1st guiding - M51 + NGC3180 (or 3184?)

[Aramcheck]

From the 5th & 6th May... near full moon & sky Bortle 6 here in lockdown Leeds. A couple of (very) late night/early morning sessions with the SW200dps & Canon 600d.

The main aim was to get the guidescope (a converted 50mm finderscope) working. On the first night I couldn't get PHD2 to calibrate, so pressed ahead un-guided. Focus was also a little off, as I couldn't find a star bright enough to use with the camera 'Live View' & Bahtinov mask.

After tweaking the software settings, the second night went more smoothly, with the guiding working for the most part. I lost some subs due to moonlight shining on the scope & ended up hastily duck-taping a plywood board to a pole and holding that for an hour-or-so to block out the direct moonlight... Towards the end the guidescope had also dewed up a little. Nevertheless, the FWHM (Full Width Half Max.) / Eccentricity & Signal-to-noise plots showed a marked improvement between the Un-guided & Guided nights.

In total I used 122 (NGC3180) & 136 (M51) x 60 second subs. I stuck with 60 sec's so I could stack the best frames from both nights in one go, but hopefully will be able to take 2-3 min subs in future.

NGC3180 - "The Little Pinwheel" didn't come out too well, but I'll no doubt try again. Processing was a little tricky but then it is approx. 40 million light years away... (I'm not sure whether it should be NGC3184... Stellarium lists it as "3180".)

M51 - For some reason the image is flipped L-R compared to the picture I obtained from the OU COAST scope. Not as good quality as COAST, but at least it's home-grown.

Both images heavily cropped!

Cheers,
Ivor

PS: clear tonight but too knackered to have another later night...

Eccentricity.pdf FWHM.pdf

[Erling G-P]

Not bad considering the challenge of the full moon.

Hope you don't mind, but I tried running them through Topaz DeNoise AI to see if the noise could be reduced. Think it worked quite well, especially on M51.

[Aramcheck]

Thanks @Erling G-P, I'm impressed! I always struggle with noise (although on SGL the images looked worse this time than when I load the jpg direct.

I've just downloaded the Topaz DeNoise software!

Cheers
Ivor

[CloudMagnet]

6 hours ago, Aramcheck said:

Thanks @Erling G-P, I'm impressed! I always struggle with noise (although on SGL the images looked worse this time than when I load the jpg direct.

 

Its nice when you start guiding and it takes away the worry of star trails... most of the time!

When you feel you are on top of guiding consistantly, a good way to reduce noise is to use dithering. Its not that much of a step further after guiding and will help get rid of banding/walking noise in your images as the noise is averaged out more in stacking.

There is plently of tutorials online about how to do this- it really does help your images go up in quality

[MarkAR]

I just realised that NGC 3184 is the one I imaged about a month ago and also had the designation quandary with NGC 3180. 

Had  a closer look at the time on Stars and the main galaxy is 3184, about 30º clockwise from the bright star on its periphery is NGC 3180. Looks like a partial circle of stars.