I find with imaging is you can go back at a future date and reprocess your data with your growing ability (whether StarTools or another software) and find what was hiding there all along for you :-) Good look using PS.

Cheers,
Steve

Edited September 16, 2016 by SteveNickolls

[Herzy]

1 hour ago, SteveNickolls said:

Wow, I could only dream of being able to spend so long on one target. They must have excellent conditions (lucky people).

Regards,
Steve

IKR! The craziest part is that all of that data was from a dark site. I'm not sure how close they live to the dark site, but for me that is an hour and a half drive... That would take many many months for me to get data like that.

I found a link to the thread.

It was 130 hours and the image is just beautiful. I'm not sure I can share it because it's on another site completely. Do you guys know if that's against the rules?

Edited September 16, 2016 by Herzy

[SilverAstro]

On 15/09/2016 at 21:54, Nigel G said:

https://1drv.ms/u/s!Av3mI1-jgAvwa4nrxgPLQAAWX8U

I cropped this quite a bit, around 50% to work on.

If anyone wants to try please do,

Good luck, I hope someone can extract more, it will be interesting to see what other programs can do.

Thanks Nige, the good news (after a few days of struggles -Onedrive does not seem to like my browsers and vista ) is that I finally got it with an ancient command line downloader (Wget) that can resume after an abort !

So I am now able to say that Gimp can also recover the dim outer nebulosity as well yea! it is pretty remarkable that you have achieved this with NoEq, mind u, stretched within an inch of its life it isnt yet exactly pretty, may take a few more subs LOL!

For your entertainment :

argh, just noticed that I forgot to rotate them 90deg, grrrr

[Nigel G]

I have been playing with Photoshop for hours (loads of hours), its an old version PS CS2, but I squeezed as much as I could, There's a lot of tabs tools and stuff, only looking on youtube has given me an idea where to start.

There clearly is nebula emissions visible in everyone's good efforts, thanks.

PS does give you lots of options to manipulate the image, I like it and must look into getting a modern version.

With darker sky's I'm confident I will capture what I'm after.

Cheers

Nige.

[alexbb]

19 hours ago, Herzy said:

IKR! The craziest part is that all of that data was from a dark site. I'm not sure how close they live to the dark site, but for me that is an hour and a half drive... That would take many many months for me to get data like that.

I found a link to the thread.

It was 130 hours and the image is just beautiful. I'm not sure I can share it because it's on another site completely. Do you guys know if that's against the rules?

It's not against the rules to post a link from astrobin, not even from CN. I assume this is the one you were thinking of: http://www.astrobin.com/249467/B/  Very nice one!

[alexbb]

On another note, on topic:

I just bought yesterday a sh Celestron C6 from a local club colleague and I set it up along with the ST102 in the beginning, and then along with the 130P-DS. Side by side on the AZ-EQ5.
In the beginning, they were mounted only for visual and the sky was cloudy, not even the moon was very visible. After a while the clouds wend away and the moon was lighting all the sky, but then it got pretty foggy.
I saw some bright clusters, the scope kept its collimation during the bagpack transportation, perfect concentric circles.

After about 2-3 o'clock, the sky cleared, only the moon keeping it bright. After observing with both scopes for a while, I decided to put the camera on the scope to show to my girlfriend what we could barely see before she went to bed, the sky being still foggy.

M35, M36, M37, M38, all 20x10s lights, 20 darks, 20 flats, didn't care about bias. ISO3200 with the Canon 550D.
And the moon at about 6 degrees over the horizon.

 

[Nigel G]

5 minutes ago, moise212 said:

On another note, on topic:

I just bought yesterday a sh Celestron C6 from a local club colleague and I set it up along with the ST102 in the beginning, and then along with the 130P-DS. Side by side on the AZ-EQ5.
In the beginning, they were mounted only for visual and the sky was cloudy, not even the moon was very visible. After a while the clouds wend away and the moon was lighting all the sky, but then it got pretty foggy.
I saw some bright clusters, the scope kept its collimation during the bagpack transportation, perfect concentric circles.

After about 2-3 o'clock, the sky cleared, only the moon keeping it bright. After observing with both scopes for a while, I decided to put the camera on the scope to show to my girlfriend what we could barely see before she went to bed, the sky being still foggy.

M35, M36, M37, M38, all 20x10s lights, 20 darks, 20 flats, didn't care about bias. ISO3200 with the Canon 550D.
And the moon at about 6 degrees over the horizon.

 

 

Very nice images Alex,  your lucky to be getting the chance , not even a gap in the clouds here. 

Cheers 

Nige. 

[alexbb]

Thank you, Nige! I think it was because the scope wasn't new.

[Nigel G]

On Friday, September 16, 2016 at 14:41, SilverAstro said:

Eeeek. Can a previous stacked image be added to by the new frames, or maybe stack the new and add the result to the stacked previous , ah Ken is typing on similar , , ,

Is it my imagination or can I see a bit of a similar rectangle in @Filroden's Cat very like that in the ESA pic,,, that would be coincidence if it was due to secondary/spider ! hmmmmm and are those isophots in the middle genuine or an artifact of me using the jpg ?

 

I'm not sure if you can add to an already stacked image,  I don't think you can with DSS , not sure about other programs and whether it would have the same effect as DSS. 

Interested to find out. 

Nige.

[jimbo747]

Superb last set of images! I'm moved in now so will get my scope setup soon.

Apologies for the incoming bad weather over next few weeks, ordered an asi 224mc last night.

[The Admiral]

On 17/09/2016 at 15:57, Nigel G said:

PS does give you lots of options to manipulate the image, I like it and must look into getting a modern version.

The was a time you could buy a licence for PS, but even so it would have cost you a good few hundreds of £. Now I think you can only get it on a subscription basis. A lot of money for the limited features you might use.

Ian

[SilverAstro]

8 hours ago, Nigel G said:

I'm not sure if you can add to an already stacked image,  I don't think you can with DSS

I did a quicky two stacks of four and stacked the resulting pair in DSS, it was rubbish compared to a simple stack of the eight !

I was not sure if I had blundered and that it was supposed to work,, or not !  I couldnt decide on the maths of adding two lots of already RMS-ed noise so wondered how the going-deep many-hours people managed, do they re-stack all from the start each time

 

Edited September 19, 2016 by SilverAstro

[Filroden]

4 minutes ago, SilverAstro said:

I did a quicky two stacks of four and stacked the resulting pair in DSS, it was rubbish compared to a simple stack of the eight !

I was not sure if I had blundered and that it was supposed to work,, or not !  I couldnt decide on the maths of adding two lots of already RMS-ed noise so wondered how the going-deep many-hours people managed, do they re-stack all from the start each time

 

I suspect they have to stack much less as they are taking 10min subs, etc. We can only do short subs so we have to stack many more. We get quickly into diminishing returns for noise reduction.

I don't think you can add more subs to an already stacked set. I suspect DSS would give each sub equal weight so one image combining over 200 subs would carry no more weight than a single 30s sub. PixInsight allows you to weight subs but I also think the math wouldn't work effectively. Unfortunately you'll need to restock every time.

Can you save calibrated lights and just stack those? That might save processing bias, darks and flats for older subs.

[Nigel G]

2 hours ago, Filroden said:

I suspect they have to stack much less as they are taking 10min subs, etc. We can only do short subs so we have to stack many more. We get quickly into diminishing returns for noise reduction.

I don't think you can add more subs to an already stacked set. I suspect DSS would give each sub equal weight so one image combining over 200 subs would carry no more weight than a single 30s sub. PixInsight allows you to weight subs but I also think the math wouldn't work effectively. Unfortunately you'll need to restock every time.

Can you save calibrated lights and just stack those? That might save processing bias, darks and flats for older subs.

Not sure if you can stack using the master dark and master bias, must try and load the masters next stack.