M33 progress

[alexbb]

Hello all!

I'm on holiday for a couple of weeks. While staying outside at the pool with a beer, before going to sleep, I remembered that I uploaded my work just before leaving. And I also have for comparison last years' efforts, but I don't remember the integration times.

First one was taken in my first astrophoto session, just after Christmas 2015, with a Canon 450D on a Sw 102/500 achromat and an AZ go-to mount. Dark site.

The next one is taken from my balcony with one of or both Canon 450/550D on the Tair lenses. Exactly one year ago. Red/white light pollution sky. Due to poor results, I remember that I didn't bother much with it.

Last one in just a little above 2h of luminance and 25mins of each RGB taken with the ASI1600 in 180s Lum subs and 60s colour subs. 130pds. In my opinion, much better than last year. I think I'll continue on it, even if I'm still in the same red/white light pollution zone.

Clear skies!

Alex

[ollypenrice]

Certainly better, but are you black clipping the data? Always leave a little flat line on the left before the histogram peak rises.

Olly

[alexbb]

Thanks! No, I don't think so. I could probably lift the histogram higher in gimp, but I used mostly StarTools which claims not to do this. I noticed that if I don't stretch (develop) too much, the background point in the histogram doesn't move too much from black. I can add some "skyglow" back to the image in StarTools if I want to achieve this and keep the stretch the same. Or I could have stretched more, but with this data more was too much.

I don't think there's much more hidden in my image, perhaps a better background removal could help just a bit?!

Anyways, I'll add more data to it and then spend more time processing. This was more to show how you can improve in time. It's also very impressive how much data the mono camera gathers.

Regards,

Alex

PS. Going back to the beach.

[TareqPhoto]

Impressive to see the improvements through time or years, i started this year and never tried stacked DSO with DSLR, in fact i bought the mount for the first time ever in my life this year, but i decided to start strong, so i also bought a mono cooled camera, and i live in a red/white LP zone, hope i don't regret it.

[alexbb]

A cooled mono camera will definitely be better than a DSLR and you have plenty of targets to shoot in narrowband and some bright ones to shoot in broadband. Integration time will make the difference.

Clear skies!

[alexbb]

Back from holidays Wednesday and it was also clear. I shot some more that night then I left again until today. Now I have almost 5h of Lum which I processed. Then I used the previous image as colour and I raised the saturation amount. This is it:

 

[TareqPhoto]

I hope Narrowbanding will help me in my LP urban, but we don't have long night until winter, and even though it is not longer than the night in most parts of North or South of earth, we live in the middle almost so even the longer night is somehow same as standard night in your country or say UK, so most DSO targets i can't stay long in one night, and if i try in many nights then i have to master how i can get the target exactly in center every night then i can go for long or many exposures then stack better.

[alexbb]

This last image was shot under heavy light pollution during 5 nights. I used a CLS filter for luminance, a cheap one that I bought for visual. As I used a reflector, I didn't mind that it didn't cut the ir/uv. There are several ways to control your mount and make it slew to the target. Automating with plate solving gets you exactly there. I don't mind doing this manually, especially that this way I can decrease the frequency of dithering. I also always center my targets since I don't have perfect optics and they provide better results at the center.

Clear skies!

[alexbb]

There's plenty of noise in the images, but I'm still somewhat happy given the light pollution that I'm trying to see through. I added a bit over an hour of Ha to the image above for the result below:

Unfortunately I have to move in ~1 month so I'm not sure if I will still be able to image from home, neither I know if I can add more data to this target.