Beginnings of NGC 6744

[Atmos]

Last night I headed up to Heathcote with the plan of getting 1-1.5 hr RGB and hopefully 3 hr of L. Plans failed obviously!

The resulting image is R 12x300 and L 12x300, using just the Luminance I am limited to 8 of them due to the others being a bit elongated. The seeing seemed to average about 2.5"-3" getting worse as the night progressed. Tried making an RGB, really nice red, everything has green bars and then a nice blue halo :P

11/12 of the green subs are quite elongated, no idea why at 300s though, guess the mount was just not playing nice!

8/12 of the blue are pretty good but there must have been some high level haze through them as the brighter stars quite bloated. The last four were lost due to cloud.

Issues aside, quite happy how this has turned out considering the poor seeing and my guider glitching on me four times throughout the night :/ Haven't been too heavy handed on the processing, there are some hot pixels that I still need to process out but this is a preliminary job. Hoping to revisit this again in a couple of months when its higher in the sky.

Link to High Res (http://www.astrobin.com/full/248966/None/)

[marc4darkskies]

Looking pretty fine there Colin. :thumbsup: Hope you get some good seeing nights to finish it off.

I've just today put it on my target list (again) :)

Cheers, Marcus

[Atmos]

Thanks Marcus :) Going to take a while to finish it off me thinks, don't get up too Heathcote too often due to work :/

[strongmanmike]

Yeah that's great Colin..a really nice start :thumbsup:

I got good seeing tonight and then cloud stopped everything :sadeyes:... F- me! :mad2:

:lol:

Mike

[Atmos]

I've got four websites telling me that I have clear skies right now. Looking out the window behind me, I can kinda make out where the moon is :P

[Eden]

LOL, ditto... outer eastern suburbs :D

[Rex]

You got some nice detail there Colin, hope you get a chance to finish it off soon.

[gregbradley]

Very high quality luminance there.

That's some consolation.

Greg

[Slawomir]

I think you have some great data Colin. Time to add some Ha to it ;)

[Atmos]

If I get some clear skies tonight I'll get some G&B data from Melbourne, still only about a half moon and it is on the other side of the sky :)

Attached is a crop of the galaxy with my current colour data. Notice the teal bars and magenta/blue halo around the stars :P

[gregbradley]

You could select the stars and use selective colour tool to tone down the cyans on the stars only.

Greg.

[Atmos]

I did that a fair bit so far, the halos really quite very bad. Taken off about 50% already of what it was. I spent a bit of time today trying to see if I could make a mask of the red data (the best with a FWHM of 2.6") and filter the blue and green data through it. Still haven't quite figured out how to do that yet. Managed to kinda get it going but it caused too much data degradation.

Going to collect some green and blue data as long as the clouds don't come over the moment I get home!

[Paul Haese]

This is a target I looked at a few nights ago as a new target selection. I think your lum looks good. Not sure about the colour data though. You could try blurring the colour data and then adding the lum to the blurred colour. A gaussian blur of around 3.2 should work well for you.

[deeplook]

Hi Colin,

seems to be some really nice Luminance data - I hope you can get good color data and make a beautiful colored image out of it!

Markus

[RickS]

Nice work on the lum, Colin. It really is a very dim and tricky target.

[rustigsmed]

nice work Col, L is looking really good. I would love to nab this target one day - apparently this is what the milky way would appear like from a distance, it might have to wait for a dark site (not that I've ever moved my gear) for me.

[Atmos]

Captured some new colour data on Sunday, had a few goes at it this week but I think I am at about as good as its going to get. I was happy with my Red so I captured some more Green and Blue. Stars are nice and round this time around BUT the seeing towards the south was terrible, imaging from Melbourne with a 50% moon. Still not sure why but the G/B had FWHM of 3.8" while 10 minutes later I was getting FWHM of 2.4" in Ha to the East. Still not sure whether it was local seeing towards the south or HORRIBLE tracking. Had to blur the R channel from 2.5" to 3.8".



Thanks Markus, waiting for the next new moon to head up to my dark site to recapture everything :)



I didn't think it was going to be overly difficult being Mag ~9.5 or something. Picked it because it was large :)



Thanks Russell. I would definitely wait for a dark site trip, the difference I have noticed from taking it at Heathcote with the moon around and down in Melbourne was staggering.

[codemonkey]

Looking good so far Colin, just need more data (same old story, right? You can never have too much data).



I'd be guessing tracking issues, potentially balance related.




I never really trust anything referring to the brightness of a DSO, especially when it's just a mag that's provided. Admittedly, this could be due to ignorance, but I've found many times that objects which should be similar in brightness are very difference, and this is going off surface brightness, not magnitude, which should theoretically be a better measure. Not sure why that is.

I found this galaxy reasonably difficult, partly because of the density of stars... I wasn't able to process it to a point that I was happy with it.



Out of curiosity, how does your dark site on a full moon compare to Melbourne? I've always wondering if, having fairly dark skies, my full moon nights could be no worse than a suburban non-full-moon.

[Atmos]

So far it is 1 hour LRGB (4 hour total), definitely need a lot more. The R channel is a lot cleaner than the GB so I don't think collecting colour in the burbs is a good idea :P
I'd agree with it likely being a balance issue. Was getting FWHM of 3.8" with 150s exposures in the south but 2.5" at 900s while tracking M8 for the rest of the night.

Really not sure what Heathcote is like on a full moon, haven't done it before :) I have done remote areas in NT and WA over the full moon and out there it is a LOT better than the burbs. The moon certainly casts a lot of light but there is still so much more that can be seen than on a moonless night in Melbourne.

[Placidus]

Coming along very nicely indeed, Colin. Good depth already. We've found it a surprisingly difficult subject, because the light is spread over such a large area. We threw 11 hours of luminance at it a long time ago. You've reminded us that Pavo season is coming and inspired us to revisit.

[Shiraz]

that is looking very nice Colin. It is a difficult target - it looks like it should be fairly straightforward, but it is actually quite difficult to control the stars and still get the faint outer regions - your result is already good.

[Atmos]

Thanks :) You are right, looking at it, it doesn't look like to difficult of a target which is why I chose it! Was a reasonably large galaxy in a nice part of the sky. I am still not overly happy with it but maybe I am setting unrealistic levels for a 5.1" refractor ;)