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Old 10-09-2019, 07:07 PM
Kev11 (Kevin)
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Some Globulars

Although city-based IIS members would regard my location as dark-field in fact I get relatively few nights of good transparency, possibly because we are at the Eastern edge of the South-West Slopes i.e. towards the high country and also only a few kms from the Murrumbidgee River. My observatory is in a valley which tends to fill with moisture-laden air in the right (or wrong!) atmospheric conditions. Autumn skies are frequently smoke-laden from hazard reduction or stubble fires.


On the other hand a clear and dry winter night is invariably magnificent. That happens to be the time of year when many Globular Clusters are high in the Eastern sky before midnight. Attached are some of my images from late June this year.


All were processed in DSS from five 30s RAW subs each at 1600 ISO taken with a Canon 1100 DSLR (unmodified) at the prime focus of a Skywatcher 8” f5 Newtonian on a HEQ5Pro mount on a permanent pier.


Darks and flats were included, however flats don’t seem to contribute much on this small number of lights. I used the DSS settings suggested by Startrek on this forum recently. On the final DSS image I superimposed the red, green and blue bell curves and moved them to the right along the S curve (whatever that is – I haven’t got my head around the technicalities yet) far enough to reveal all the resolution apparently available in each cluster. That seemed to simultaneously move the background from deep black to a shade of grey, albeit also unveiling many faint stars. I can live with that, not least because I haven’t yet calibrated the monitor on the computer I am now using.


DSS help is delightfully vague about the nature of the Luminance and Saturation adjustments offered, more-or-less saying “just try and see what happens”. As the possible combinations of settings are almost infinite, I would appreciate some guidance or explanation of the principles on that.


Cheers
Attached Thumbnails
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Click for full-size image (M107_1.jpg)
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  #2  
Old 10-09-2019, 07:16 PM
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rustigsmed (Russell)
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nice captures kevin. great to see some globs!
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Old 10-09-2019, 07:53 PM
Startrek (Martin)
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Kevin
Some great images there , although a bit mono looking, lacking some colour balance
DSS , although has some post processing tools to use is fundamentally aligning and stacking software program
You would benefit greatly using some bonafide post processing software
I use Startools and is very intuitive and fairly easy to master once you work with it for a while
There are also many other post processing software packages available which would “ add life “ to your great images
Well done !!
Cheers
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Old 11-09-2019, 07:34 AM
Kev11 (Kevin)
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Thanks for the comments Russell and Martin. Interestingly, I like the images in black and white because that is what I "see" when looking at these objects through the scope directly. I agree though that except for Omega centauri and Tucana 47, Globs in this field size are not as exciting as galaxies and nebulas.
I have looked at the demo version of Startools but it seems to demand RAM and processing speed beyond my humble computer resources.
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Old 11-09-2019, 05:42 PM
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rustigsmed (Russell)
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Kev11 View Post
Thanks for the comments Russell and Martin. Interestingly, I like the images in black and white because that is what I "see" when looking at these objects through the scope directly. I agree though that except for Omega centauri and Tucana 47, Globs in this field size are not as exciting as galaxies and nebulas.
I have looked at the demo version of Startools but it seems to demand RAM and processing speed beyond my humble computer resources.
it might be worth trying GIMP, the free photo editor https://www.gimp.org/ it is pretty good these days can do most thing photoshop can do, and i think still runs pretty light on systems.
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Old 11-09-2019, 07:58 PM
Kev11 (Kevin)
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Thanks again, Russell, will check that out.
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