Yay 20 min subs! IC1396 & M101

[Uranium235]

Finally....

Ive slayed the dreaded backlash monster to break the 20min barrier for the first time.

And I found setting PHD dec guide mode to anything but "auto" helps quite a lot (west=south, east=north), the graph was so good you could eat it on toast.

M101 Was collected over the two previous nights, however the seeing conditions werent exactly great last night so some of the gain from going the extra 5min has been lost. On IC1396, there seemed to be a suspect star count of 44,373 stars from the 20min sub I did last night - is that right? Could noise ever be picked up as a star by DSS?

IC1396

Light: 6x600s, 6x900s, 1x1200s

Darks, Flats, Bias

M101

Light: 5x300s, 3x600s, 3x900s, 2x1200s

Darks, Flats, Bias

80ED Pro + 1000d

Thanks for looking!

[Psychobilly]

Good stars and a pretty sweet looking guide graph...

Glad you have got it sorted out...

Peter...

[peter shah]

guiding looks spot on.....great set of images:cool:

[Uranium235]

Thanks guys

Im starting to get the hang of adding stuff from more than one session. Before I used to try and get the whole shoot done in one night, but with the shorter nights its just not possible. I just have to remember *not* to change the orientation of the cam or the end result has missing edges where the sub has been rotated to fit.

M16 will be a tempting next target, so i just need another clear night within the next week or so to get it done before taking a little break as by the end of the month it will be too light to do anything useful.

Anyways, i can always catch up with ic1396 in August - as the MW should be nice & high in the sky then hmmmm I guess the milky way aint such a bad thing to look at.

[George]

Love the graph (mines like the alps at the moment), lovely pair of images too.

[Tim]

Isn't it a great feeling when it all comes together

For interests sake, try just staking your 600sec subs together, and the others seperately. You will likely find that there will be more signal in the 600's alone than you get by combining all of them together. Because the algorithms for deciding what stays when you combine them all is a compromise, I tend to get better results from sticking to the one length of sub. (There is a routine in Pixinsight to nicely combine different length subs into one HDR image as it goes).

Just a suggestion, but i'd be interested to see how you got on trying that.

Cheers

Tim

[Uranium235]

Hmmmm, thats something to consider for next time. Are you sure 600sec is enough for an f7.5 frac? When they were registered, the 15min subs scored a much higher score & star count than the 10min.

Ok I will go back to DSS and have a go at stacking them seperately.... this may take some time (I assume you were talking about ic1396?)

[adamsp123]

Things seem to be coming along nicely, great you are getting the guiding working and nice images you have got there.

[Psychobilly]

DSS will also do the HDR "thingy" if you use Entropy weighted as the stacking mode but it needs loads of subs to keep the noise under control...

Peter...

[Uranium235]

Thanks Peter, I will give HDR a blast when i have something like 25-30 subs that might take a while though given the lack of darkness.

Well... I grouped and stacked the subs for ic1396 and the 6x600s didnt show as much Ha as the 6x900s, not that im expecting too much as my camera is unmodded.

Until I get a focal reducer, it might be better to stick with 900s.

Unfortunately I wont be adding anymore subs until at least the weekend as its forecasted for cloud all week . Anyways, thanks for the encouraging comments guys!