My first with flats and darks

[GOTO]

Hi all,
Despite not being able to get the Atlas AZEQ6 to work with PHD2, I managed 42 minutes of images plus darks and flats for this image of M8. It was the first time I was happy enough with the luminance images to get the flats and darks. Stacked in DSS and tweaked in Lightroom and Photoshop.
William Optics 132 FLT
ZWOASI294MC-Pro exposure 20s x 128
Optolong L-extreme
AZEQ6 sadly without PHD2
I bumped the ZWO gain up to a dizzying 400 because I couldn't do longer exposures until I can connect to PHD2. This maybe why it's so noisy.

Suggestions most welcome.
Regards
Geoff

[jahnpahwa]

I think thats lovely.

Colour palette is nice and subdued, the structure is the feature. Amazing what an astro cam pumped up to 400 gain can do with 20s exposures on a bright DSO.

I think its kind of a nice cross over from viewing visually to the super saturated images of this target. Well done :thumbsup:

[GOTO]

Thank you :)

[Placidus]

That worked just fine!

It doesn't look noisy to us, BUT if you wanted an explanation for what noise there is, well, our Lagoon was 17 hours with a 20 inch. You've got 42 minutes. Not even Batman could have done much better.

Room possible improvement: If you could throw in a few shorter subs, or a few subs with lower gain, you'd avoid burning out the Hourglass. You could also just possibly tweak the colour balance in favour of showing more of the blue.

But, overall, bravo!

[GOTO]

Thank you. I appreciate the feedback and encouragement:)