Soul Nebula, using PHD Multistar

[rickwayne]

10 hours of integration time in this over two nights. When I saw I was getting 0.67" total RMS with my newly-compiled PHD2, even though my target was still mired in tree branches, I tried a twenty-minute exposure and just boggled at the results -- 1.3 HFR, which is better than I  usually get with five minutes!

20 minutes just seemed too risky, though, so I went with 10. After the meridian flip an hour in, the numbers got worse, but still much better than I usually see.

This is reprocessed from before, using much lighter stretch on the OIII data -- the blues accurately represent where the oxygen glowed in the data, but are hand-masked in. I also used SiriL's green noise removal tool, hit a bit more stretch with SiriL too, and didn't lean so hard on the data in Photoshop. Spent quite a bit of time on the starless layer hand-retouching star halos in the starless layer with the Healing Brush tool.

Tech deets, as always, on Astrobin.

 

Edited December 7, 2020 by rickwayne
Much much better image!

[bottletopburly]

Very nice work , I remembered last night whilst imaging about multi star upgrade so quickly updated turned on multi star so first hour rms was 1.47 ten minutes using multi star 0.80 and then fog stopped play and during that ten minutes fog was developing so looking forward to giving it a proper test but looks like a game changer using my eq6 belt modded mount .

[tooth_dr]

That’s very nice. Plenty of detail

[rickwayne]

10 hours ago, bottletopburly said:

...turned on multi star so first hour rms was 1.47 ten minutes using multi star 0.80 and then fog stopped play and during that ten minutes fog was developing so looking forward to giving it a proper test but looks like a game changer using my eq6 belt modded mount .

I am pretty excited about it too. Really does look like a big leap.

The jury is still out on actual quantitative results for this particular detail, but:

One of the possible advantages is that seeing effects average out over the stars -- in any reasonable guiding FOV, the stars are moving independently. (Better astronomers than I did the math, using the experimental results of how the atmosphere actually behaves at various scales.) This means that "chasing the seeing" is a lot less of an issue than it used to be and so if you have a squirrelly mount like mine that needs lots of little corrections, a short guide exposure makes it possible to address them before they get big enough to affect the image. I'm mostly using 1 second these days, which is a big help for my overloaded  CEM-25P.