Bode & Cigar

[vlaiv]

After two months of horrible weather - last Friday a chance to do something!

Data: 31 x 240s light, 36 dark, 256 flat / darkflat

Equipment: TS80mm F/6 Apo, ASI178mcc, Hutech idas p2

Conditions: red zone, relatively good transparency, poor seeing, heavy winds / gusts.

All comments welcome ...

Thanks for looking

[barkis]

Thank you for posting this. The weather in general  has been quite poor, inflicting some disappointment
on Imagers across Europe, not least here in the UK. I'm sure Serbia has been likewise.
It's nice you managed some exposures, and produced a very nice M81/ 82.
M82 Starburst is plainly visible, and the Spiral M81 looks good also. 
Hopefully better conditions will arrive soon, and make us all a bit happier .

[laudropb]

Very nice capture. 2017 has been very disappointing so far. Let's hope it can only get better.

[Knighty2112]

Nice image. Well done!  

[subhas barma]

Thank you , for your posting . My sky is very poor seeing . I tried it . But , I am failed . 

[vlaiv]

Thank you all.

Given the continued weather, I've spent some time practicing my processing skills (I do need a lot of practice in that area ).

Here is an improved version - at least I think it looks better.

[Rodd]

I think you still have  some room to stretch--though this last one looks a bit blue to me--could be my screen.  I have 2 screens and they are VERY different.  

[CraigT82]

Very nice, much more star colour in the 2nd, and the galactic core is better controlled.

 

How do you find the Hutech IDAS P2 filter?

[vlaiv]

40 minutes ago, Rodd said:

I think you still have  some room to stretch--though this last one looks a bit blue to me--could be my screen.  I have 2 screens and they are VERY different.  

Indeed it does have a bluish cast, I believe. I've noticed that but don't know how to fix it.

I've calibrated color based on unknown star, Stellarium says it's color index is 0.63 - that is close enough to  G2V with color index of 0.625. Also my flat panel is LCD one - I think it has quite a bit shift to the blue compared to sunlight.

So I fiddled with color temperature and saturation. Galaxies seem good color balance wise, but background is slightly bluish. If I correct with curves only that part it looks a bit unnatural to me. There is also slight LP gradient, really small one visible at the highest stretch. I did not remove that (I'm doing most of my processing with ImageJ / Gimp - so no gradient removal plugin unless I write one myself - which I plan to do). I think that bluish cast on background is probably due to LP.

22 minutes ago, CraigT82 said:

Very nice, much more star colour in the 2nd, and the galactic core is better controlled.

 

How do you find the Hutech IDAS P2 filter?

I've done just a bit of shooting with this filter, and both times I've made changes to my setup so I can't be really sure how good it is. I shoot from really heavy LP - red zone, maybe even white this year (relying on lightpollutioninfo maps its red zone, but there have been two construction sites opened near by with strong lights shining whole night this winter). I previously measured LP levels in certain exposures (and found that I get about the same values for dark signal as for LP with asi185 on that previous setup), but since then I've started using different scope and cooled camera. Subs look really clean of LP - these are 240s subs, but mind you pixel size is quite small and I'm using 80mm scope so I would not expect buckets of signal with this kind of exposure. LP Gradient is barely noticeable. I also did not find any special issues with color balance (then again I'm no expert ). So no real comparison yet, but I do feel it works really good. I'm even a bit surprised since I consider my LP to be of broadband type, not just orange glow.

For a decent comparison I would really need to do comparison shooting - with and without filter on a same night, and calculate LP glow magnitude in both cases to establish actual difference.