M57

[Starwiz]

This was a bit of an experiment on Monday night, 1 day before full moon.  I had only gone outside to see if I could get my auto-guiding working which I did, then tagged this on at the end.  

The sky was very light, so I found keeping the exposures quite short worked best.  

80 lights x 6 seconds at ISO1600, 20 darks stacked in DSS.  

John

[wimvb]

Very nice, despite the full moon.

I think you could even try this target with your ASI. The smaller chip and pixel size might result in a very nice image.

[orion25]

Good show! Nice color. I can see the central dwarf 

[swag72]

Looking good so far

[Starwiz]

17 hours ago, wimvb said:

Very nice, despite the full moon.

I think you could even try this target with your ASI. The smaller chip and pixel size might result in a very nice image.

Thanks, I'll give it a try but may wait until the moon's out of the way first.  

John

[LukeSkywatcher]

Nicely captured. You even have the central star.

[Starwiz]

1 minute ago, LukeSkywatcher said:

Nicely captured. You even have the central star.

Thanks, I was quite surprised myself as I couldn't see many stars with the moon being so bright.  

John

[Starwiz]

On 7/21/2016 at 00:26, wimvb said:

Very nice, despite the full moon.

I think you could even try this target with your ASI. The smaller chip and pixel size might result in a very nice image.

Good call.  Here's my effort with the ASI120mc.  120 x 10 second frames taken early this morning just before the moon started getting in the way.  Stacked in DSS.  

I'm sure it can be improved, but very happy with my first attempt at imaging a nebula with the ASI.   

John

[Ruud]

Good images, John. I like particularly the processing of the first one: pleasing colours there!

[Starwiz]

1 minute ago, Ruud said:

Good images, John. I like particularly the processing of the first one: pleasing colours there!

Thanks.  I like the colours in the first one more than in the second.  I was getting a lot of noise with the ASI, so had to keep the exposure length down, so this may have possibly contributed to losing some of the green end of the spectrum?  

John

[Ruud]

A slight colour imbalance must have crept into your second image during the processing. Not too much though: a level adjustment layer in Photoshop can remove the blue-green cast. I experimented a bit with the adjustment layer's white point picker in the red, green and blue channels, clicking on the brightest star till it looked white. The result is in the zip.

M57_levels on rgb.zip

I'm sure you can do better than that with your original data!

[wimvb]

Nice images, both of them.