Iris nebula with Skywatcher 72ED

[moise212 1,095]

Hello all!

The weekend that just passed we went to my girlfriend's parents. The skies in that rural area are pretty much as good as you can get. I don't have an SQM reader, but Clear Outside estimates 21.91.

I didn't take the EQ6R with me, I still consider it a big lump of iron, and the AZ-EQ5 should be on its way back this week as a Stellar mount. So I used the EQ5 which was left in the car for a while. While the tracking/guiding on the RA axis is quite good, the DEC control jumps a lot after multiple consecutive guiding commands, I blame the "enhanced" handset.

So with all the drawbacks, I tried to do align the mount as good as I could and I put the 72ED with the ASI1600 on it and a finder-guider.

Perhaps also focus could have been done a bit better, FWHM in the subs was 3.x.

Below is a quick process from last night, no deconvolution yet and a purple area at the bottom that I have to fix. 58x120s lum, 30x120s each RGB.

[smr 126]

That's brilliant already. 

[jjosefsen 208]

Yeah I have to say, that looks pretty darn good to me. Without being able to pixel peep on my current device, your processing looks really good. Good color without looking overprocessed, very natural.

 

[moise212 1,095]

Thank you, both!

I didn't mention, but the image was rescaled to 60%.

[Skyline 237]

Very nice image there, nice to see those stars in the corner looking round.

Looks like Skywatcher might have another winner on their hands regardless of some fiddling with spacing.

Edited October 8 by Skyline

[Rodd 3,719]

I think it looks terrific--it looks like I can reach out and run my hand through teh dust.  Well done

Rodd

[moise212 1,095]

Thank you too!

I thought/wanted to reprocess this, but I have tons of other data waiting in the queue. It's been clear here almost every night for the last 2 months maybe. Processing time now it is as the clouds rolled in.

[tooth_dr 2,658]

Fantastic, you really can see the dust just sitting in front of the stars.  Lucky you having too many clear nights

[moise212 1,095]

5 minutes ago, tooth_dr said:

Fantastic, you really can see the dust just sitting in front of the stars.  Lucky you having too many clear nights

Thanks! I only skipped the ones when the moon was near full. Imaging, sleep, pack some gear, sleep, work and again.

[swag72 6,309]

That's a super Iris...... the dust is really good, you've processed it really well

[moise212 1,095]

3 minutes ago, swag72 said:

That's a super Iris...... the dust is really good, you've processed it really well

Thank you, Sara! Actually this was so easy to process, but I "blame" the good skies for this. It makes such a big difference to have good data to start with. That weekend we arrived home at 1-2 AM after a wedding. I had the stacks already, I registered the channels, I applied some DBE on the L and the RGB images, I extracted a synthetic luminance from RGB, I combined it with the real luminance, I took the highlights from the synthetic luminance (I think the stars were just a tad tighter), made an LRGB, TGV, MMT, stretch, slight star reduction, background enhance, increased the saturation on the highlights and at 3 AM I was sleeping already.

I should have applied some deconvolution and some sharpening, plus a better gradient handling as there's an annoying blue area at the bottom.

[peter shah 1,227]

nice and dusty....lovely shot

[toxic 2,370]

that is really nice