Another mediocre M42

[gary1968]

Howdy,

My 1st attempt at M42 with the SC1 Toucam, fitted with Attik 0.5 reducer and Baader UV/IR Cut filter. Scope was my C80ed on a CG5GT, 30 x 20sec frames stacked in registax and processed in gimp.

(click to enlarge)

All comments / critism welcomed, thanks for looking......

Gary

[blinky]

Great stuff Gaz Nice colour, no trailing Was 30 secs that max you could go to? It's enough BTW for such a bright object, just wondering if you could go longer.

[MikeD]

Great stuff, beats the hell out of my first m42 with a toucam.

Mike.

[Psychobilly]

Nice one Gary

Great stuff fromt he Modded Toucam

I suspect theres one or two rouge frames in there as if you look carefully you will see that tthe stars have a faint "echo" offset about 3 o'clock if you can find and remove these from the stack then the image will be a lot sharper.

Billy...

[dogfish]

WTG Gaz. I'm really falling behind everyone now - must get my finger out.

Cheers, Martin

[gary1968]

Thanks guys..... :-D

Craig, I could have went a it longer than 20secs but I figured that for M42 20secs was enough. I have some lx avi at 10 secs and 5 secs but haven't figured out how to process muliple avis yet.... lol.

I did some 40 secs of M31 but due to the moon it was too washed out to be of interest, on the up side it showed no trailing either.

Billy, thanks for the advice. I will look again at this and check to individual frames to see if I can find any carpy ones and reprocess.

Any advice on the best program to stack the avi's frames would be helpfull. I used registax as I cant figure out how k3 works, I cant seem to get an image in the 'result' file when finished, alhough the software does seem to be doing something???

Anyway, its a start and most enjoyable too, need to save up now for a 1000d..... :-D

Gary

[Psychobilly]

SO what do you end up with from a moddified cam ... is it an avi but with a very low frame rate and can you split it up into individual frames?

[gary1968]

Thats right Billy, you get an avi with slow frame rate. There are a few frames that are carp. Been playing around with k3 again and just cant get it to process then show a result.

I think that there is a bit more to come from that image if I can get it through something other than registax.

Thanks for your help.

Gary

[Psychobilly]

Can you split it up into individual frames...?

[gary1968]

Billy,

I can view the individual frames in k3 but I cant see a way to save the frames individually. If I / we could figure that out then DSS would be the way to go, yes?

Gary

[Psychobilly]

yep DSS if you can split the file into individual Frames...

[gary1968]

Here is another go at processing, not sure which I like best. I find processing is way more difficult than shooting the image in the first place, but here it is anyway.....

(click to enlarge)

Thanks for looking....

Gary

[Psychobilly]

Nice one Gary,

now we're getting some where

Whats next getting rid of the hot pixels ?

[Albireo380]

Did you take the M42 shot last night at herperigg Gary? I was out at Drymen and the sky was washed out by the moonlight.

Tom

[Starflyer]

Nice first M42 Gary.

You can split the avi into individual frames using VirtualDub - load the file and choose File | Export | Image Sequence, you can then stack in DSS.

Ian

[gary1968]

Thanks guys,

Billy, are the hot pixels the blue spots in the image? And if not what are they. How do I get rid of them??

Tom, yes that avi was shot last night at Harperigg so could have been better if there were no moon. I also tried some M31 but it was washed out.

Ian, thanks for that but I posted a querie in the imaging discussion section re this and SteveL came back with the same recomendation. The second version above was processed that way.

This processing carry on is going to be the end of me, driving me mad, lol. Such a lot to learn. Still, I at least have some avi's to play around with now.

Thanks again,

Gary

[blinky]

Gaz,

The second one is a real cracker! You must be chuffed to bits with that

[gary1968]

Cheers Craig, I am fairly pleased with it. I'll keep playing around with it until I get some more avi's to fiddle with during the next few cloudy nights.

Gaz

[Psychobilly]

Hi Gary,

The hot pixles are the trails of primary colours that are in the image... I dont know how successful taking a Dark "AVI" would be , record exposures the same as the lights but with the scope covered... and then use thes as the basis of some darks... failing that its a bit of retouching in GIMP...

Billy...

[gary1968]

As it has been cloudy here for a few days I have benn fiddling around with my M42 avi again, boredom is a wonderful thing aint it?

Anyway here is the result, there is a bit more colour in it now.....

(click to enlarge)

I must stop playing with this now, lol.

Next time I have to get some darks as there were none used in the image.

Thanks for looking again..

Gary

[Psychobilly]

Getting there Gasry

Just cleared up the hot pixels and a few small tweaks ... hope you don't mind....

(click to enlarge)

Billy...

[gary1968]

Thanks Billy, it looks better like that I think..... :-) You have reduced the amount of blue / violet in it and blackened the background, it was the background I was trying to blacken.

Please feel free to tinker with any image I post as I find processing very difficult and it is good to see what others can do.

Thanks again,

Gary