Here's two different attempts between 30 Oct - 11 Nov when I could find clear skies. All captured on ASI071 with APT, 2min subs. Only bias frames, no darks. Processed in pixinsight.
The first was on my F5.9 80mm refractor. Two views (1) the wide field with NGC1365 and friends and (2) a zoom in on NGC1365. I drizzle integrated to try and get some detail - it helped but still not great.
And the third image is using 8" F5 newt. I've just zoomed in on the galaxy as the coma was really bad for some reason (I had it all set up nicely then pulled apart my scope - idiot). So ignore the eggs on the edges. I'll have to redo this when I work out the coma.
I've used deconvolution (still some halos around stars) and followed John Rista's guide on noise reduction using a mix of TGVdenoise, multiscalemedian transform on the linear image, and then fumbled around a bit with the non-linear. And had fun fiddling around with masks !!
Its 6 hrs total integration on the 80mm refractor versus 4 hrs on the newt.
Some nice little fuzzies in the wide field, Chris. The version taken with the newt shows some nice detail. Lots more data would help but I'm sure you already know that
That is some image Chris. Glorious space shot - love it, heaps of little gems in it. The close up with the newt looks pretty special too, but hey we are always looking for ways to improve our photos that’s the carrot that keeps us attempting the perfect capture time and time again. Well done across the board Chris!
Thanks all for the comments. The wide field blew me away - I felt like a Hubble! I saw the bunch of galaxies near 1365 in sky Safari and wondered if many would pop out. A fair few did.
Yep much more data on the newt needed. I'm going to redo it as I later realised that I had the wrong spacer on my coma corrector - idiot factor. My excuse is that I was in a rush as I'd just finished making an Arduino stepper driven focuser for it. It makes imaging so much easier = lazy astronomy.
