Southern Cross

[Atmos]

Hello everyone!

About a week ago I took out my HEQ5 (non SynScan), put my D700 with a 24-120 F/4 on it, pushed it to 120mm and pointed it at the Southern Cross area. Took 113x30sec subs at 6400 ISO (thinking back, probably should have had it lower), combined and processed with DeepSkyStacker.

Still got so much to learn!

[Retrograde]

Not bad at all - heaps of detail & nice round stars.
It's just missing some colour (which is quite common with DSS).
Try adjusting the saturation slider in DSS to give it some colour.

[Atmos]

I had tried that but I have a feeling that DSS isn't liking that very much. The brighter stars are fine but with so many of the smaller ones it appears as if I am getting a considerable amount of chromatic aberration. I have a feeling it may be an artefact of running the camera at ISO 6400. I know that messes with colours a bit at times.

I have started playing with the trial version of PixInsight as of a week ago. It's decided that it doesn't want to work any more, invalid code or something. Should still have another few weeks on it but I am thinking about biting the bullet and just getting it anyway, heard nothing but good things about it once you get past the learning curve.

[Atmos]

Managed to get PI working again, watched a few tutorials and had another play around. Got closer with the colour calibration but still not quite there. The background has a bit of a green overtone that I really struggled getting rid of. I know it should be more yellow than it is but messing around more just made things worse.
There is some visible chromatic aberration on some stars, not much I can do about that. The Nikon 24-120 lens is amazing, just not amazing enough :P

[Retrograde]

Yep looks much better with colour. Good work keep at it :thumbsup: