M12, in my worst part of the sky

[alan potts]

Got some impressive, for me, guiding last night adding to M13 0.4 on RA ans 0.3on Dec, conditions were good and it highlighted to me what someone said last week, conditions are all when it comes to guiding. However all changed when I lowered the scope to pick up Messier 12 around the 20 degree mark from the horizon. Still not too bad though at 0.8 and getting better as it climbed.

M12 rises in my worst part of the sky, not that it is that bad, there is just a bit of a glow from the town about 4 miles away

. This is 1 hour 30mins of 3 minute subs at 1600ISO using a Canon 40D which is modded, had dither working too, I think. This is far from perfect compared to some of the outstanding work I see on here but I feel I am improving. Used my 805mm APO at native F/L

 

Please feel free to offer advice or cut it to bits, see there is a very faint galaxy just creeping through in there.

Alan.

[steppenwolf]

@alan potts You are indeed making some great progress. The image is a little red but this can be adjusted by trimming down the red channel using levels something like this. I have only made a tiny adjustment but I hope it shows the effect of doing this. I'm really pleased to see that you have persevered despite the difficulties at the start.

[alan potts]

1 minute ago, steppenwolf said:

@alan potts You are indeed making some great progress. The image is a little red but this can be adjusted by trimming down the red channel using levels something like this. I have only made a tiny adjustment but I hope it shows the effect of doing this. I'm really pleased to see that you have persevered despite the difficulties at the start.

Thankyou very much Steve, yes it does look better, I feel this could be my half baked attempt to bring up the orange in the stars as I felt it generally lacked colour. I used a technique using Select and Mask then tried to bring up the stars in Raw Filter, this works very nicely for noise reduction and it is pretty good for taking the sting out of bright centres, not so good for colouring stars though, I know other ways. It's strange when I was looking at it I didn't notice the red in the background and I normally do, I sometimes like to leave an image do a bit of gardening then come back, I find it helps.

 

Alan

[kirkster501]

I love these globular clusters.  Well done Alan, I like it.  I agree with Steve about the red.  You've also got a slight gradient on the right.  In my (very limited) experience, getting rid of - or minimising as much as possible - gradients is one of the most important things you can do to get better at AP and improve your pictures, not that I am an expert, far from it.  It is not always easy and sometimes impossible and people want to rush on to the next stage.  But time spent removing gradients here is very well spent.  

I really like your picture  

[alan potts]

52 minutes ago, kirkster501 said:

I love these globular clusters.  Well done Alan, I like it.  I agree with Steve about the red.  You've also got a slight gradient on the right.  In my (very limited) experience, getting rid of - or minimising as much as possible - gradients is one of the most important things you can do to get better at AP and improve your pictures, not that I am an expert, far from it.  It is not always easy and sometimes impossible and people want to rush on to the next stage.  But time spent removing gradients here is very well spent.  

I really like your picture  

I am tending to get a bit of gradient on that right hand side, I cropped the far right corner away. I see it on most of my images shot facing eastwards, I'm beginning to think it is the glow from the laptop creeping in the viewfinder. The long the sub the worse it seems to be, will look into it but I am just trying to hone skills a bit before I get a ASI 071, by this time we should have better darkness, or at least more of it.

Alan

 

[Laurin Dave]

Very nice Alan, well done!.  Just reward for all that hard work..  I ran it through Pixinsight Automatic Background Extraction which has removed the slight orange gradient to the top right.

Nice FOV and good stars to the corners so good decision to go for the ASI071

Dave

 

[alan potts]

16 minutes ago, Laurin Dave said:

Very nice Alan, well done!.  Just reward for all that hard work..  I ran it through Pixinsight Automatic Background Extraction which has removed the slight orange gradient to the top right.

Nice FOV and good stars to the corners so good decision to go for the ASI071

Dave

 

Dave I won't be getting the ASI071 until maybe Sept, the savings pot took a bit of a hit at weekend , but I will get one, it will be a bit better for darkness then too. I feel the glow from the laptop is getting into my 40D's viewfinder when pointing eastwards. Must mask it.

Alan