NGC1579 Northern Trifid (Batman!) Nebula - LRGB

[Tzetze]

Having spent a couple of evenings working on aligning my optics, I settled on star shapes that were good enough across the field for my liking. There's still room for improvement there but I'm happy enough considering the struggle to get to this point!

I've been tackling the extensive tutorials provided by Kayron Mercieca on Light Vortex Astronomy. A considerable number of hours were spent on this image. Including some wasted hours trying to get around a PI error that was stopping progress. It turned out that reverting to an earlier version allowed me to continue.

I'm very pleased with the results here. Star reduction left the smaller stars looking a little crunchy on close inspection but I think it's better overall than without the reduction. Perhaps the background could be pulled down a little lower.

For acquisition, I've been going with Lum 10x 1x1 600s and RGB 10x 2x2 150s simply because it allows me to get a full set within a few hours. Someday I'll learn to optimally expose for ADU.

Equipment used: EQ8, 10" Newt at f4.7, Atik 460ex, Astrodon 1.25" LRGB Gen 2 E.

[MartinB]

That's a new one on me.  Looks quite a challenging target made harder by PI foibles.  Nice work!

[Allinthehead]

Very nice Mike. I like the background as you've presented.

[carastro]

Very nice image. 

I've been trying to get this target for a couple of years, but always seem to be in the wrong place at the right time (due to obstructions such as house or tree).  I managed to get a couple of hours on it at Kelling Heath but it was VERY noisy, I am presuming it is quite a faint object and needs dark skies, therefore have not attempted it from home.

Would you say that was the case?

Carole 

 

 

[Tzetze]

5 hours ago, MartinB said:

That's a new one on me.  Looks quite a challenging target made harder by PI foibles.  Nice work!

Thank you Martin. Yes, I found this to be quite a challenge indeed. Some new ground (to me) explored in both pre and post processing has benefitted results greatly. I'm impressed by the colours produced by a Photometric Calibration process which uses plate solving and, in this case, type G2V stars as reference. Very 'natural' tones.

 

5 hours ago, Allinthehead said:

Very nice Mike. I like the background as you've presented.

Thanks very much Richard. When there's so little actual background, I'm easily convinced it needs to be set lower.

 

5 hours ago, carastro said:

Very nice image. 

I've been trying to get this target for a couple of years, but always seem to be in the wrong place at the right time (due to obstructions such as house or tree).  I managed to get a couple of hours on it at Kelling Heath but it was VERY noisy, I am presuming it is quite a faint object and needs dark skies, therefore have not attempted it from home.

Would you say that was the case?

Carole 

 

 

Thank you Carole. It's certainly a faint object and I had quite a bit of noise to deal with here myself. I'd have been better off with a larger number of longer subs. According to lightpollutionmap.info Kelling Heath has similar sky conditions to my own location (4). I have no experience of imaging under brighter skies so can't really compare but I'd imagine it would quickly become more difficult to capture more than the brightly illuminated area.