'Hartley's Strawberry' - Ha - finished ! ​​​

[TakMan]

😀

Take one pack of Jelly and add 15 hrs of time to help it set....

My longest integration through one filter.... It's been a slog what with our weather, but I'm happy with the end result.

Over the period I've really been able to better understand the new software suite I've moved to, my gear, plate-solving, I've settled on multi-star guiding in PHD2 as that appears to offer a small improvement to the overall guide trace and RMS figure... and 'Han59' has helped me dial in the autofocus routine making it more robust/reliable.... so time well spent!

I've managed to start both the OIII and SII, but it'll be next year now when I get the rest to make up a final image... 🤞

Perhaps a OSC CMOS would have been a better idea stuck onto the 106's F/R !

The progress to date can be found here:

So, 45x 1200 seconds, Chroma 50mm unmounted 3nm Ha, dark and flat frame calibrated + dark flats

Aligned/stacked in APP. In fact, I gave APP 47 files to go through that I was happy with and let it choose the best 45 to pre-process and stack.

FSQ106ED @ f/5 - Atik 16200M (running at -20ºC), Atik OAG/SBIG-ST-i

Post-processed solely in Ps (no Topaz - I tried the demo of DeNoise AI once again - and hated it, much preferring what can be done via the tools in Photoshop itself - perhaps it's just me!!!) and stand-a-lone StarNet++ (V1) on OSX. Tried to get V2 to work, but turns out it requires the latest OSX (only released in mid-Jan 22) and I'm not interested in upgrading (and being Apple's guinea pig, as I use the machine for graphics and need all the other software to still work!) A pity the developer decided to go that route, but V1 works OK with my data thankfully.

Data was super easy to work with, very little noise reduction used to get to this point. Of course, there is noise, but I think once the other channels are added and colour introduced, quite a bit will be masked. Will probably reprocess anyway as I've lost a bit of detail in the bright upper left edge of the Jelly that I can see better on my previous go!

Damian

Do the clicky thing for the full size jpeg (slight crop after stacking)

Edited February 15, 2022 by TakMan

[glafnazur]

That's a great image, especially the full size. just love mono images 👍

[teoria_del_big_bang]

This is an target I have come to love past couple of months but only managed a few hours and that in partial cloud.
Also I have made the newbie mistake of trying to get Ha, OIII and SII and now realise I should have just concentrated on Ha and get a mono image like your wonderful image. I have sme data, although the halos I have on the two bright stars with my Baader OIII means I am discarding that data and wait till I get a Chroma or Astrodon OIII.

This image really shows what can  be achieved I think that is a wonderful image in it's own right but look forward to seeing it with some SII and OIII even if I do have to wait a year 🙂  and it has really inspired me to get this target under my belt even if that means waiting till next year.

Thanks for sharing 🙂 

Steve