M106 and NGC4217

[tmarkuk]

A first real test of my finally working autoguiding setup and my Astronomik CLS CCD clip filter. It's mostly been an experiment in working out my maximum exposure length before my urban location starts causing to much trouble and getting a handle on how many images produce a decent SNR.

All comments and criticisms gladly accepted!

Orion Optics 250mm Reflector on a Celestron CGEM

Canon EOS 1000D Unmodified

Image calibration and registration in Iris, stacked and processed in Pixinsight.

Tim.

[GuillermoBarrancos]

Wow nice! You did this unguided?

[Euan]

That's really nice Tim

What's the exposure lengths?

[Glasspusher]

Very nice Tim, so what conclusion did you arrive at about the exposure times?

John

[tmarkuk]

This was guided, it's a combination of 5 and 10 minutes exposures as it goes. Five minutes proved a bit short to get the outer areas of M106 to show up above the noise, 10 minutes just got to much sky glow, I couldn't capture enough 10 minutes exposures to get a decent SNR anyway. I'll be trying my next target at 6 or 7 minutes when the skies clear as I think that will give the best results from my location.

I had originally just stacked the calibrated 10 minute exposures, something like 33 of them in total, this was an experiment to start with. Take all my 10 minute exposures and all my 5 minute test images, calibrate the lot then stack them and see what happens.

It's not possible for me to stop fiddling with an image ever, so saying that heres a slightly modified version with an unsharpen mask applied.

[Beyond_Vision]

Thats come out very well with great colour showing for a unmodified DSLR. I think the first edit is better as the second looks more noisy. Quite a few fainter galaxies picked up to

Regards

Kevin