NGC 55... lol

[codemonkey]

This was done more as a laugh, just to see what I'd get out of it.

Been having some bad luck and lots of technical difficulties since getting all of my new toys. In particular I've been having problems with guiding, as you'll see here, which is the cause of the diamond shaped stars.

This is about 15x65s frames each of 2x2 binned red and blue, with a synthetic green frame created from mix of 65% blue and 35% red. I was trying to shoot RGB while NGC 55 was quite low on the horizon and the sky glow was worse, and then follow it up with luminance once it got higher with less sky glow so I could go deeper. Unfortunately the guiding went from bad (as seen in these images) to completely nuts right at the point when I tried to take the green. I suspect that particular issue might have been caused by power issues, so I've upgraded my power source and hopefully that'll fix that particular issue.

These were shot with an Atik 314L+ and a 600mm ED80, so it was significantly undersampled even without binning. Probably shouldn't bin with this scope/camera combo but i was just trying to get something resembling an LRGB image ;-)

I've now tweaked a whole lot of PHD settings in preparation for my next run, hopefully that'll do a bit better.

[LightningNZ]

Hi Lee, I think that's pretty great effort, especially considering the difficulties you had with it. The colour certainly looks okay and you got some good detail in the galaxy.

[jenchris]

Sounds like backlash and too perfect balance.

[codemonkey]

Thanks mate :-) Yeah, I was pretty surprised with what I was about to get colour wise with just R&B.



Funny you should say that, I've just adjusted the mount to make it a bit easy heavy so hopefully that'll help too. I might try and figure out which direction it's drifting in and explicitly set DEC to only guide in that direction if that and the other changes I've made don't help.

I think it's mostly chasing the seeing to be honest. It corrects in one direction, only to correct in the other direction.

At one point recently, after drift aligning it within 2' (I didn't try very hard that night, would normally do better) but after a while the guiding started to say it was ~200 pixels out and bouncing around wildly. That's what I'm hoping was caused by power issues. The night when I took this it did a similar thing, but it was about 40 instead of 200.

[Rex]

That's a pretty good start Lee. To did alright considering the short sub lengths. Glad your getting ur new gear all sorted out. Can be very frustrating when your having issues and all you want to do is image. Keep at it mate, it will all come together and you will never look back.

[raymo]

Great effort.
raymo

[mariner10]

Hi Lee,
One of my favourite objects, the first galaxy I ever looked at so it has that special meaning.
For something done as a laugh it came pretty good with some decent detail. I've never seen diamond shaped stars before, had plenty of elongated ones after tracking issues but not diamond.
Look forward to seeing some of your other efforts over time.

[codemonkey]

Thanks mate :-) Yeah, the only thing more frustrating than new gear with bad weather is new gear, good weather and technical difficulties!



Thanks raymo :-)



Thanks Steve, appreciate that :-) First galaxy I ever looked at (besides the LMC / SMC which I originally thought were clouds until I realised they were repeatedly in the same place) was M83.

It was a serious attempt that got foiled... I processed it for a laugh because I didn't expect to get anything remotely worthwhile out of binned red and blue subs only. I was pretty surprised at the colour I managed to get out of it in the end though.

Hopefully soon I'll be able to give this a real shot... lots of very thin cloud around right now but I'll try tonight, although it'll probably turn into a test run where I try and sort out these issues rather than actually doing any serious imaging.

The diamond shaped stars are due to my guiding continually over-correcting, possibly due to bad seeing / configuration.

[mariner10]

That's interesting about the guiding over correcting, just another thing that can go wrong with this game. Has the tendancy to stretch the frustration levels at times.
I was trying to image Saturn last weekend with a video cam but couldn't get it to stay in view unless I reduced the resolution to a point that made it worthless. At least I proved the camera works I suppose.
Yeah, the detail was pretty good for a "roughie", just goes to show your ability and the gear you're using is pretty good.