Messier 8 - Lagoon Nebula

[Karlzburg]

Afternoon all,

Towards the end of my image session last night I decided to see how my set up would go capturing the Lagoon in regards to FOV and detail.

Just over an hour of data for this shot. Run through DSS with some settings changed and processed differently in Star Tools.

Thanks for looking.

[Startrek]

Karl
Perfectly framed by your scope/ image set up , super image and great processing
I bet you would have liked 2 or 3 hours on the Lagoon !
What did you try differently in Startools ?
Lately I’m getting better results when I do a final re stretch in Develop rather than Autodev particularly on galaxies
Lagoons on my list during Winter , going to set up and try for 3 hours of dithered guided subs down the coast
Great work keep it up !!
Cheers
Martin

[Karlzburg]

The only time I used auto-dev is to show any errors due to dithering so I know where to crop, changing between redo global stretch or stretch as is will give different results as well. Keeping the stars out of the colour module will stop the stars from blowing out and taking the focus away from the nebula. I do my mask early so a lot of the modules I do, deal with the nebula/galaxy, for me that has made a big difference.

When I stack my images I'll register them and not stack so I can check the FWHM on all the frames and then see which has the best score which them becomes my reference frame. The lowest score sub I check to see how bad it is, whether I've bumped the scope or a gust of wind moved it, any movement of the stars I de-check that image from the list. In the end you have only the best subs for stacking and the best of the best as a reference.

I can't think what my setting are at the moment for DSS and Star Tool adjustments vary, I rarely leave anything default anymore.

I don't use BYEOS or APT anymore, they're not bad programs but have found better in so may ways.

[Startrek]

Yeh the first thing I do after Bin,Autodev and Crop is create a star mask an invert then move on to the main modules
If you want to work out roughly whether you will fit an object in your image frame just use he following calc
Width of camera chip in mm x 3460 divided by the focal length in mm of your main scope = FOV in arc minutes
My set up gives me 77.2 arc minutes
Lagoon Nebula is 90 x 40 arc minutes so my set up will clip the sides of the Nebula
Yours is probably in the order of +90 arc minutes lucky you !!
Still happy using BYEOS it’s kicking goals for me so I’m not upgrading at the moment unless I progress to cooled CCD sometime in the future

[Karlzburg]

My FOV is smaller than yours by about 4 arc min, your scope will get the same image as what i got just a bit bigger.

https://astronomy.tools/calculators/field_of_view/ is a great site to check FOV on all different DSO.

[RyanJones]

Nice work Karl,

There certainly is a lot of detail in this image. The FOV works really well too.

[Karlzburg]

Thanks Ryan, I'm pretty happy with it. After changing how I image has made a big difference during processing. Re-did NGC 5128 and the difference half way through processing can be seen.

[ChrisV]

Nice detail Karl. I like how you have captured the central OIII.