How long to get first decent image ?

[AstroMuni]

19 minutes ago, powerlord said:

Consider trying Affinity.

I dont think they have a version on Linux 😞

[Clarkey]

23 minutes ago, powerlord said:

Startools (35 quid)

Affinity Photo (50 quid)

These are the two I use quite a lot and both are excellent value for money. I have also invested in Astro Pixel Processor which is not cheap, but I think is excellent for stacking and batch processing (except for £60/year a manual would be good).

Another useful tool if you get Affinity is the Astroflat Pro plug-in.

However, the best way of getting excellent results is the initial capture. There is no substitute for integration time.

[Padraic M]

Personally, I think you've got a remarkably good result there for the capture time. I don't think new software will necessarily get you better results at your current stage.  

Nebulas are faint objects and need long exposure times to bring out the detail. 47 minutes doesn't count as a long exposure! I just had a quick search on Astrobin and found this - Canon 1100d modified, 4hrs 40mins in 7-minute exposures. You really need to be getting hours of exposure time to get the noise level down. 

https://astrob.in/127094/0/

Your star shape is pretty good, the star colour is good. If I'm being picky, you've got some blotching in the background, particularly in the red, which is probably the result of over stretching. Stars are a little bit big too, also from the stretching. Starnet++ can be very good to help with the stars and I believe it can be used on Linux (I haven't personally done it on Linux though).

I can't remember if you said how dark your skies are.... if they're not great, then a (good) light pollution filter would help.

[Astro Noodles]

Thanks guys for your positive comments and suggestions. I am greatly encouraged and now resolved to get a few hours of integration time on this target before trying anything else. 🙂

[Astro Noodles]

I'm working on 8 hours of the western Veil. Currently on 4hrs 24 minutes taken over 4 nights, The one thing I have realised is that I really need an astro-modified camera !

[Astro Noodles]

I have been busy. 😀

5 hours, 58 minutes of 60 second subs taken over 5 sessions. ISO 1600. 217subs with Skytech CLS filter. 141 subs with no filter.

I'm still not entirely happy with it. It's too noisy and the stars are too bloated.

Things I have learned:

I don't really like the CLS filter. It seems to kill the star colour.

I really need an astro modified camera.

I really need astro darkness.

I'm going to try some narrowband imaging at OIII next

I have attached the TIF file if anyone would like to try and draw a bit more out of it. 🙂

 

Autosave.tif

Edited July 18, 2021 by Astro Noodles

[RobST]

Don't ever be worried about posting an image on here, it's the fastest way to improve 😁

A decent image is a very subjective thing, find below my first image, you may have to squint to see Andromeda 🤣 (it's the little smudge).

I was ecstatic with this image and it's what got me hooked, the fact i could image something so far away with my very old canon 400d and the kit lens that came with it totally blew me away 😃

Good luck with your imaging 😁

[Astro Noodles]

A disappointing session last night. I was attempting a widefield capture of the Cygnus Loop with my 200mm F3.5 lens. Iso1600 which seems to be the sweet spot for the 1100D. 120second exposures. No filters except an IR/UV cut. 2 hours worth with darks, flats. bias.

I think that the Moon is the main culprit here, but the subs were all over-exposed on the blue channel. The stars are all slightly egg shaped so clearly my PA wasn't quite as good as I had hoped.

Any comments would be welcome.Autosave002.tif

Autosave002.tif

[geeklee]

1 hour ago, Astro Noodles said:

Any comments would be welcome.

It's definitely in there Noodles, but like you say it just looks buried:

Whenever I tried to really stretch it hard, I got a really bright central portion.  Were you happy with calibration and was that file the unstretched, integrated master?

120s is on the high side for F3.5 with no filters, full moon (+ no astro darkness?) and ISO1600 (but I don't have much DSLR knowledge).

[geeklee]

On 18/07/2021 at 18:00, Astro Noodles said:

I have attached the TIF file if anyone would like to try and draw a bit more out of it.

I couldn't bring more from the Western Veil, but the flip side was more faint data (and unfortunately lighter background) and Pickering's Triangle showing through in the top left.

This has just had the background removed, made non-linear and some crude star reduction

Edited July 27, 2021 by geeklee

[Astro Noodles]

Yeah, I get a really bright central portion. I guess it must be due to moonlight/overexposure.

I've just seen what you have done with the western veil. I can get it out to about what you originally had with some fairly extreme stretching in Gimp.

I'm really impressed that you have been able to extract the Ha, I didn't think there would be any. Is that really from my .tif or are you pulling my leg? 😄

Can you tell me which programs you used to do this? I feel an investment coming on.

[geeklee]

34 minutes ago, Astro Noodles said:

I'm really impressed that you have been able to extract the Ha, I didn't think there would be any. Is that really from my .tif or are you pulling my leg? 😄

I think it's just different compromises we each made.  If I try and show a portion of the image at about the same scale you had then you can see it's getting close to breaking down if I keep pushing in this direction.

Although the background is quite mottled you can see lots of Ha right in the noise level of the image.  It's challenging but good data - you should definitely be pleased with what you've captured (and what you processed above in the thread).

I used PixInsight but it's not the magic bullet 😅  I purposely tried to do as little as possible but with a different approach - less of a bright, stand out Veil but allow a bit more of the faint stuff to come through. 

Edited July 27, 2021 by geeklee

[Astro Noodles]

34 minutes ago, geeklee said:

Were you happy with calibration and was that file the unstretched, integrated master?

120s is on the high side for F3.5 with no filters, full moon (+ no astro darkness?) and ISO1600 (but I don't have much DSLR knowledge).

I think that the calibration was OK (at least I did it all). The Tiff file is unstretched integrated master straight out of DSS

I think that with no moon, astro darkness and a lot more integration time I might be able to get a decent image.

[geeklee]

23 minutes ago, Astro Noodles said:

I think that with no moon, astro darkness and a lot more integration time I might be able to get a decent image.

I think you've definitely exceeded this already, but those factors will certainly help you capture an image more easily !

Edited July 27, 2021 by geeklee

[Andrew_B]

On 27/07/2021 at 16:10, Astro Noodles said:

A disappointing session last night. I was attempting a widefield capture of the Cygnus Loop with my 200mm F3.5 lens. Iso1600 which seems to be the sweet spot for the 1100D. 120second exposures. No filters except an IR/UV cut. 2 hours worth with darks, flats. bias.

I think that the Moon is the main culprit here, but the subs were all over-exposed on the blue channel. The stars are all slightly egg shaped so clearly my PA wasn't quite as good as I had hoped.

Any comments would be welcome.Autosave002.tif

Autosave002.tif 115.09 MB · 2 downloads

Not wanting to spend your money for you, but if you want to capture something like the Cygnus Loop in unfavourable conditions then it might be worthwhile to invest in a narrowband filter or two, although they're certainly not essential.

I've shot during full moon with light pollution and approaching twilight with my Baader filters and still got results that were pretty good (by my standards at least) because although they doesn't get rid of unwanted skyglow completely, an H-alpha or O-III filter will do a lot to boost SNR on your subs to the point that you get something acceptable even when you can hardly see any stars with the naked eye.

I love the black and white style of H-alpha photography because it reminds me of seeing those kind of shots in astronomy magazines as a kid which were always taken on Kodak Technical Pan film. For colour images, a combination of H-alpha and O-III can give a very convincing pseudo-true colour effect although it can require careful processing of the image to balance everything out and keep colour casts to a minimum.

The only sticking point is that if your Canon DSLR is unmodified then its red sensitivity will be fairly low so you'd end up needing very long integration times to get a decent amount of H-alpha data and I suspect that even without filters, a modded camera would have captured a lot more of the Veil given that you had 2 hours worth of data. That's only true of Ha (and S-II if you try that) though because the O-III lines are well within the camera's most sensitive wavelength range.

To illustrate the effectiveness of filters, the shot below was taken in a Bottle 6 location when the Moon was 90% full (although I don't think it was up throughout the session) using my H-alpha filter and it was getting close to sunrise so sky brightness was a real problem in the later subs. I used a 50mm lens at f2.0 so obviously the faster lens will have some advantage compared to your 200mm at imaging the nebulosity in the frame, but it also does a better job of picking up skyglow and light pollution. Exposure time was 2h 30' at ISO 1600 using a modded Fuji X-A3 and I've included the last 90s exposure I took to give an idea of how little contrast there was in some of the subs.

I'd second the recommendations to give Astro Pixel Processor a try. It's got an easy to follow workflow and can do an incredible job of taking out light pollution, unwanted gradients, and severe vignetting without losing detail.

 

Edited July 29, 2021 by Andrew_B
Added detail about modded cameras

[Astro Noodles]

So in answer to my original question: How long to get first decent image?

Answer - Depends on the weather.

I think that with clear nights and some decent budget equipment, the answer would be a few weeks. But not in the UK.

I have been working on M31 and have a total of about 5 hours of subs taken in 4 sessions starting on 8th July. I've actually had about 11 hours on this target but had to discard more than half due to out of focus, poorly framed, too much moonlight. With a few more clear night, it wouldn't be much of an issue, but in the UK image capture time can't be wasted like that.

[900SL]

I started with MW wide angle. I read up on it first so I had some idea what I was going to be doing out in the (Saudi at 40C) field.

I then gravitated to a series of trackers over the course of a year, learning as I went. I think I am now ready for a GEM.  Working on my processing at the moment, this was overcooked in spinach

 

Nikon D5600 or D610, SY 135 from memory

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited September 16, 2021 by 900SL

[Astro Noodles]

A quick Pleiades from Wednesday. 80x 60sec with calibration ay ISO 800.

I experienced problems with power, wind and dew. 😄

[Astro Noodles]

A couple of hours on the California nebula with Askar 135.

[Astro Noodles]

[Astro Noodles]

About 40mins total exposure time of Orion Nebula taken last night. I'm quite pleased with it. It looks much noisier on here than it does on my laptop. Taken through Askar 135mm and blown up.

Edited January 5, 2022 by Astro Noodles

[Astro Noodles]

Alintak and associated nebulae

[Astro Noodles]

Western Gemini

[Astro Noodles]

Rosette. 22 x 90sec

[Steve143]

This is my first decent image. Complete beginner to astrophotography. I'm learning with every session and have just bought a SW EQM-35 Pro GOTO mount, so hoping for some much better images - as long as the UK weather cooperates!  

M31 (273 x 2sec), no tracking, Canon EOS 70D with Samyang 135mm. Stacked and processed with Affinity Photo.