Finally a degree of success with an OSC

[Adreneline]

I obtained my first telescope (ED80DS Pro with NEQ6) in October 2016 and experimented with some success with an unmodified 70D, slowly getting to grips with EQ-suite, CdC, DeepSkyStacker and BackyardEoS whilst taking a large number of varying quality images of M31, M33 and M42. In November I bought an Atik 414ex osc and have been on a real journey of discovery. Having finally got to grips with PHD guiding, Sequence Generator Pro and dithering, and spent hours experimenting with Photoshop and various pieces of trial image processing software here is my first result that I feel reasonably satisfied with. To the expert eye I am sure it has a wealth of shortcomings so any constructive comments would be very much appreciated. The image comprises 62x120s high-dither lights with fifty darks, flats and bias frames (all at -10 degrees C), and what feels like 2x62 hours of time spent processing!

I will take this opportunity to thank so many on this forum who have unknowingly helped me make progress over the past four months. I have read many, many posts on a vast range of topics and learnt more than my brain could cope with. Thank you to all for sharing so much.

Equipment: ED80DS Pro with 0.85 f/r, focussing unit and USB interface, NEQ6, IR/UV filter, Atik 414ex osc

Software: Sequence Generator Pro, Cdc, EQ Suite, DeepSkyStacker, Photoshop CS6

[Demon Barber]

Nice capture, i like the framing and colours, 

Regards

Mike

[steppenwolf]

Very nice indeed, you should be very pleased with this image. Nice subtle colours, good shaped stars and look at those lovely red glowing hydrogen filaments emanating from the core! If I had any criticism at all, the image may be a fraction soft on focus but a delightful image nonetheless.

Welcome to SGL by the way!

[Adreneline]

Thank you Mike and Steve for your comments. It seems that every aspect of this hobby represents a challenge so I am delighted to receive your positive feedback. I've read my copy of MEPC so many times over the past four months it has literally fallen apart from the binding. Clear nights are few and far between in the East Midlands hence my decision to go for osc, but at least I get plenty of time to try to perfect my PS skills. One of my biggest challenges has been creating a 'useful' luminosity layer from the original rgb image. Once I've succeeded I'll share my M63, M101 and M51 images. Thank you again.

[iwols]

lovely images,ive got  the 414ex  mono and filters but sometimes wish ide gone for the osc version

[alacant]

Hi. Good shot. Ideas? Maybe lose the reducer so you don't need to crop so much? HTH. 

[PeterCPC]

Lovely shot but it looks a bit on the yellow side to me. Maybe my screen.

Peter

[RichLD]

Well done sir, good capture! It's nice to hear someone extol the virtues of OSC 

I agree with Steve that your focus looks a little off (I mean a gnat's) but other than that I really like it.

Might be worth trying a bit of High Pass in PS on a separate layer then allowing some of the galaxy detail through with a layer mask?

HTH

Rich

[Adreneline]

Thank you again for the kind comments and suggestions.

I thought long and hard about a mono 414ex but decided I would make a go of the osc. Clear skies are rare around here and light pollution is a problem until after midnight when many streets lights are turned off; even then I can really only image N-thru-E-to-S. Dithering has markedly improved the background noise problem. Colour balance is a challenge; I get different results from the PC to the MacBook to the iMac - in the end I go with what I like the look of! Perfecting my skills in PS is clearly the name of the game so I'll be trying to better understand the benefits of masks next I think.

I'm inclined to leave the hardware exactly as is for now as it took me an age to get everything spaced correctly and even now it would seem I still have an issue with focus which thus far I have left to SGP to handle.

Adrian

[Star101]

Nice work. That's a good image.

You have done well with M82 being so much brighter than M81 keeping the brightness levels even across the image. 

I have the ATIK 4120EX OSC, It produces excellent images and with limited clear skies in my part of the UK, the OSC camera is probably ( with exceptions) the best option!  

[ollypenrice]

That's a success for sure. I did wonder why such short exposures but perhaps that really is your skyglow limit?

While the colour balance isn't far out I think it might take a tweak here and there. For me green and red are probably a bit high and blue a bit low. I'd advise using the eyedropper tool in Ps, set to colour sampler at 3X3 average, to measure the background sky. This will tell you where you are on CB. Persoanlly I like a background sky at 23/23/23 RGB as a default but if you have a rogue channel this will identify it for you.

Olly

[Adam J]

M81 makes me smile as it was the second object I ever imaged after a poor attempt at M42. I am actually very tempted now to return to it.  

Its a nice image it looks like you have done a good job of collecting and processing the data. However Olly is right, a little too much red and green to my eye, still easy to nudge the balance if you feel so inclined. 

[Adreneline]

Thank you again for the comments.

I went with 120s because I had already tried 180, 240 and 300 and found the centre of M82 would tend to be over exposed and lack detail/structure.

I've taken Olly's advice and sampled the background in the tif file in four areas of the image background and it comes out at 22/23/20 RGB so I'm in the right ball park I think. I should have mentioned I also used the Topaz DeNoise plugin in PS. Finally I took the 100 dpi image which results from the 414ex and increased it to 300 dpi without changing the image dimension. That's probably cheating but it seemed to help smooth the final image quite a bit - to my eyes!

Thank you again for all the helpful comments.

[Adreneline]

Just finished my first attempt with PI - using exactly the same lights and calibration frames. I used the Batch Preprocessing script and then followed the LVA tutorial on M31.I think I prefer this one to my attempt with PS. 

M81-M82-PI.tif

[Adreneline]

Here's the jpg for a more 1-to-1 comparison.