M104 - Sombrero Galaxy

[Hallingskies]

A re-work from data I gathered on the nights of April 18th and 19th - with a properly calibrated monitor on my desktop!  Surprising how much difference that makes - or perhaps not!

Equipment: SXV-H9, Vixen 114mm f5.3 ED refractor, NEQ6 mount, guiding with Lodestar X2/PHD

Subframes: 70 x 200s luminance, 5 x 200s each for RGB 2 x 2 binned), 20 darks and bias frames, 20 flats for each channel (image acquisition and stacking, hot pixel and gradient removal, channel registration and LRGB composition all in Astroart, noise reduction with NeatImage, final colour balance and cropping in Paint Shop Pro).

For me, objects this low down in the southern sky are badly obscured by light pollution from the Aurora Maidstonealis. The image scale is quite small for my old Vixen refractor, but in the end things didn't scrub up too badly given that the sky was hazing over as I was trying to grab the luminance data.  I would have liked some more RGB subs but after six weeks of cloudy skies I took what I could get.

I have a lot to learn about image processing and would appreciate any advice as to what what folk think is right or wrong with the above effort.  Please note that I don't speak Adobe or PixInsight though, only being self-taught in PaintShop and Astroart... 
 

[kirkster501]

Good job, I like it.

[tooth_dr]

My favourite galaxy. Lovely image 

[sloz1664]

I'd love to image M104 but it's too low down for me in my present position 

Well if you are new to imaging, you are certainly on the right path. Great image.

Steve

[Hallingskies]

9 hours ago, sloz1664 said:

I'd love to image M104 but it's too low down for me in my present position 

Well if you are new to imaging, you are certainly on the right path. Great image.

Steve

Thanks for the comments.  I’m not exactly new to imaging, but have only just come back to it after a seven year break, having finally got around to putting up a permanent observatory.  From looking through this forum it is staggering how much image acquisition and processing seems to have moved on in that time.  There is much to learn and relearn.

[Hallingskies]

20 hours ago, kirkster501 said:

Good job, I like it.

Thanks for not looking too closely.  There was quite a bit of chrominance noise in the RGB stack that gave the overall image too soft a look for my taste, once I’d beaten it down.  A combination of light pollution, haze, too few subs and my limited ability in processing, methinks...

[Hallingskies]

9 hours ago, sloz1664 said:

I'd love to image M104 but it's too low down for me in my present position 

Well if you are new to imaging, you are certainly on the right path. Great image.

Steve

P.S.  I saw you listed a TAL 200K in your signature.  How do you get on with it? I remember having a serious think about getting one about 15 years ago, but wound up getting a Vixen VC200L instead -  a similarly off-beat but excellent ‘scope...

[ollypenrice]

It's good but I'd go easy on the black point and let more faint signal into the image. It does look black clipped to me.

Olly

[sloz1664]

55 minutes ago, Hallingskies said:

P.S.  I saw you listed a TAL 200K in your signature.  How do you get on with it? I remember having a serious think about getting one about 15 years ago, but wound up getting a Vixen VC200L instead -  a similarly off-beat but excellent ‘scope...

The Tal 200K I have is the f8.5 not the usual f10 and the optics are fabulous. I've had it 6 years now and I've never had to collimate it. I'm now using for imaging with my atik 460exm and the results are promising. If the weather would play ball I would have some nice images to post.

Steve

[kirkster501]

23 hours ago, sloz1664 said:

I'd love to image M104 but it's too low down for me in my present position 

Well if you are new to imaging, you are certainly on the right path. Great image.

Steve

Me too, at the Meridean there is a willow tree in the way

[Hallingskies]

13 hours ago, ollypenrice said:

It's good but I'd go easy on the black point and let more faint signal into the image. It does look black clipped to me.

Olly

Thanks Olly.  By “easy on the black point” I assume you mean keeping the x-axis intersect of the histogram curve a bit to the left of the block of main signal.  I do try and do that, but the background noise is quite high in most of my images.  Not sure what the smart way of processing that out is, but I normally “magic wand” the background to exclude stars and the main object, and then apply smoothing (or even take it out as a separate image mask, hit it with NeatImage and drop it back).  Of course, this loses the faint detail as well as the noise.  Maybe I just need to put Steve Richards’s books on my birthday list...?

[Hallingskies]

13 hours ago, sloz1664 said:

The Tal 200K I have is the f8.5 not the usual f10 and the optics are fabulous. I've had it 6 years now and I've never had to collimate it. I'm now using for imaging with my atik 460exm and the results are promising. If the weather would play ball I would have some nice images to post.

Steve

Not heard of the f8.5 one before, sounds interesting.  I find the collimation on my f9 VC200L to be similarly bomb-proof, which was the reason I went for it in the first place (plus it has an f6.3 focal reducer option). Newts are too fiddly!