NGC 2024

[poogle]

As the imaging season is coming to an end for me I thought I´d share the two images I´ve been working on this winter. I still consider myself as a beginner, especially when it comes to processing, I´ve been following the Light Vortex tutorials for Pixinsight. As I live next to an airport in Stockholm it feels like I have everything working against my imaging, but I´m not giving up  I have an Celestron AVX mount with a Skywatcher 150p, and an Starlight Express SXVR-H18 and some Baader NB filters. What do you all think would benefit my imaging the most, upping the mount, scope, camera or filters?

The first one is a first draft of roughly 6 hours if HA data gathered on NGC 2024 (10 minute subframes), the Flame star nebula. It´s a difficult one, trying to contain the bright star. I´m hoping to get 4 more hours of light on this one. The one thing I´m not satisfied with is the star shapes, maybe I wasn´t selective enough when selecting subframes. Might be some high clouds or bad guiding on some of the frames.

The second one is a classic, M42. Almost 10 hours of HA data (again 10 minute subframes, and some 30 second subframes for the core). Better star shapes on this one I think. I´m hoping to get some colour on this one next winter

All constructive critisism is welcome  

/Patrik

 

[AstroNtinos]

Very nice pictures! Well done!

[poogle]

I managed 4 more hours on NGC2024, totalling just over 10 hours. Also gave it a bit more love during post processing, but I think that someone more experienced would be able to produce a way better end result  Maybe I stretched it a bit to far, looks too noisy for 10 hrs 🤪

I think this is about my limit under my Bortle 8 skies with my current equipment. Thanks for looking!

[MartinB]

I've had a good look at your images Poogle and, other than the irregular stars in the first Flame image everything looks in reasonable order. I can't see an untoward amount of noise but your images look rather dark and I am wondering whether this is because you have held back the histogram stretch or whether they are black clipped, in either case I'm guessing you've done this to hide the noise in the darker regions.  That seems a shame and I'm sure you could pull more out without the images looking over processed.

10 hours with a Baader 7nm Ha filter and a fast 150mm scope on a target like this should give you an image with excellent signal to noise ratio that can be stretched a long way, despite your Bortle 8 skies.  You are on the right track using the Light Vortex site which is excellent.  He covers noise reduction techniques in PI very well.

Regarding equipment, you probably don't need to make any changes but hone your processing.  I don't know what guiding you are using but PHD2 is now a very powerfful tool indeed.  The defaults should work really well and you can use the guiding assistant to fine tune things.  Also, provided you enable it under advance settings it produces a guiding log.  There is a Log viewer tool available for download and it is very useful and easy to see whether things have gone amiss with the guiding.  If you were to make any changes to your kit I would suggest a small, good quality refractor.  Your mount would then be way inside it's limits.  I have used Baader filters for many years and have found them excellent.  Your bright sky might well impact on OIII but your Ha filter should still give you good quality data.

 

[poogle]

Thank you very much for your thorough answer @MartinB, it means alot!

I purposely made the background dark just to give it a more "realistic" look, but also trying to keep Alnitak at a minimum and being afraid of introducing too much noice. I guess you're right, 10 hours should be enough to give it a good stretch 🙂 Will definitely have another go with the processing trying different stretches, and also dive into the noice reduction section of Light Vortex and perhaps learn how to use masks.

Great tip with the log tool, will have a look at that since I'm having some troubles with the Dec-guiding, where the calibration differs each time I run it. I suspect it's due to extensive backlash and I tried guiding Dec in one direction only, but if the calibration is bad so is the guiding I guess. Will try to have a look at the mount this off-season and see if anything can be done.

Again, thanks for your great input! Heading over to FLO to do some window-shopping now, would love not having to do collimation and mirror cleaning each season 😂

/Patrik