M20 despite the data.

[alocky]

After patiently sitting through two and a half days of the AAIC, where the overwhelming message from the experts was; 'use as much high-quality data as you can', I thought I'd ignore them completely.
This image was acquired from light-polluted suburban Perth over the only two clear(ish) nights (nearly a month apart) of late I've been here. The first night was plagued by clouds with only about 30 min of L R and G being usable. Some strange behaviour also began to manifest, with the PHD window 'twitching' on the desktop, and guiding dropping out intermittently causing severe streaks and ruining all the B subs. Seemed to be someting to do with the feed from the DMK41 guide camera. Fast forward a month, and surprisingly, the hardware and software have not healed themselves, and last night I managed about 30 min of useable B while trying to fix it before the clouds rolled in. There is definitely something odd happening on the laptop - I never used to have any trouble from the guiding end of things, now I can't get an rms below 1.5.
Anyway, stacking, gradient removal and LRGB combination all done in pixinsight, curves and levels and not much else.
No point being rude about the image - hopefully if I resolve the issues with the guiding when the weather cooperates and actually acquire a suitable amount of tight data, I'll be able to show what this 10" can actually deliver!
Anyway - here's the worst you can expect from a 10" with a QSI683.
Astrobin site here: http://www.astrobin.com/55463/
cheers,
Andrew.

[IanP]

Andrew, more data wouldn’t heart and the guiding issue HAS to be addressed – stars are not round. Otherwise it is a nice image! :thumbsup:
And yes, I’m also waiting for some more favourable weather conditions!!! :P

[alocky]

Thanks Ian - I've been having a slow-motion tanty over the last month, since the damn sky won't stay clear long enough for me to find out what the hell is going on!
A really tight rejection criteria on the stack eventually produced tighter stars than in the subs. Still, as you point out, they're a very nasty shape.
Grrr! Now it's going to rain for the rest of the weekend, too.
Think I'll stomp off to my library and have a drink.
Slainthe
Andrew.

[Lee]

RMS 1.5? Is it guiding RA at all? I let mine run with guiding output off the other night for testing, the raw PE of the worm gave an RMS of 1.4.....

Anyway - I've taken worse images with better RMS values - so not too bad! :)

[strongmanmike]

Well Andrew, that's one hell'a'va save in my opinion :eyepop:

Yes the stars look odd but the colours are lovely to my eye on my new U-Beaut 24" Full HD monitor :D and the neb looks nice and soft without looking toooo artificially smoothed (although I would probably tone down the smoothing just a tad still :thumbsup:)

Nice job indeed, the fact that you got this good must be frustrating given what could have been :thumbsup:

Mike

[alocky]

Thanks Lee and Mike! I only ran a very gentle TGV denoise in Pixinsight, the smoothing is more a function of the woeful guiding and subsequent loss of detail - shame, really because one of the luminance subs shows me what the scope and camera can deliver when everything is working...
I've cleaned up the laptop, downloaded the latest drivers and versions of everything, so all I need is some clear skies to try and sort this guiding out.
cheers,
Andrew.