NGC1955 - Despite Ekos being annoying

[AstroViking]

Evening all,

I won't bore you with tales of meridian flips that didn't flip, nor focusers that wouldn't focus, nor aligning that got totally bent... Suffice to say it was a night of frustration and swearing at Ekos for it's refusal to behave.

However, out of the mess, I captured enough data to get a reasonable image of NGC1955. (My thanks to whoever imaged this a couple of weeks ago - it's an interesting target.)

As always, comments and feedback welcome!

Cheers,
V.

Image details:

* Gain: 100
* Offset: 10
* Temperature: 0 degrees C
* Exposure: 180 seconds (Just under 4 hours integration time)
* Filter: L-Enhance
* Lights: 79
* Darks: 20
* Flats: 50
* Dark Flats (Bias): 50
* Stacked and pre-proc'd in SiriL, GraXpert, starnet++, finished in Affinity Photo v2

Equipment:
ED102@714mm / HEQ5-Pro / ASI183MC-Pro / UniGuide50+SV305 / Kstars/Ekos

[Anth10]

I feel your pain Steve- astro photography most certainly is a hobby of extreme patience. On any given session you can almost guarantee that something unexpected will hamper your plans. It’s just part and parcel.
But with every go at it you always take some positives from it to better improve.
I think you’ve managed a very good result here despite the hiccups.
Plenty of integration so top effort.
How do you rate graXpert? I’m thinking of going with the RC Astro plugin for gradient xterminator - I know from the trial use it produced great results.
Cheers
A

[AstroViking]

Hi Anthony,

Thanks for the feedback. The final image did come out really well. I do like the 'hollowed out' look of that nebula. It's either very floral, like a rose, or like a tunnel, depending on how your eye focuses on it.

To make things more confusing, I set up the mount (only) with Ekos today and tracked a target near the meridian. On cue, the mount did a perfect meridian flip. Three tests, three perfect flips...

As Bill Stent said to me once - "Astrophotography is like Formula One. If nothing's broken, something will."

Which means that the problem lies somewhere else in my setup. Given that my Ekos setup is a couple of years old and has seen many configuration and hardware changes, I suspect there is a strange gremlin setting that's messing things up. When I get a chance I'll nuke the whole thing and rebuild it from scratch - and take a backup!

As for GraXpert, I think it does a pretty good job of removing the gradients and very good job of removing noise. I can't speak for any of the 'Exterminator' products as I've never used them.

Apparently the next version of GraXpert will do deconvolution, too.

Chers,
V.