The Leo Triplets

[Marci]

Whilst getting @Vicky050373 set up with EQMod (and EQDir over Bluetooth) & APT’s platesolving at my place last night, we decided to leave my rig (200PDS) pointing at yonder Leo Triplets...

Got some data, but working with the EOS1000D FSM camera remains a pain due to lack of a CLS/IR/UV filter and a filthy sensor, and I suspect I should have gone for shorter subs as at 240s the light pollution washed out any hope of retaining natural colour - but anyways, here’s the result of 15x 240s @ ISO800 with 7x matching darks and 10x bias, no flats, and an hour of fettling in Photoshop. Manually correcting coma with CameraRaw’s lens corrector has meant it’s cropped into NG3628, but heyho... 

I altered my methodology for this session and dithered between every shot, and set the dither scaling to 2 in PHD... this seems to have dramatically reduced the colour noise I was getting when dithering every 5th sub with scale set to 1 (which was perfectly fine for the EOS650D - a much less noisy camera by comparison).

I’m also still undecided what the best ISO is to use with the EOS1000D. I may go for a reshoot of this tonight at ISO400 and ISO1600 to compare.

 

[Marci]

Just for reference, this is the sensor dirt I’m having to frame targets around!

 

[Vicky050373]

This was a great result, and we had a good night too

[mapstar]

Nice efforts there Marci