Oh Deer....

[DaveS]

....And Stephan too .

This was only intended as a test, given my horrible conditions. 10x5min subs in R, G, and B, 6x5min subs in L. No HII, and I think I won't bother if I take this further. Captured last night with a half moon getting in the way, and under London's LP.

130mm f/7 TS apo triplet with 2.5" reducer at 910mm fl, Baader LRGB filters and Trius 694 camera. A number of subs were write-offs, one had Bahtinov mask spikes, two others weren't even of the correct field, dur...

Aligned and Sigma Add stacking in AstroArt 5, then Gradient Reduction, Adaptive Divide plus Linear on all stacks, the Green especially had a bad moonlight gradient. LRGB synthesis followed by heavy cropping to get rig of bad alignment edges, another Gradient Reduction, Adaptive Subtract then DDP. White balance and another Gradient Reduction followed by Low-Pass filter and a mild Histogram Stretch.

I think there's enough promise there to go after more data with the moon out of the way, possibly pushing the subs up to 10 min.

C & C welcome, as are suggestions for how to progress on this.

[DaveS]

Dur.... It's also flipped. Half my subs were taken after meridian flip and I got my flips in a twist. Won't bother to post a flipped version as the first shows all that is needed.

Debating on what to do next. Tomorrow looks to be another clear night but the moon's getting brighter and nearer to the group so maybe I'll get a couple of hours HII despite what I said above. Not sure how much there is though.

Alternatively I could take the time to refine my PA and do another whole sky model.

Dunno....

[wimvb]

Looks good. If you add more LRGB after the moon has got out of the way, you'll probably see a vast improvement. Worth waiting for.

You mentioned going for Hll. Does this target have any significant signal in narrowband, other than Ha?

[DaveS]

Thanks Wim.

After sleeping on it I think I'll do some mount "housekeeping". I have an updated version of the mount control software that I want to install, but it will need new sky models.

When the moon gets out of the way I'll go aftet more LRGB, especially the L which is a bit short in this image. I'll worry about HII later as I suspect I'll need a finer plate-scale to show it.

[DaveS]

I can't believe how long it's been since I first posted this, but last weekend I managed to get another hour of L data before the target crossed the meridian.

The crop is harder as I had more alignment borders to get rid of.

Dunno

I may be able to get some more data after the full moon but it may only be HII, then I'll have to put it to bet for another year as it will be getting to far over my house.

What do people think, worth pursuing?

[ultranova]

Looking a lot better, I admire your dedication on this target

I think with the start that you got off to I would have

put this one to bed.

personally I would put this one on the back burner,

there's  plenty more  out there to get, in saying that

you have come this far on what only supposed to be a test

well done

Paul

[wimvb]

Much better already. Be aware that to get an appreciable improvement, you need to double the total integration time. No matter how much you already have. So, adding one hour on an hour isn't that difficult. But then you have to add two hours. And four ... and eight ... When you tire of this, you've reached the point of diminishing returns. Ideally you'd want the noise to be confined to the background, and the galaxy almost free of it. In reality, it's usually the weather that determines the total integration time. (At least in the UK/Northern Europe.)

On my mobile device, the background looks a bit purple, and the core overstretched. But that may be just my screen.

[DaveS]

Yes, I need a lot more RGB, and now I look on my work computer I can see the purple blotches in the BG too.

I agree, it's time to put this to bed for another year and move on, though I think it'll be worth getting more data. Probably I'll put the reducer back on to go to 683mm FL for the winter nebulae.

Annoyed with myself that I cut the run short to go after the Crab, which is a bit small for my 'scope. I could have captured another hour and a half of RGB before it went out of view.

[Shibby]

It's encouraging to see what you've managed through the light pollution of London. Nicely done bringing out such faint objects! It could do with flats but I suspect it's too late for that?

[DaveS]

Not too late at all Lewis, and thanks for the encouragement.

I've been meaning to get some more flats for while now. Providing it isn't raining at the W/E I'll have a go.

The last lot of flats I took were duff and just made things worse, but I'm not sure why, it wasn't just the histogram levels, there was something odd going on as well. Maybe the white T-shirt I was using had a crease in it.