the cyclone season has started

[alocky]

Here's a LRGB composite of NGC 2997 from my backyard in Perth, with the trusty 10" starfinder, QSI683wsg on a G11. Processing in pixinsight.
Had some real problems with the calibrations - maybe it's the light pollution but I acquired 3 sets of flats at dusk, and none of them worked very well.
Subs are 5 minutes each, and I got 16 each for the colour channels and 32 for luminance.
Higher res version on astrobin here:
http://www.astrobin.com/156919/
cheers, and thanks for looking.
Andrew.

[Ross G]

Great looking galaxy photo Andrew.

Nice colours and I like the composition.

Ross.

[Placidus]

I think it worked rather well.

[multiweb]

+1 Pretty galaxy. Good rendition. :thumbsup:

[alistairsam]

Thats a neat looking galaxy and it looks great. Star colours are really nice. need to look up how high this gets from here.

Cheers
Alistair

[andyc]

Appropriately named for this week! And a very nice image too, one of my favourite galaxies.

[gregbradley]

One of my favourite galaxies. Quite well done. As with all images it would improve with more total exposure time but as it is its a nice image.

Greg.

[alocky]

Thanks Greg. One of the many drawbacks of not having a permanent setup is having to schedule imaging sessions around days we're allowed use our bores to water the lawn. Hopefully that will all change soon and I can join the megadata club.



Thanks Andy - I love this thing visually, it's such a casual, laid back kind of spiral :-)



Thanks Alistair!
Probably about zenith at the moment for you (if you are in Nth Vic) it's declination is -31.







Thanks Marc, Mike and Ross !

[strongmanmike]

Good result Andrew, it's a really nice galaxy that one :)

Mike

[alocky]

Thanks Mike! I love going after galaxies, but with my image scale and seeing I'm running out of decently large candidates! At least Virgo and Leo are on the way up.
Cheers
Andrew

[RickS]

Nice one, Andrew! Probably hard to do better without a dark site where you can do longer subs.

Cheers,
Rick.

[alocky]

Thanks Rick. That's a very interesting point too. Normally I get 10 minute subs and there's no doubt it's easier to deal with light pollution and calibration seems to work better. I think it's because most of the signal ends up in the same part of the histogram as the flats. Problem is retaining star colour with 8086 chip. This was a partially successful experiment to find a compromise - but I think I need to revert to two sets of subs, one for stars and one for object.
Cheers,
Andrew