Flame and Horsehead. First auto guided image.

[vincentnm]

My first attempt at auto guiding and first light for my ED80. Bad light pollution. 1 min X 55 subs. No wonder the SNR is so low. Used Noel's actions to remove light pollution. But I guess there was too much of it and too less signal. Anyway here's to a humble begining.

Thanks,

Vincent.

[Psychobilly]

Hi Vincent,

Congtrats on your first HHN and Flame...Its a hell of a lot better than my first efforts. Ok so you have problems with LP reducing the SNR but so many oither things are right the image.

The framing , and tracking are good and the focus is only ever so slightly soft - the LP can be sorted using a suitable filter as its better to remove as much as possible before capture.

Billy...

[blinky]

Great first autoguided image Now that you are autoguiding i would try for longer subs, if you have bad LP get a filter (As Billy says). The Orion LP Filter is very good about 30% cheaper than the more expensive ones.

[Psychobilly]

Vincent,

I there any chance of posting the image (resized and jpeged) that came out of the stacking process before you started processing it?

Billy...

[vincentnm]

Thanks for your comments guys. Billy here's the unprocessed file (1.5 MB). I think many of the problems here are with my processing, been too liberal with the gaussian blur.

http://ukastronomers.com/VincentMorris/action/download_files/fileid/92

[Psychobilly]

Hi Vincent...

Having had a play with the tiff or a few minutes this is what I have come up with so far....

(click to enlarge)

Billy...

[George]

Had a quick go myself Vincent, there's plenty of data there it just needs teasing out. Rather than use Noels actions first try using levels & curves first as I find noels LP actions don't work on every image. There;s plenty of primers on SGL for image processing or you can try a few of these links:

http://www.astropixels.co.uk/Guide_levels_and%20_curves.htm

http://www.waid-observatory.com/articles.html

[gary1968]

Wow, 8-) , a good image to start with. It certainly has been shown that there was a lot of detail in there that needed prised out in processing, really shows the power of proccesing.

Gary

[Sam]

That's a very fine effort for the first go at autoguiding. There's a lot of data in that image and HH is a stand out.

[vincentnm]

Thanks guys and excellent processing. I was too aggressive in the processing, stretched too much trying to get more detail hence worsening the light pollution. A valuable lesson learnt - do not over stretch to compensate for lack of data!

Thanks again,

Vincent.

[Psychobilly]

Hi Vincent its also important to do things in the right order...as its very easy to muck things up... George has doen a far better job than I have... I think I should have extracted the stars and worked on them seperately.

Also your better of makeing changes in stages ratehr tahn tryign to do too much in one step.

Maybe someday I'll get round to reading Martins tutorials.