First Imager with FMA180 - Flaming Star, Tadpoles and half a Spider

[Clarkey]

This is my first attempt with a recently purchased FMA180. It should have been a slightly wider field than shown but dew to a failed plate solve the other half of the 'spider' got chopped. This is a total of about 120 x 3 minute subs using a Canon 600D, guided and dithered. Conditions were not too good with quite a bit of thin high cloud so it is a bit hazy. This is first try with a OSC camera for quite some time and it is also the first true widefield image I have done. (Most of my recent imaging has been mono). I need to work on my star masking and colours - but as a 'first' attempt I am not too displeased. The processing was done in APP, Starnet and Affinity.

From various reviews I was concerned about CA and poor star shapes with this small scope, but from what I can tell the results are pretty good. The stars are good shapes to the edge of field (albeit on an APS-C sensor) and there was no real evidence of blue fringing.

Any guidance on OSC and very widefield image processing gratefully received.

Thanks for looking.

[CloudMagnet]

Looks good to me, it might be worth putting it together as a mosaic if you find the time to shoot the left hand side of the spider. Would help increase the SNR if you use a large overlap to help bring out the details in the nebula.

Star colours look nice and natural as well- could look at doing some star reduction to make sure the nebula doesnt get lost behind them.

 

[Clarkey]

23 hours ago, CloudMagnet said:

could look at doing some star reduction

This has been star reduced quite a bit - both with Starnet and a star mask. I did try to reduce them further but it looked too unnatural. It is one of the problems I find with wide field images - I need to find a better way of managing the star density.

[CloudMagnet]

Yeah, it can be tricky with the high density areas. You could look at reducing the stars on top of the neubla rather than reducing the whole image. That way you would still keep the natural look of the background, but bring the nebula forward.

Even doing nothing further, its still a great image