M97 - A very small Owl

[Jarvo]

Evening everyone.

The Owl Nebula is one of my favourite objects and is one of the first to be imaged by my new telescope.

45 x 60"s of Data @ ISO800 stacked in DSS.
Olympus DSLR
Esprit 100 ED Telescope
OIII filter

I love the fact it actually looks like an owl and I'm chuffed you can seen the resemblence in this unguided image over a brief 45 minutes.

My trusty little Olympus has a neat Noise Reduction feature on it which I used. It takes a bit longer in the field but I don't need to have darks. (I know we are meant to use dark frames but they never process well in DSS for me.)

I took me loads of attempts  in DSS to get something I was happy with. In the end I got rid of the Dark Frames and ended up with a 5% Star detection rate.

Think I'm going to continue to add data to this (I saw a post earlier with data gathered over a 2 year period on M51. Inspiration indeed).

Thanks for looking

Jarvo
 

[Sunshine]

That's a big effort! it clearly is the owl nebula, good luck with collecting more photons from this object.

[Demonperformer]

Darks will always be a problem with a non-temperature-controlled camera, and badly matched ones will add more noise than they compensate for.

A good start. As you realise, a LOT more data is needed (isn't it always?), but you should have enough data on that image allow an imaging program (like Sharpcap) to position your next session in the same place.

Look forward to watching this one as it develops.