Elephant trunk nebula - first go at narrowband

[teh_orph]

Hello guys

I can see why people get addicted to imaging... I replaced my EQ2 scope with a EQ5 + 200p in January and have been making progress with guiding. However as I live in London I can never really use an exposure longer than about five minutes due to the light pollution...or at worst just 30 seconds!

I recently sourced a second 1000D, removed the IR filter and DIYed in a filter holder into my optic train and added a 1.25" Baader 6nm Ha filter. For the last few weeks I've been experimenting with imaging like that and finally have an image when using the equipment in anger.

Five hours of Ha from 20x15 minute images across several nights. Flats and darks for each set of images, combined in DSS and worked in Photoshop CS6. You can really see the noise still; I'm going to Peltier cool the sensor next.

Feedback please! I'm resisting buying OIII so I can add some colour...! I will be adding more data to see if I can get the noise down. Tone mapping this was really tricky - trying to get the stars to not saturate was a right chore.

Kit info etc:

http://www.astrobin.com/208838/

Thanks

Simon

[xtreemchaos]

great first go mate,you have a nice detail well done.thanks for sharing   charl.

[michael.h.f.wilkinson]

Lovely trunk! Excellent first narrow-band image

[laudropb]

Very fine image especially for a first go at narrow band. Thanks for posting.

[geordie85]

Very nice indeed. I'm curious to know how you managed to capture this. Did you shoot in colour then convert to mono or have you modified your DSLR to only image in mono?

I've been collecting Ha and O111 the past 2 nights of this with my astro modded 600D and astronomik 12nm clip in filters.

I seriously need some darks though as it's drowning in noise at the moment

[teh_orph]

Thanks all

Very nice indeed. I'm curious to know how you managed to capture this. Did you shoot in colour then convert to mono or have you modified your DSLR to only image in mono?
I've been collecting Ha and O111 the past 2 nights of this with my astro modded 600D and astronomik 12nm clip in filters.
I seriously need some darks though as it's drowning in noise at the moment

My camera is unmodified, apart from removing that IR filter directly in front of the sensor. I'm imaging in colour, and then dropping the other three pixels' worth of data. Tbh I'm not happy with the way I do this, what system do you use?

Really I want to just take my RAW files and drop the GG and B leaving R, but there's no software which I can find does this nicely. I can't do it reliably in dcraw: it works ok on the light frames but it ruins the flats and darks. The best I have found so far is to use DeepSkyStacker and *disable the black point=zero* check box, set red=1, blue=1 and luminance=1 whilst using the super pixel option. There's still green data in the image though...

Omg that noise though.

[geordie85]

I've only had 1 attempt to process my data so far. Used dss to stack each channel. Switched from RGB to greyscale in photoshop but it hasn't worked very well at all so far.

Mind you my processing skills are still very limited