sold my Espirit 100ed so giving my Askar400 some love on Carina Neb

[Robert_T]

having now sold my Espirit 100ed I have brought back out my little Askar 400 (72mm aperture) on the CEM40 mount in the interim (new larger refractor scope on way).

I had one of those "will I wont I" nights here Thursday around clouds and forecasts, but found after an hour and a half of dodging clouds to polar align, get guiding recalibrated, autofocus workin etc, things cleared and I started taking 2min exposures expecting to be clouded out at any moment, but the clouds held back till 11.45pm letting me gather nearly 3 hours of subs :D

I had some wierd issues with processing/stacking this dataset in APP... the program kept saying my flats from the night were corrupt or missing data... loaded them all up eventually separately and APP accepted, but found when I tried to recompose extracts from APP of HaOII mono and Ha and OIII mono in Startools later (as LRGB) I have awful banding appearing... the straight RGB colour FITs from APP worked Ok, but still when pushed looked to have some underlying pattern noise... so I stacked the exact same data in DSS and processed though Startools clean as a whistle... still no clue. Hope I get it sorted as I prefer to do extracts from APP and recombine and make use of Startools powerful bi-channel colour presets.

Any thoughts/advice on the above welcome.

Anyway, here's 2hr 30m of Carina with the Askar/QHY268c DSS, STartools and PS for what it's worth.

[Rigel003]

Spectacular image! Well done. A good focal length for this object. Maybe just a little burnt out in the core? I've just bought a 268C and looking forward to using it.

[Robert_T]

thanks Graeme. I tried to tame the core a little with a blunt hammer of the burn tool and agree it's not a good look. I reverted it now and even though some highlights are stronegr think it looks a little more natural now.

yes 400mm is good for this but thinking 300mm might be the sweet spot.

[PKay]

Looks good to me Rob.

Very good seeing at the mome down here, bout time...

Will look forward to seeing results from your new scope.

[Robert_T]

thanks Peter, any sort of seeing is hard to come by at the moment ;)

BTW I sorted out my APP issue... not sure what is different but restacked (2hr 20min) and re-extracted Lum, Ha, and OII from my stack and recombined in Startools perfectly... allowed me to do more a hubblish palette attached below.

[PKay]

Never ending Rob, too much choice!

Process ver2 is my pick :)

PS: Have a quick look down in DS. I started working on the 'Gumtree Nebula' and learning heaps about narrow band.

All good fun...

[Robert_T]

thanks peter. i checked out DS. i must give the gumtree a try as well. cool object.:thumbsup: