Crab's in season !

[physicus]

What a great night last night: 10 hours straight imaging 8 pm till 6 am (in the UK and near full moon for most of it).  Finished up with the beautiful crab nebula, adding some Ha to the previous night's luminance.  I'll probably revisit/add/reprocess, but I like this as it is in lum  (75 min) + Ha (180 mins).  Usual set-up: c9.25/FR.63, Atik460ex, AZEQ6, OAG/ZWOASI120mm-s, Baader filters. 

[seo]

Very nice image and work !

[pyrasanth]

That's a very nice image. It is a shame that you don't have the image scale to hone in on the really fine details but then again seeing quality can ruin the details so it's often a compromise. I did a thread last year on the Crab. Might be worth you hunting it out as there are some fine images & yours is one of them. Tell me a little about the telescope used to take the image & the brand of filters you used.

[laudropb]

Very nice image. Thanks for posting.

[VikN46]

Lovely

[physicus]

That's a very nice image. It is a shame that you don't have the image scale to hone in on the really fine details but then again seeing quality can ruin the details so it's often a compromise. I did a thread last year on the Crab. Might be worth you hunting it out as there are some fine images & yours is one of them. Tell me a little about the telescope used to take the image & the brand of filters you used.

Thanks Pyrasanth; I'll check out the thread.   The image was taken with a Celestron 9.25" SCT with Celestron focal reducer.  The Atik460 was binned at 1x1, and my focus was good but seeing limited - partly because the subject started pretty low down.  I think subject brightness would support an attempt at native focal length and f10, but as you say, the seeing has to be there.   In merging the Ha and Lum here I have also lost some of the detail (perceived?) present in the indiviudal Ha and Lum stacks, so some potential for improvement there.  The filters are Baader Ha 7nm and IR/UV for luminance; they are the 'entry level' set, but seem fine apart from the OIII (not used in this shot) - which halos terribly.

[physicus]

 

3 hours of SII added in to the previous pic. Very attractive as unbelievably violent cosmic events go. Just have oxygen (OIII) to capture now, at which point point I'll decide what crazy colour scheme to settle on.

Ha (Red), Sulphur (Green), Lum (assigned Blue +Luminence)

lum (75 min) + Ha (180 mins) + SII (160 mins). Usual set-up: c9.25/FR.63, Atik460ex, AZEQ6, OAG/ZWOASI120mm-s, Baader filters.

[toxic]

looking really good

[pyrasanth]

I would go for the Hubble Pallete- this would look really good. Have you experimented (you can get a trial) with PixInsight. If not the learning curve is a shock but the results are spectacular particularly with the background & colour equalisation. I used Pixinsight to do the calibration & stacking of the "Heart" of the Heart image I just posted & the results are vastly better than anything I have previously done.

I use the fast 2" Baader Narrowband filter for the RASA- they are really good. I have been tempted to get an Astrodon 2" filter for the OIII but am not sure how it would behave at F2.22 since the filters I have are certified for F2 or slower. I guess I would need to try it but it's a sizable investment.

I've just ordered an Atik 11000 which I hope will produce excellent results with the RASA. The image scale will be 3 arc secs per pixel which is a tad high but since my seeing is not very good it might make guiding easier & frankly I'm always over oversampling with the Atik 460 from the sky's of Birmingham- I mean it's not exactly Atacama!

Good luck with your imaging your producing results worthy of the effort your investing. 

[JamesF]

This is looking very nice.  I hope the weather holds to get the OIII data.

James