Kal
27-12-2006, 08:24 PM
Hi all,
I imaged these 3 objects last night while out testing a few things. Tested my new (second hand) 15mm Panoptic, which is now my favourite eyepiece :thumbsup: Tried autoguiding with my ETX90/LPI combo, which will go down as a failure, as the LPI doesn't seem to be sensitive enough to pick up enough stars :( . Tested a tour I wrote and uploaded to my LX200, which was a success :D
I tried some new software out for processing these pics as well. Because I was using some 30 second exposures and staying on the target for 15+ minutes, I was getting quite a bit of field rotation, so registax gave me circular warp fields when I stacked them. I downloaded and tried out DeepSkyStacker (http://deepskystacker.free.fr/english/index.html) and used it to stack all of these images. It is a wonderful freeware program that does pretty much everything for you. A bit slow to process, but you don't even need to pick stars to lock onto for stacking, it automatically processes everything. Apart from stacking in this program, the only post processing was a levels adjustment in photoshop and a magic want for a dust mote (I really should take flats!) :whistle:
M1 - Crab nebula 21x30 seconds
NGC 2392 - Eskimo nebula 17x30 seconds
NGC 2440 - 26x15 seconds - I didn't even notice the faint "butterfly" shaped nebulosity until I was in the digital darkroom, I only saw/noticed the part that I have now oversaturated!!!
I imaged these 3 objects last night while out testing a few things. Tested my new (second hand) 15mm Panoptic, which is now my favourite eyepiece :thumbsup: Tried autoguiding with my ETX90/LPI combo, which will go down as a failure, as the LPI doesn't seem to be sensitive enough to pick up enough stars :( . Tested a tour I wrote and uploaded to my LX200, which was a success :D
I tried some new software out for processing these pics as well. Because I was using some 30 second exposures and staying on the target for 15+ minutes, I was getting quite a bit of field rotation, so registax gave me circular warp fields when I stacked them. I downloaded and tried out DeepSkyStacker (http://deepskystacker.free.fr/english/index.html) and used it to stack all of these images. It is a wonderful freeware program that does pretty much everything for you. A bit slow to process, but you don't even need to pick stars to lock onto for stacking, it automatically processes everything. Apart from stacking in this program, the only post processing was a levels adjustment in photoshop and a magic want for a dust mote (I really should take flats!) :whistle:
M1 - Crab nebula 21x30 seconds
NGC 2392 - Eskimo nebula 17x30 seconds
NGC 2440 - 26x15 seconds - I didn't even notice the faint "butterfly" shaped nebulosity until I was in the digital darkroom, I only saw/noticed the part that I have now oversaturated!!!