Rosette Nebula now nearly 3hrs DSLR data

[Stub Mandrel]

After several night which only produced about 60 minutes of data after dumping two or three times as much that was no good, last night I was finally able to add another two hours.

I think it's starting to take on the appearance of a huge, angry storm in space.

Any criticisms or suggestions for this (I know someone will say more data!) more than welcome!

[wimvb]

Looks great. The background colour mottle is 'easy' to remove if you dither (12+ pixels in both RA and DEC). This will also make processing the data easier.

 

Oh, lest I forget: also get more data

Thanks for sharing

[Filroden]

You're starting to pull out some detail, so as Wim says...more data please

You might want to take another look at your background removal. I think you still have a fairly heavy amount of light pollution affecting the image so it looks a little 'washed out' and you've lost too much in the upper left corner where it's almost gone to black. I think there is much more hiding in the image.

[Nova2000]

That's a nice rosette! Can you share your equipment?  The background seems weird tho. 

[Stub Mandrel]

Ha! I was going to ask about curing the dreaded blotch in PS.

The problem is the better I get at my PA and tuning my mount the less it drifts...

Also I think my darks aren't ideal, I've just taken 99 in the fridge to match last night's low temperature.

Gradient exterminator struggles a bit on this one because so much of the frame has to be excluded

130P-DS with modded Canon 460D on an EQ3.

[bob-c]

 a nice rosette.

                 bob

[Guest]

Looks great the rosette. 

[wimvb]

Neil, do you have both RA and DEC motors on your mount? If so, you can use the hand controller to dither. Manual dithering is a pain (been there, done that, didn't want the t-shirt), but totally worth the effort.

[Stub Mandrel]

I might write dithering into my controller, but if I do that I will also need to write an interval timer for it as well.

I'm not sure my sanity could cope with manually  expose-ditehr-expose  every two minutes for five hours...

[wimvb]

15 minutes ago, Stub Mandrel said:

I might write dithering into my controller, but if I do that I will also need to write an interval timer for it as well.

I'm not sure my sanity could cope with manually  expose-ditehr-expose  every two minutes for five hours...

Try doing that at -15 C. I believe I used styrofoam insulation to stand on.  Otoh, I only did about 40 x 2 minutes.

That's when I got the idea for a 'ditherbox'. I used the camera control from the Synscan handcontroller. Passed the signal through a microcontroller and on to the remote control input of my camera.

Whenever the shutter signal from the HC ended an exposure, the microcontroller would send a signal to the ST4 port of the mount, to move in either RA+, DEC+, RA-, or DEC- for a certain amount of time. It worked great, except that it didn't compensate for DEC backlash. With my AZ-EQ6 mount, I can't use this anymore. But whenever I do widefield with my EQ3 mount, I use the ditherbox.

[Stub Mandrel]

Wow, this is hard to process, I've spent several hours on it now.

It is made harder because I've managed to pick up the fainter nebulosity in a huge band that the rosette is near one end of.

I really can't decide how much to lighten this fainter nebulosity, but it is 'real' although most rosette images don't show it.

Somehow I can't get the same blue in the central stars as I was getting with the shorter integrations.

<edit> I've tried again not pushing the fainter nebulosity as hard.