The "No EQ" DSO Challenge!

[calli]

Notice how "3D" the zoom effect looks :-)

Carsten

[The Admiral]

17 minutes ago, Nigel G said:

I had an hour to spare this afternoon so I bunged together a video of my images with some dodgy music for something to listen to and a couple of un published images. have a look if you want, best viewed full screen and lights out  From my YouTube channel

Sorry

Nige.

That's brilliant Nige! That's a good way of showcasing your images.

Ian

[The Admiral]

1 hour ago, Filroden said:

You really captured the Ha regions in the arms.

  Doh! Yes, they're not purple stars are they. I guess it's a mixture of the blue with the red H-alpha. I had a look on the Messier Objects website and it confirms it.

Thanks for your comment, much appreciated.

Ian

[Nigel G]

1 hour ago, The Admiral said:

Last Monday I had a go at imaging M33 (Ken, you're to blame for that ). The trouble is, I'm not good at this late night thing, so I didn't really image at the best times. Still, this is what I got.

I was debating whether or not to image using my 0.79x reducer/flattener, but in the end I went with the native FL as I reasoned it would cover more of the sensor and thus require less cropping. Put it in to DSS and it threw up scores of between -5.25 and 567! With my reducer they normally top the 2000's, but hey ho. So I stacked all with a score >50 (234 x 30s subs), and after doing what I could in ST, I was just not happy. The image looked a bit out of focus, though it has to be said that individual subs looked fine. So this time round, I went through the subs one-by-one and weeded out those where I thought there was a bit of trailing. That brought it down to 199 subs. I registered and stacked those, and this is the result of that. It was quite interesting going through them in time order, because they started out with a coffee colour at about 8.30pm and ended up a dark grey by 11.20pm. I really needed to have started and finished imaging later. Perhaps I'll have another go in a few weeks time, when it is better placed earlier in the evening, and use my reducer. Let's hope for some clear skies when the Moon's not up! I feel that I'm pushing the data a bit too hard here, but needs must! Not sure what to do about magenta stars, always get them*.

Ian

*Edit. I've found I can either reduce their saturation to zero, or turn them blue, in Lightroom.

That's great Ian, it is a good one to image and process, plenty of detail and good star colours, Nice

Nige

[Nigel G]

8 minutes ago, calli said:

Notice how "3D" the zoom effect looks :-)

Carsten

I thought that was a nice effect especially with the lights out and big screen

Cheers

Nige.

[The Admiral]

Thanks Nige.

Ian

[SteveNickolls]

1 hour ago, Filroden said:

That's stunning. You really captured the Ha regions in the arms. I made the same mistake as you. I started imaging when it was still not quite astro-dark and it was also lower in the sky giving a double whammy of background but as the night went on my images also improved. It's so tempting to just start imaging as soon as you're aligned and it looks dark but I guess 30 minutes back inside with a coffee might make the night last longer!

This imaging business is young folk stuff (unfortunately). I guess SWMBO has never actually complained about me coming in during the wee hours so I ought to image later but it is the getting up a few hours later in the morning that really does for me. As the Young Mr Grace used to say on 'Are You Being Served?', "You've all done very well".

Cheers,
Steve

[parallaxerr]

Tadaaaaaa!!!

Here it is in all it's glory, my Alt/Az imaging rig! Really pleased so far with how this has turned out, it's a very compact, neat little setup.

Few issues:

1. The Baader SCT to 2" click-lock doesn't have a shoulder inside for the draw tube to contact so it can be tightened. The adapter just screwed straight past the end of the draw tube and became loose and free to move fore and aft
2. It's all very tail heavy as the L-bracket dovetail allows for exactly zero adjustment due to it's short length.

Work arounds:

1. Fitted a 7mm 2" extension to the snout of the MPCC and inserted it into click-lock and did it up TIGHT! Then screwed the click-lock onto the draw tube so that the snout extension now becomes the physical stop. Seems to be working OK, I guess the original WO adapter had a flange/shoulder inside for a stop.
2. Rotate focuser 90° to get as far forward as possible & try it as it is! See what happens, the scope will be loaded against the Alt main gear quite a bit so hopefully it will track OK. Otherwise may need an ADM type dovetail extension.

Took it all outside and set it going on M31, it's snapping away right now on the Hahnel Giga-T II Pro wireless intervalometer, which I can program from in the kitchen Very easy to handle and a breeze to align with the RDF and live view on the camera. Focus spot on with Bahtinov mask...let's see what comes out in an hour or so!

Edited October 6, 2016 by parallaxerr

[parallaxerr]

Well, as can be expected the cloud has rolled in. I managed to get about 13 minutes of M31, mostly through a light haze of cloud. However, I'm happy to say that, I just took my first bunch of Astro images AND, I just tried my hand at DSS & GIMP for the first time.

It's been a valuable first night of trial and error. I saw some star trailing on 30s exposures so reduced to 20s which got rid. The Baader multi-purpose coma corrector does indeed work well with this scope, the stars in the corners of the images are elongated only a touch, hopefully I can adjust this out by tweaking the sensor spacing.

So here it is, output from DSS (light frames only) and another with curves adjusted (a lot) just to see if there's any hint of spiral arms, and there is Absolutely school boy in comparison to the other images in the thread but I've made a start!

 

Edited October 6, 2016 by parallaxerr

[The Admiral]

That's an excellent and encouraging start Jon. You've got nice tight stars so your focus looks spot on, not schoolboy at all. All you need now are some clear nights, photon collection is a priority!

I've not used gimp so I don't know how easy it will be to extract all the detail, but in my view the processing is everything (well, almost ). A lot of folk use it though I think.

Ian

Edit. I see that you're not keeping the camera strap on, but a number of us do and use it as a 'safety harness' for the camera, should it decide to drop out! I know it is recommended to remove it so as to minimize any 'scope movement in any slight breeze, but your call . I've not noticed it being a problem.

Edited October 7, 2016 by The Admiral
Another thought

[SteveNickolls]

A good start, very well done. Will be interested to see how both your mount and telescope perform for you. Some tweaks ought to get you results at longer exposure lengths, that's the fun of experimenting of course. :-)

I'm currently looking into controlling my camera at distance so your wireless intervalometer is interesting and I will check up on the Internet later this morning. I take it you find it works very well?

Hope you get some clear, dark sky for another go soon.

Best regards,

Steve

[parallaxerr]

Thanks for the comments guys...

I am pleased with the stars Ian, the Bahtinov mask & live view made focusing very straight forward and the focus point is about 9mm from the end of draw tube travel. I don't know GIMP either but I lost my copy of Photoshop CS3 when I changed to an SSD hard drive recently, although I never really got on with it. Good point on the camera strap, I'll fit it, or perhaps add a little paracord tether to the mount, just in case.

Steve - the Giga-T is very easy to use. You can set delay, exposure duration, interval etc. all very easily then just press play and off it goes (camera has to be in bulb mode). I kept an eye on the exposure count from the warmth of the kitchen watching it count down

Edited October 7, 2016 by parallaxerr

[Nigel G]

Jon. A very good start, excellent focus, you will get use to your mount and find out your maximum exposure times.  Every mount is different.  On a good night with a rising target I can get upto 90 seconds BUT less than 50% will be good enough to use. 

Your setup looks great too. 

Looking forward to seeing more of your image's ,

I must admit this thread has come along way and images are improving. It's great to have more people joining in. Keep it up guys.

Nige.

[Filroden]

I think you've caught more than just a hint of the spirals. Here's a quick stretch in Pixinsight. The quality isn't great as I'm working from the jpeg but it shows there's a lot more data in there even for such a short number of subs. With some more subs they should really start to become clear.

I also found using curves as the main stretch quite difficult. In the end, having watched a few YouTube videos, I used Photoshop and applied many small S curves to bring out the detail rather than big steps, which tended to saturate the bright areas (and in M31's case, the core is easily saturated).

Good to see such a promising first image from the new set up!

[parallaxerr]

Thanks Nigel - I must admit I'm very happy with the way the setup looks. I like my equipment to look good as well as perform well, although I don't think I'm alone on that one.

Fil - Wow!!! OK so there's definitely more information in there than I thought and you make a very strong case for post processing, another steep learning curve coming up I feel.

[happy-kat]

We also use StarTools which has a very swallowable price.

[The Admiral]

13 hours ago, parallaxerr said:

It's been a valuable first night of trial and error. I saw some star trailing on 30s exposures so reduced to 20s which got rid.

As you know Jon I have the same mount as you and for operational reasons I've stuck to a maximum of 30s exposure times, but I haven't had serious star trailing, even less so when I'm using my 0.79x reducer (bringing the effective focal length down to 565mm), so with your even shorter focal length the mount should easily give you 30s. Don't expect to see no star trailing though; I find a percentage show it to a greater or lesser degree. Alt-Az mounts I think are a bit cruder in their movements as they are primarily designed for visual use. DSS calculates a 'score' for each frame and you can decide on this basis, if you want, what frames you want to include in the stack (to do this you'll need to un-tick the box in the registration set-up to preclude stacking straight after registering). I've not tried longer subs but I think all the others have pushed it up to a minute or so, with varying degrees of success, when field rotation allows.

2 hours ago, parallaxerr said:

Fil - Wow!!! OK so there's definitely more information in there than I thought and you make a very strong case for post processing, another steep learning curve coming up I feel.

As happy-kat says, many of us use StarTools. It's not too expensive (60 AUD, or ~£37), has a good user group, but is rather a 'black box' though and make no mistake there is a learning curve with that. If you really want a challenge, and empty pockets, then go with the purists and get PixInsight! Either way, I think that astro images demand rather more than conventional photo-processors can provide. As I said before, processing can make or break an image, so it's worth using tools that'll get most out of the data.

Ian

[parallaxerr]

Perfect timing Ian, I just spent the last hour trialing Star Tools and came up with the image below. I followed a simple tutorial (which left plenty unexplained), however I'm amazed at what the program has brought out in the image. Considering the major lack of subs here, I'm impressed and will buy a licence for ST, it will be interesting to see what it can do with more photons!

P.S. Low res screen grab!

Edited October 7, 2016 by parallaxerr

[SteveNickolls]

That's a very decent first attempt with StarTools indeed. You can download ST and try it for as long as you want but you can't save your images (though you can do screen grabs). 

BTW regarding the wireless intevalometer, I do like the idea of keeping more warm while imaging this winter-brrr :-)

Cheers,
Steve

[The Admiral]

6 minutes ago, parallaxerr said:

Perfect timing Ian, I just spent the last hour trialing Star Tools and came up with the image below. I followed a simple tutorial (which left plenty unexplained), however I'm amazed at what the program has brought out in the image. Considering the major lack of subs here, I'm impressed and will buy a licence for ST, it will be interesting to see what it can do with more photons!

Well done, that's a great start! Yes there is plenty unexplained , but we muddle through and get there in the end. It is remarkably powerful software and can seem to extract a surprising amount of information from your data, but as ever, it works best when you feed it with good data, and of course that is something us Alt-Az imagers struggle with, so don't always expect a good result! I know, I've been there!!

At the bottom of the StarTools web front page, there is a link which says "PDF Document". I don't know if you are aware that that is an "instruction" manual, which provides a good background. I put it in quotes because it has its limitations and is supposed to be a work in progress.

Ian

[Nigel G]

Jon, that's coming on well and I'm sure with a bit of gradient work and a couple of other tricks on ST I'm sure you could get much more from this data, good luck, ST is worth buying to be able to save star masks which is necessary to fully use the tools, and save final images in a format which is workable after ST if needed.

Nige.

[Nigel G]

I just did a quick gradient wipe with ST, Its all there, just needs a bit more total exp time  

Nige

[parallaxerr]

1 hour ago, The Admiral said:

with your even shorter focal length the mount should easily give you 30s. Don't expect to see no star trailing though; I find a percentage show it to a greater or lesser degree.

Good to know. Admittedly I saw some trailing in the first 30s exposure on the camera screen so reduced to 20s. It could be that the tracking was lagging as the mount is set to approach up and right whereas I may need to set right and down to keep the alt gear loaded after slewing, due to being tail heavy. Worth a try.

 

1 minute ago, Nigel G said:

I just did a quick gradient wipe with ST

Interesting Nige, I tried it and got a different result, will retry with the original file.

[Nigel G]

7 minutes ago, parallaxerr said:

Good to know. Admittedly I saw some trailing in the first 30s exposure on the camera screen so reduced to 20s. It could be that the tracking was lagging as the mount is set to approach up and right whereas I may need to set right and down to keep the alt gear loaded after slewing, due to being tail heavy. Worth a try.

 

Interesting Nige, I tried it and got a different result, will retry with the original file.

Use the wipe tool and select vignetting , all stacking artefacts need to be cropped out for wipe to work best.

Edited October 7, 2016 by Nigel G
addition

[Nigel G]

The best way to remove artefacts is to first do an auto dev, this will show you any artefacts, then crop any out and re do auto dev to check they are all removed. Go to wipe, do your stuff and re do global stretch with either auto or manual develop. if you still have gradients just undo and try again with different settings in wipe. Then carry on processing.