New Setup - A few from Tuesday evening

[SamAndrew]

Had the new camera for about a month now; I'm still in the "kid in a candy shop" phase so I keep jumping around to try different targets. I've managed about 15 hours of data spread over 18 different targets over the past 5 weeks. With the addition of a DeepSkyDad auto focuser last week, my rig is now "complete" (still need to do some fetlling with cable management)

Tuesday night session was the first decent one in about 3.5 weeks. I can only image to the west of the meridian due to Light pollution from Kingston town centre which is only about 300m away. Thankfully to the west I'm looking straight across Bushy Park, so that direction is much better. My garden faces north west so south is blocked by the house, so I don't get a lot of time on each target. 

Started off with NGC 7822 and added a bit of Ha data there to take that up to 70 minutes - lost a lot of subs to passing clouds. 

Then on to the Soul nebula and added an hour of SII and an hour of OIII to the 2 hours of Ha and OIII data I already have - still working on creating my first combined narrow band image so that will follow later.

As the Soul began to sink lower I moved across to sh2-205 and NGC 1491, gave up pretty quickly on sh2-205 as that will need a lot of data! so I've got 50 minuets on NGC 1491.

Moved over to IC 443 to grab an hour of Ha there - think this is my favourite one of the evening - could have been a bit better framed, this stack is the best 45 mins.

M42 had finally cleared the neighbours house so I jumped down to grab 30 minutes there before it disappeared behind trees. Turned the gain down to 0 and managed 5 minute subs with only a slight bit of clipping.

Jumped up to the Rosette and managed to get 30 minutes of Ha while that one was still in view as well.

It was about 2.30 am at this point and conditions began to deteriorate so I shot about 20 minutes of lum on NGC 2403 and then called it a night.

So everything attached is just a simple stack on the 5 minutes subs with about 2 hours of darks and a simple stretch. Will process all of them a bit harder once I've got some more data, but knowing the British weather, that might be months!

[Vixen4eva]

Nice set of images...

Alan

[SamAndrew]

And here's the Soul nebula. First proper crack at an SHO image. I had 2 hours of OIII but the transparency was poor so I've only stacked 50 mins worth. So far I hadn't been using flats, but the OIII needs to be stretched so hard the uneven illumination shows up. So I've just taken my first set of flats for each filter; not perfect, but it'll do. I've used PI's ABE tool which has unsurprisingly left a dark halo around the nebula. Will put in more effort when I have more data  Happy for now.

Ha 12x5mins 

OIII 10x5mins

SII 10x5mins

[Barry-Wilson]

Good work Sam ? with a great set of images.

I would steer clear of ABE and learn the DBE tool which is much more refined for background extraction.  For the Soul image I would work on removing the strong purple gradien in the background sky and you will have a striking NB image.