Omega Cen

[DiscoDuck (Paul)]

It's been a few months between images! Xmas and other things got in the way

Went to an astro camp in the southern Flinders Ranges last weekend and got some luminance on Omega Cen. Clouds didn't allow any colour shots there so had to do that back in the 'burbs - hence the weird looking stats of 70 mins luminance and 6 hours of colour!

RC8 + ASI 1600MM-C on an AP Mach1 mount.

Full res available on Astrobin here.

Comments welcome.

Paul

[diegocolonnello (Diego)]

Lovelly result, i love it!!!!

[willik (Willik)]

Great shot Paul colour and detail
Martin

[Peter Ward]

An excellent Omega Cent. Nice one

[Placidus (Mike and Trish)]

Shows the elusive ellipticity excellently.

[multiweb (Marc)]

+1 Subzero cool.

[gregbradley]

That's a sensational Omega.

Greg.

[Stonius (Markus)]

Lovely star colours! Not sure if that's due to the long integration times, or your post methodology, but whatever you're doing, it's working!

Markus

[SuperG]

Nice result

[strongmanmike (Michael)]

Grand looking Omega Paul and I agree with M&T the oblate shape is noticeable, as it should be. If you could reduce the fuzzy halos around all the stars I recon it would look even better though I imagine this might be from a little bit too much stretching or need a different curve, during processing?

Mike

[DiscoDuck (Paul)]

Thanks guys.

Originally Posted by strongmanmike

If you could reduce the fuzzy halos around all the stars I recon it would look even better though I imagine this might be from a little bit too much stretching or need a different curve, during processing?

Yeah. I'm not sure what I can do there. I used a MaskedStretch in PI - don't normally do that, but it coped well with not letting the core blow out and bringing out lots of faint stars in the outer edges, but seems to cause a bit of a halo as you can see.

It also damaged the really bright stars - so I redid (that was version D on Astrobin) with a weak Histogram stretch first before the MaskedStretch and that was better. But still the general fuzzy halos.

Any suggestions on controlling that fuzziness from the masking welcome.

P.S. Tried a tad of deconvolution (version E on Atsrobin). Helped a bit I think.

[willik (Willik)]

HI Paul
There is nothing wrong with your image it looks great
some on this sight pay thousands and thousands of dollars on their equipment
and their trying to justify the least image fault to make them feel good
your image Paul is very good so don't worry your image is near perfect
Martin

[DiscoDuck (Paul)]

Thanks Martin. Not a problem. I am after any feedback on how to improve. All comments are more than welcome and gratefully received.

[Shiraz (Ray)]

that is very pleasing to look at - colours are excellent and the dynamic range is well handled. An excellent image of a surprisingly difficult object.
Cheers Ray

[strongmanmike (Michael)]

Originally Posted by DiscoDuck

Thanks guys.

Yeah. I'm not sure what I can do there. I used a MaskedStretch in PI - don't normally do that, but it coped well with not letting the core blow out and bringing out lots of faint stars in the outer edges, but seems to cause a bit of a halo as you can see.

It also damaged the really bright stars - so I redid (that was version D on Astrobin) with a weak Histogram stretch first before the MaskedStretch and that was better. But still the general fuzzy halos.

Any suggestions on controlling that fuzziness from the masking welcome.

P.S. Tried a tad of deconvolution (version E on Atsrobin). Helped a bit I think.

Well firstly, thanks for not misinterpreting my post and hopefully you don't think I passed comment due to any need to make myself feel better about my own equipment, I can assure you this was not on my mind even one iota Again, as I indicated, a great shot overall

Not sure where these sort of halos are coming from?..I can see them during my processing sometimes when manipulating the histogram curves after a DDP stretch so I pull the curve around until they are not so strong.

Mike

[DiscoDuck (Paul)]

Thanks Ray. And thanks Mike - definitely looking for suggestions for improvement. And this forum is a great place for that.

[Bart]

Very nice Omega C Mr Duck!



Do you think the shorter exposure time and a higher quality mount have contributed to an increase in image quality? Or do you think that overall it is a combination of that and your skill level with PI has increased?

[DiscoDuck (Paul)]

Originally Posted by Bart

Very nice Omega C Mr Duck!

Do you think the shorter exposure time and a higher quality mount have contributed to an increase in image quality? Or do you think that overall it is a combination of that and your skill level with PI has increased?

Thank you Master Simpson.

One thing I tried with this was to deliberately under expose so as not to blow too much of the core - only 60 sec luminance shots, whereas I was doing 5 mins to get sky limited for e.g. the Antennae on the same night.

Using PI's MaskedStretch helped a bit too with getting some background stuff out - the first time I've used that, so not really sure about it. As Mike pointed out, it did cause some peculiarities - probably because of the clumsy way I used it, and not because of the tool of course!

Not sure the mount made too much of a difference - my old EQ6 would track (when it was having a good night!) almost as well … and with only 60 second exposures there's not too much dependence on good tracking.