New Years Eta

[Chris85]

Hi All, Happy New Year!

How did everyone spend their New Years Eve? I spent mine taking pictures of space. :P Ahh the joys of having a 1yr old! Anyhoo here's my go at Eta Carinae Neb taken last night.
8 x 700s subs with darks/flats, Rc 6" + 600D stacked in DSS and processed in Gimp and Nebulosity.
I think I spent twice as long trying to process this than I did actually capturing the data. :screwy: I also tried with Startools but I think it's just to much for my ageing laptop. Oh well Neb seems to be working sweet anyway :)

Comments welcomed and thanks for looking!

Cheers,
Chris

[Tony_]

G'day Chris,

Great image - surely good enough for the general deep space section! Must be nice to have clear skies - even on New Years Eve.

My NYE: a good bout of gastro in the morning which cancelled any plans of going out that night - even though due to the joys of a 2 1/2 year old it would have been an early night. So instead it was a video at home.
Then at midnight watching local fireworks from our balcony - considering they are illegal we seemed to be surrounded by them.

Happy New Year!
Tony.

[cometcatcher]

Nice capture Chris. I want to get an RC 6 soon.

Gastro seems to be catching over the forum. Was clear last night but I couldn't get out of bed being dizzy and wanting to puke.

[Chris85]

The general deep sky section, Tony? Jeez I don't know about that! Cheers though :-) Just when I think my pics are looking ok, I have a squizz through that forum and get humbled pretty quickly :-P To be honest though, this is easily my best shot yet :-D

Thanks Kevin, yeah those Rc's are cracking scopes. Even with my 600d the stars are pretty much points the whole way across.:thumbsup:

Cheers,
Chris

[cometcatcher]

Chris, I was wondering have you tried the GSO 0.75 RC field reducer with your RC6? I was just wondering how they perform distortion wise because I would much rather image at F6.75 (with reducer) than F9.

[Chris85]

I haven't yet Kevin, but it's actually the next thing on my to-get list. Like you said it only reduces and doesn't correct, so I'd imagine the edges will be pretty average on the dslr. I'm sure it'll be fine if you had a smaller chipped ccd? I'll probably just get it anyway and if I need to crop, then so be it. No biggie, and it beats spending a truckload on some of these wiz bang reducer/correctors :thumbsup:
Cheers

[cometcatcher]

I only have APS-C size sensors, apart from the video camera stuff.

In any case I would like to see more images you take with the RC6, field reducer or not. In the meantime while I'm saving I'll try and get one of my newts photo ready.

[LightningNZ]

Hi Chris.

It looks pretty good in all aspects except the colour. The result virtually monochrome. Did you balance the colour channels in DSS before you exported or in some other program immediately after importing the stacked version?

Cheers,
Cam

[cometcatcher]

I'm having the same thing happen with my newly acquired full spectrum DSLR. It's so strong in Ha response that the colour of everything else is pale. Other than fancy use of filters, I'm not sure it can be fixed in processing alone.

[Chris85]

Thanks for your input, Cam. That's right I aligned the colours in DSS before chucking it into Nebulosity. I'm finding processing to be a right PITA, and toning it down from a sea of red is quite challenging! Don't know about mono though?


There's a few more to come soon hopefully. These holidays have been pretty cloud free for the most part :D

Cheers!