M16 pillars higher res

[Shiraz]

Hi

have been collecting snippets of high res Ha on M16 and looks like this will be all there is for the season - the seeing has recently fallen into a deep hole. I also have some O3, but any attempt at colouring reduced the impact of the image to my eyes, so it remains Ha only.

Used drizzle super-res and got about 10% reduction in FWHM, so the original data was slightly undersampled. Intensity levels are aimed at maximising the impact of the main pillars, so the rest of the image is a bit subdued.

screen size: http://www.astrobin.com/full/110298/B/
full res:http://www.astrobin.com/full/110298/B/?real=&mod=

thanks for looking - feedback appreciated. Ray

[RickS]

Wonderfully sharp, Ray!

[LewisM]

WOW! Simply wow

[multiweb]

That's amazing Ray. Best I've seen to date. :bowdown:
Those stars are amazingly round. Care to elaborate a bit on the processing you did. Also did you use the newt? Is that cropped? AO used? What mount did you use. EQ8? Length of subs?

[SimmoW]

Yep, mega-crisp!!

[Shiraz]

thanks Rick.


thank you very much Lewis.


Very generous comment thanks Marc.
70 subs at 5 minutes taken over few months whenever Ha seeing was good and I wasn't doing something else. EQ6 with a 250f4 Newtonian, RCC1 and H694 camera - 6nm Ha.
No AO, just a converted finderscope and QHY5L2 as the guider. Processing was drizzle 2x followed by deconvolution on linear data with (PI derived) synthetic star PSF. then stretching and a little bit of local wavelet sharpening and noise reduction. Stars were in pretty good shape, but the combination of drizzle and deconvolution produced minor artefacts at the edges of the brightest ones, so they were tidied up in StarTools - hence the perfect roundness. Then image was downsized 0.75 and cropped from 13.5mp to 7.1mp for composition and to remove regions where minor setup changes had led to poor overlap.


thanks Simon

regards Ray

[RickS]

I wondered about those oddly perfect stars :)

[Shiraz]

you guys are a pretty tough audience - never thought I would have to apologise for stars that were too round :rofl:

for interest, this is what they looked like before tidying and a bit of sharpening etc - they were not all that bad to start with, apart from the artefacts.

[SkyViking]

Some incredible resolution Ray, very impressive. Definitely one of the sharpest Pillars I have seen, if not the sharpest. A colour version of that would be incredible! Great work :)

[Placidus]

Superbly sharp, and very clean. Awesome.

[gregbradley]

Superb image Ray, sensational.

Greg.

[pluto]

That's amazing detail, great work :D

[troypiggo]

Almost cut my eyeballs looking at it - so sharp.

[Saturn%5]

Very nice Ray So sharp :thumbsup:

[Shiraz]

thanks very much Rolf. I have not yet been able to put together a decent colour version - will post if I manage it sometime. The data is OK - my skills are lacking.


thanks very much Mike.


Thanks a lot Greg - appreciate the comment.

thanks very much Hugh.


Hi Troy. :lol: thanks


thank you Graeme

regards Ray

[Octane]

Jaw-dropping doesn't even begin to describe this image.

I can only imagine what it'd look like in the full HST SHO palette!

H

[dvj]

Well my, my. Puts those 17" and 20" results on lofty peaks to shame doesn't it? :shrug: Yeah, the stars are too round, too hard. It's not color, blah, blah, blah. :lol: This is a masterpiece of detail and processing talent.

Do we know how drizzle is different than dither?

j

[strongmanmike]

Ummm? :question:...wow? :eyepop: :face:

Soooo, that from a simple fast Newt and little starlightxpress huh? :question: :lol:....well, must get me one of those :question:

The seeing, careful sub selection, and drizzle aside, t'is quite amazing sir :thumbsup:

Mike

[marc4darkskies]

Holy cow Ray!! :eyepop:

That definitely deserves one of these ... :bowdown:

And one of these .... :jawdrop:
You're certainly throwing down the gauntlet to the rest of us would-be imagers aren't you! Now let's see the colour!! :)

[alpal]

Hi Ray,
Wow - that is so sharp & crisp.
There is hope for all of us who have Newts. instead of RCOS systems.

cheers
Allan

[multiweb]

Thanks for that Ray. I thought as much. A truly inspiring image. Shows what stock equipment can do in the right hands. :thumbsup:

[Regulus]

Amazing. Really nice work Ray.

[Peter Ward]

Been away for a bit and missed this one...

Wow!!

Very clever data capture and selection plus inspired use of processing tools, for a simply fantastic result

I for one, will be going back to the drawing board.. I think you set a new standard here Ray. Well done :thumbsup::thumbsup::thumbsup:

[DaveNZ]

Wonderful effort. I love those round stars. I might have to purchase startools.

Dave

[Shiraz]

Thanks very much H. I will persevere with colour, but am not very skilled in that area.


Thanks very much John - that is a very generous comment.

I guess the difference between this and the big boys on the hilltops is that they can routinely get a good set of hi res data in a single night. It took me a couple of months of scratching around to find and use the rare periods of fairly good seeing - being close to the sea has advantages, but good seeing is not one of them - it was still fun though.

As I understand it, dither is required to move the stars around in the subs. Drizzle upsamples and fills in missing data using offset real data from the dithered images, rather than interpolation. In that way it recovers some of the information that was scrambled by undersampling in the original images. Should work really well with your system - might be an alternative to the smaller pixels that you mentioned in another thread. Maybe worth a read http://www.adass.org/adass/proceedings/adass99/O6-02/


Thanks Mike. Yeah, these little cams are pretty cool eh - go well with a fast Newtonian. Actually it was good fun seeing how far the system could be pushed - there is some very capable software out there now.


Wow, thanks very much Marcus - very generous of you. All right, I will keep trying with colour, but I have a lot of trouble with it.


Hi Allan. Thanks for the comments. I would still accept an RCOS if anyone wants to get rid of one:D


Thanks again Marc.


Thank you Trevor


Very generous of you Peter - thank you. super-resolution might be very useful technique for your RH - you could maybe try for a 64mp image at 0.8arcsec for example...


Hi Dave. yep, StarTools is a must have in my books. I concentrated solely on the nebula and left the stars to look after themselves - StarTools cleaned up the mess that resulted very effectively - possibly too well :).

regards Ray

[DJT]

That is a stunning image, top job :thumbsup:

[tilbrook@rbe.ne]

Superb Ray!:thumbsup:

I think We'll have to nickname you Mr Hubble!:)

And I mean that sincerely.

Cheers,

Justin.

[alpal]

Ray,


I think you've got better results than an RCOS.

Did you spend a lot of time getting the spacing just right for your corrector?
I want to know your secret. :)

cheers
Allan

[Ross G]

A great photo Ray.

Sharp, detailed and nice tones.

Ross.

[Shiraz]

thanks David, appreciated


Hi Justin. Thanks very much for your generosity. My wife calls me "you idiot", which probably means that I already have a nickname:).


Hi Allan. Thank you. No secret Mate - I really think that it just comes down to seeing. If that is good we have a chance, but we don't get much good seeing down under (most of our population lives near sea level).
I spent a fair time sorting out the corrector spacing, but the main thing with the RCC1 seems to be that the collimation needs to be spot on to get good results. And I spent many hours squaring up the CCD and regularly refocus - as you know, a few tens of microns make a big difference with fast scopes.


Thank you Ross.

regards Ray

[alpal]

Ray,

Hi Ray,
thanks for your reply.
I also have an RCC1
see pic:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/24719437@N03/8029429824/in/photostream

I think I need to spend more time on the spacing using the Varilock
after viewing your pic.
It's amazing that the RCC1 works so well for a $250 corrector.

cheers
Allan

[strongmanmike]

And there in lies the myth, in the end seeing is absolute king, doesn't matter how big or how much your scope is worth or how catchy its name is, if it doesn't get under really steady skies most people would be hard pressed to see any advantage :)

[Stevec35]

A great image Ray - love it!

Steve

[sjastro]

Wonderful resolution Ray.

Steven

[alpal]

Well it must have been a fluke night at Ardrossan south Australia
which is at sea level.

Imagine how good our results would be if we all had robotic scopes at Siding Springs
at altitude & many more clear nights?

[Shiraz]

Hi Allan - yep, they are really good value - as far as I can see, the RCC1 does nothing to the image but remove the coma.


:thumbsup:


Hi Steve - thanks for the comment


thanks very much Steven


It wasn't a fluke Allan, it was nearly a dozen flukes - I switched over to M16 whenever the Ha seeing was exceptional (which is better than 2.5 arcsec FWHM around here) and the moon was up (and I was not doing anything else). The shortest bracket of images was taken in a 15 minute burst of good seeing and the ensemble was gathered over months. It would be great to have a better site, but part of the fun is that whoooa feeling when the seeing comes good :).

regards Ray

[strongmanmike]

Absolutely, I've been hammering a galaxy over recent days and the variation in the seeing bewteen nights has been ridiculous, one night was so bad I just collecetd RGB another night saw excellent seeing, the difference in teh subs can be huge, if the nights of excellent seeing were more numerous it woudl be great. The idea of only collecting and using the very best sharpest subs has plenty of merit but time is precious so, unless we are automated, we ususally end up using at least some of the less than aptimal data... how good would it be if most nights were good ala up in the Chilean Andes etc where nights with seeing over 1" are considered less than optimal :eyepop: :)

Mike

[alpal]

Yes Mike,
I've seen the same thing in Melbourne.
It's gone from a FWHM of 2 arc seconds to over 6 arc seconds in the space of 2 hours.
As Ray wrote - he grabbed the best subs over many months.
Looks like that is the way to go to push the limits.
I look forward to your galaxy pic.

cheers
Allan

[marco]

:eyepop: Exceptional Ray, a fantastic resolution with details usually not seen in amateur-ish images :thumbsup::thumbsup:
Seems almost to be floating around the pillars in a spaceship..

I am speechless

Marco

[Shiraz]

that's a very generous comment Marco - thank you.

As I understand it, there is a slightly surreal aspect to the M16 pillars in that they have possibly already been destroyed by a SN shockwave. Great that the light still has the pre-damage view - they are such a beautiful structure.

regards Ray

[strongmanmike]

Had to have another look (read drool) at this Ray...seriously man, this is a friggin amazing result mate and to think it was achieved with an inexpensive fast 10" newt and a small inexpensive camera and modest mount is really eye opening. You have clearly got your collimation and image plane tilt spot on and the use of only good seeing data and some smart processing shows that spending $50K+ on a scope and mount or even the need for long FL is indeed not necessary, one just needs to know how to tune their scope and then image with it under really good conditions....RIGHT!! you and me, now, moving to the mountains in Chile we are...so every night has good seeing (not the Aussie version)...imagine what we could do :cool:..of course while it is "o-k" as is, you will have to help me tune my scope to the same level of perfection as yours though :P

Mike

[Shiraz]

hi Mike - missed this, sorry. Thanks for the comments and yes, it would be great to have reliably good seeing - and no wind - and no streetlights - and no dew..... But even with what we get, this is a fun hobby:thumbsup:
regards Ray

[Paul Haese]

I missed this image. What I think. Sharp, sharp detail. I love the round tight round stars. Great detail. Certainly one of the sharper images I have seen of this object on IIS. :thumbsup: