BUSY BEES (M44)

[halli]

Hi All

Thought I would make life a bit easier by choosing a nice cluster to gain more experience of using a CCD, instead of trying to dig a faint galaxy out of the light polluted mirk !!

I choose M44 because of the nice star colours and its simplicity in order to practice LRGB processing which I am new to and found the Light Vortex tutorials very useful.

I have had a few little issues ensuring my 383l had enough voltage to avoid a very noisy output and bought a 13.8v regulated supply which appears to have done the trick.

130pds and Atik 383l without CC  - but now I have bought one ! -  but need to get the spacers so I can use it - perhaps next time !!!

Best Wishes 

Ian

 

 

[wimvb]

Very nice stars and wonderful colours.

Thanks for sharing.

[halli]

Hi Wim

Thanks for the comment - appreciated

Ian

[laudropb]

Very nice image and a good choice to practice with your CCD camera.

[halli]

Thanks laudropb

[jetstream]

Fantastic image Ian.

[swag72]

A couple of thoughts on this image - There seems to be a light circle in the middle of the frame - Did you use flats? If not these are an easy enough way to really improve an image over all. Also to me it looks as though the black point has been clipped a little and the background is too black...... Has the histogram gone too far to the left?

Great star colour and a pleasing one to look at  Hope that helps.

[Mr Spock]

It's nice to see star clusters for a change and the colours are lovely. If you wanted to go a bit deeper there are a lot of faint galaxiews in this area.

[halli]

Thanks everyone for your kind comments.

Yes you are correct about the two points you made wrt flats and the black point Sara !   I am still trying to get a repeatable flat generation process with the 383l, so I decided to try and get away with it for this image !    

I think ive got a useable workflow now using the  SGP flats calibration wizard to get the right ADU (25K seems ok) with a LED panel.  Ony thing is that this requires the telescope to be brought indoors  to perform and the risk is that any dust etc will move as a result !  I found a recent image had a number of dust bunnies on it and when I introduced the flats the dust bunnies increased except they were light instead of dark !  They certainly help quite a lot with vignetting and gradients though.  I have now removed the dust from its souce which was the outer glass window on the CCD !.   I shall also try and see if I can get consistent results with the telescope in situ.  I agree they are quite important to improve the quality of images.

I am finding using the 383l even with 2" filters still produces some vignetting in the corners which surprises me - not sure why this is but this is easily removed using DBE in Pixinsight or better still with flats.

With respect to the black point I must admit I  succumbed to the temptation to take it into the histogram a bit to cover up a multiple of sins in the backgound !  With this sort of cluster I dont think I lost  too much  important data as I was just interested in reproducing the star colours nicely and they were bright anyway.  Call it artistic license I guess ! Still feels like cheating though !!!  Although I guess any faint galaxies in the vicinity as Michael has suggested would have been affected

Ian