Whirlpool Galaxy with 10" and modded 300d

[tooth_dr]

I imaged all night last night, getting up at 3:30am to check progress. I was pleasantly surprised with the skies last night, initially lots of thin cloud, but this disappeared after midnight. About 3 and a half hours of data on M51, in 300s subs at ISO 800. Darks and flats subtracted, stacked in DSS. Processed in CS2.

I previously imaged this with my ED80, and was very pleased with the difference in the two scope.

EDITED: I'm getting a bit better at the processing. Many thanks to all the members' input in the thread, and in particular to Psycho_Billy for his pointers

Spent another night doing this one:

The final one:

[Tim]

Very nice result there with the dslr, the colours look natural and unforced.

You seem to have the same issues I had with my dslr, namely excessive noise in the red channel. There are techniques you can use to select the background and use perhaps heavier than normal noise reduction to reduce the effects, just make sure not to apply it to the galaxies or stars.

I dunno about you but I still get a real buzz when the first picture of the session rolls in and there is a gorgeous galaxy like that sat there Nice work.

[tooth_dr]

Thanks TJ, I notice that I always get noisy diagonal lines when I push my images, but I suspect it's just too few frames, and using a 300d!

All the best

Adam

[tooth_dr]

Added some more data, and bias frames, and loads more darks and flats

[tooth_dr]

Reprocessed it there after work, think this is the finished version now!

[Psychobilly]

Getting better and better with more data and a few calibration frames... you have mail

Peter

[tooth_dr]

Cheers Peter! Checking Mail now.

[paul11]

Thats a really nice M51,in the first image you posted is that the full FOV?,,,,Paul.

[tooth_dr]

Thanks Paul, no the first one is also cropped from the original.

[MikeD]

Great detail in the dust and the Ha regions are showing up well, nice work.

Mike.

[tooth_dr]

Cheers, I've realised my monitor on my laptop is way different to my PC monitor so that might account for the not so good processing above!

[MikeD]

The 2nd image in your first post gets my vote.

Hope you don't mind i had a play with the noise,

I added the image as a layer to a larger canvas and rotated the image until the banding was vertical and then applied Noels Vertical banding noise reduction action rotated the image back and cropped the image to its original size.

I then ran colour bloch reduction with noels tools followed by noiseware pro to the background as a masked layer.

Finaly ran gradientx to the result.

Mike.

[tooth_dr]

AWesome! I have all those tools, including Noels Actions, and GradX, need to start using them. That;s a nice top about rotating the image to use vertical line removal tool!

[Dangerous-Dave]

Excellent result Adam. If I were you I'd get the 300D upgraded to a 1000D though, I owned one for 2 years and it's such a noisy camera.

[tooth_dr]

Hi Dave

I feel that it is maybe the weak link now in the setup. I'm looking into a 1000d atm, and plan to sell the 300d.

[Beyond_Vision]

A very nice capture Adam one to be proud of and some great tips from Mike.

Regards

Kevin

[tooth_dr]

Reworked this one in the first post I knew 9.5 hours has to yield something good

[Albireo380]

Looking better and better, every time I see it.

Well done.

Tom