June 25, 2020 - My very first DSO (Ring Nebula)

[MM617]

Hey everyone!

Last year I posted here for advise on equipment, I managed to get a good deal on a HEQ5 pro mount and a SW Evostar 80ED telescope, sadly when I got it the weather got in the way and also a bunch of issues which held me from trying out anything until now! The first night was a bit trail and error and getting familiar with everything, but last night I managed to capture the Ring Nebula, considering it's my first picture ever I'm pretty excited about it!

It was taken with a ZWO 178MC camera, I user Sharpcap livestack each frame was a 5 second exposure with a total of 20 minutes, no darks or lights used (yet) and no filters used either in a bortle 5 area.

One thing I did notice though, it has some strange red/green/blue artifacts in the picture, I just went to check and noticed that every frame I shot has a red, green and blue pixel in it... is this because the camera overheats or can they be considered as dead pixels?

[MarkAR]

A good start to imaging.

The coloured pixels are dead, you should really stack these using calibration frames. That should remove them. 

[endless-sky]

Looks like hot pixels. By live stacking, there is no calibration or rejection. You could try saving the single exposures and then stacking them with a stacking software that enables you to reject outliers (for example, DeepSkyStacker, available for free). This should get rid of the hot pixels, as they will appear in different regions of each frame (if you don't guide, or if you do guide but enable dithering).

[FaB-Bo-Peep]

I won't even attempt to comment on processing techniques as I'm still very much learning and half the time have no idea what I've done when I manage to achieve a pleasing result with my imaging but all I will say is that there's a lovely amount of detail in that Ring and you should indeed be excited by it, especially as it's your first attempt. 

Well done!

😀

[MM617]

Thanks for the feedback guys! I did some more digging into this and I managed to get some darks and flats so I got the DeepSkyTracker and did a first attempt on stacking and editing myself, I sacrificed some colors but the pixels are indeed gone! Here's a slightly cropped version of the edit, I noticed in the bottom left corner some reflection/glare appeared so I cropped that off for now.

Tonight it should be clear again, so looking very forward for a 2nd chance

[endless-sky]

Much better! Very nice and the background is much cleaner, too.

[FaB-Bo-Peep]

Be careful, it's always hard knowing when enough is enough in terms of tweaking an image, you could easily lose many hours, trust me I know!

If you haven't already done so, be sure to also check out M27 - Dumbbell Nebula which is in the same area as the Ring, it's much larger and a very impressive sight. I had a crack at it last night and will be posting the resulting attempt at an image later this evening 🙂

 

[MM617]

Yeah I noticed that editing is a very delicate job and it can quickly get out of hand so far it seems we'll have good conditions tonight, so if the dumbbell nebula is high enough for my viewing area I might give it a shot