First AP attempt = NGC3324. I'm excited !!!

[ChrisV]

For the past year I've been doing video astronomy, so all camera work has been with shorts subs (5-30sec) over short periods, and no post-processing.

Now I've sort of got guiding going so took some longer subs on the weekend (backyard in suburban Sydney). Before I get too excited could I get some comments.

This was taken on my GSO 8" F5 newt with an ASI071-MC OSC cooled camera.
Guiding PHD2 with an ASI290MM with the 200mm guidescope I just got from Pete (thanks).
Its 28x 5min subs captured with sharpcap, then stacked in DSS with flat/dark correction (I rejected 3 of them cause of low score).
Then I've fumbled around with it in StarTools.

I also took some subs before the meridian flip but they made the stacked stars have weird fuzzy shapes.

[raymo]

That's a ripper; onwards and upwards.
raymo

[Ryderscope]

Congratulations Chris. Well done!

[glend]

Looks great Chris! Nice scope, eh? Now you have a whole sky full of stuff to shoot. Have fun.

[LostInSp_ce]

Very nice :thumbsup:

[Benjamin]

Love the colours in the image (red, pink, blue and the yellow star). :thumbsup:

[cometcatcher]

Lovely image and well processed!

[johnyb]

Lovely pic. Well done :thumbsup:
28 x 5m subs gives you plenty of data to pull out. Excellent result in the final image. :2thumbs:

[Camelopardalis]

That's a beauty Chris :thumbsup:

What's it doing in the Beginner's forum :P

[ziggystardust52]

Hi,
I'm a new person on this forum wanting to eventually get into astrophotography. I've noticed something called 'DSS' mentioned. Is it a piece of software? I have Photomatix and Registax. Are these similar?

Just saw Chris's later post. Will download Deep Sky Stacker and assess.

[ChrisV]

Thanks all for the comments. I'm loving the newt Glen, its a nice complement to my refractor.

Does this process in startools seem sensible ? After stacking flat/dark corrected subs in deep sky stacker (DSS)

1. Opened the fits file and cropped slightly to get rid of uneven edges from stacking.
2. Binned 71%. Seemed a good compromise between smaller files size and enough to give unblocky stars.
3. Autodev it to see what the detail looked like. Selected an ROI until I got a bit of background glow so I could see if there were any gradients.
4. Then used the wipe function to remove gradients.
5. Redid the autodev & ROI to get it at the right level of exposure.
6. stopped tracked and de-noised.
7. Then I did (overdid) the colour adjustment. Turned up the saturation to ~160%.

I haven't worried about other features like HDR, contrast, deconvolution yet.

In the end it looked like a lot of red was clipped when I did the colour balance. I don't know if this was me clipping stuff above the noise floor, or whether it was the way I set up my OSC camera?

To set up the camera I adjust the colour level controls in sharpcap so the RGB histograms overlap when shooting a bit of white paper during the day (or a clean bit of black road in the shade). Does this sound right?