How’s my imaging coming along

[Jjmorris90]

Hi everyone 

 

I captured this last night. NGC 3718. Over 3 hours. Though I’m aware this target requires a lot more time, I wasn’t aware until afterwards. 

The other image is of Orion, my first image back in December last year. It’s fun to look back at the progress no matter how small it may be.

 

[barbulo]

1 hour ago, Jjmorris90 said:

It’s fun to look back at the progress no matter how small it may be.

That’s part of the deal, isn’t it? Step by step, always improving, climbing the learning curve.

Looking back puts our job in perspective and evidences the difficulty of our hobby. 

Good job!

[Laurieast]

That's a good image, if you separate out the stars with StarNet ++ from the nebulosity so that you can work on each layer (Stars only or Starless)  you can pull much more out of that.

You can download StarNet ++ here: https://www.starnetastro.com/download/

 

 

[Jjmorris90]

19 minutes ago, Laurieast said:

That's a good image, if you separate out the stars with StarNet ++ from the nebulosity so that you can work on each layer (Stars only or Starless)  you can pull much more out of that.

You can download StarNet ++ here: https://www.starnetastro.com/download/

 

 

What does that do exactly? Never heard of it lol

[Laurieast]

30 minutes ago, Jjmorris90 said:

What does that do exactly? Never heard of it lol

It lets you have two images to work on, one just stars, the other nebulosity only. 
You open up a copy of your image in StarNet and it takes the stars out. Now with a starless image you can adjust it without it affecting the stars and ending up with much bigger brighter stars as well as the nebulosity. 
Then with layers in Photoshop or Pixinsight you can add the stars back, after having processed those to your liking. 

There is a how to here: https://astrobackyard.com/starnet-astrophotography/

And several how to do it videos on YouTube.

Have fun!

 

[PatG]

great progress and an interesting cluster of galaxies. what equipment are you using ?   

Regards

Pat   

[tomato]

That’s a great result, nice colour and detail on a target that is quite challenging in my book. The biggest improvement you could make IMHO, which you have already indentifed, is to capture more subs.

I would say your imaging is coming along nicely.👍

[Jjmorris90]

2 hours ago, PatG said:

great progress and an interesting cluster of galaxies. what equipment are you using ?   

Regards

Pat   

I’m using a skywatcher 130pds with an asi183MC pro and ASIAIR 

[AstroMuni]

11 hours ago, Jjmorris90 said:

I’m using a skywatcher 130pds with an asi183MC pro and ASIAIR 

Thats great progress indeed.... I find that the hard part is learning how to use the various software tools to bring out the best from your images and that takes time.

I would suggest you try processing your older image and see if you can achieve better results with what you have learnt so far.

Edited February 24, 2022 by AstroMuni