Ngc5128

[theodog]

Hi All,

Gotta get me nightly hit of imagin'.:D

Through moon and high cloud I obtained;
36x5minL 1 dark
3x5min RGB 2x2binned 1 dark
Lum's stacked with Deepsky Stacker.
Colour combined with MaximDL and then fiddled and cropped.:whistle:

[leon]

Not a bad effort considering the conditions Chris, probably a little over cropped, but that is my opinion only, however well done.

Leon

[multiweb]

Nice. What did you use for tracking over 5min? What kind of Auto-guiding?

[Ric]

Hi Jeff, very up close imaging but nice, it looks like you are picking up the finer details of the dust lane

Cheers

[rogerg]

Overall I like the image and would be very happy with the result if it were mine. However, some comments to perhaps promote improvement:

There appears to be a bit of a magenta cast on the top left, but a green cast on the bottom right? I'm not quite sure what would cause that, but it looks like the colouring could be improved by some further processing in something like photoshop to "balance out" the colour across the image.

The dust lane through the centre shows excellent detail, I'm particularly interested in the slight colouration to the right end of the dust lane which looks interesting. I wonder if a very slight unsharpen applied to the dust lane area would be beneficial? (using a mask to only apply it to the dust lane perhaps).

Finally, it looks like you suffer from a similar problem as I do much of the time - focal length being slightly longer than desired. The slight blurryness of the stars suggests that for the viewing conditions you might have been better at 2x2 than 1x1 binning, it seems the viewing conditions weren't quite up to 1x1? However, no matter how many times people tell me this, I usually ignore it and would do 1x1 :)

I wonder if a few more dark frames would've helped you smooth out the noise a little more (perhaps 10 darks, 10 bias).

Nice tracking, nice amount of exposure data (36 lum), great detail in that dust lane, pretty good low level of noise.

As I said before, nice image, and one I'd be happy with myself :thumbsup:

[Terry B]

Nice detail in the dust lane.
Is is really 3 hours of lum and only 45 total of colour?

[Peter Ward]

Things to fix:, gradients, colour balance & focus.

Nailed it: tracking...dead nuts on! :)

Stick with it!

Peter

[jase]

A fine effort Jeff. You've acquired plenty of data to play with. As Peter points out, colour balance would really make the difference on this image.

[theodog]

Thanks all for the feedback, it was appreciated.:thumbsup:
Yes, I agree with every comment. Will try harder next time.:doh:

The subs were auto guided as a sequence of 3x(12x5min)L. hence 36.



The guiding is performed by MaximDL CCD. It is easy to set up and use.:)

[rogerg]

Personally I don't think it's about trying harder, trying too hard is no fun in my book :), it's just about doing it again and you always improve with time/attempts.

[skeltz]

Good going jeff,its a steep learning curve sometimes but it keeps the old grey matter exercised doesn,t it
Keep it up

[tornado33]

Hi Jeff
Yep very good tracking there. Nice deep image too.
How long are the guiding exposures, just a few seconds I take it?

Hope you dont mind but I used Gradient xterminator PS plugin to even up the background.

With a dslr or indeed any big chip imager gradients can be a real pain particularily in the city and not at the zenith, Gradient Xterminator usually works very well, it can even up both the background intensity and the colour.
Scott

[marc4darkskies]

Be proud Jeff - a fine image. I'd agree with the others though - back off on the cropping a tad and spend more time to process out the noise - I'd expect you have enough Lum data for that.

Cheers, Marcus