Eta Carina - second attempt

[monoxide]

well this one looks a touch better than the last :whistle:
i touched up my drift alignment, still not 100% but its close enough while i'm still playing around. my good friend next door (....) had his flood light pretty much right on where i was set up so that didn't really help a lot.
nearly 3 hours of data here and its well worth it, i wish it was possible to upload the tif :)
i'll definately be going back over this one tomorrow with fresh eyes, i just wanted to get an eyeball on what i'd captured.

i'm not sure whats happening in the top left corner of the frame either, i don't think the darks are subtracting properly as i can see a fair bit of what looks like amp glow (??) before calibration. its almost like a bit of vignetting behind the amp glow, that corner seems to be black clipping in all of my images so far which is why i had trouble setting the black point.

anyway here it is.

17x 600s MPCC + UHC-S

high res: http://i289.photobucket.com/albums/ll226/t0nesAstro/carinacalibrated.jpg

[bluescope]

That's one heck of an image there Tj ... plenty of detail. Perhaps you should try using flats to deal with the vignetting. I'm not up to parr on the procedure but others in IIS are ( I'm sure someone will tell you about it ) and there are articles on the subject in the projects and articles link top left of site menu. The only other thing you could try would be GradientXTerminator but with such a full frame I don't think it's the answer ... it really works best when you have some space around the subject.

Good work !

:thumbsup:

p.s. I just did a quick GradientXTerminator filter on your big image and reduced it etc to post. You can see what effect it has had. I still tend to think flats may be a better solution/more subtle but that's up to you and others opinions.;)

[Gama]

Excellent work.

Theo

[monoxide]

thanks guys.

i definately need flats, i just haven't built a lightbox yet.
i just tried gradientxterminator on the tif and had another little play with the image.

heres another version: http://i289.photobucket.com/albums/ll226/t0nesAstro/carinarepro.jpg
and heres a 100% crop of the keyhole: http://i289.photobucket.com/albums/ll226/t0nesAstro/keyhole.jpg

[Robert_T]

Hi Tj, wow what a visual treat! A real 3D feel. The knot, twists and swirls seem to have a lot of depth:thumbsup:

Do you need a light box for a decent flat? I have heard others mention just a white t-shirt over the lens and exposing to 1/3rd of the full pixel value range?

cheers,

rob

[Matty P]

TJ that is just beautiful! The colour looks spot on with subtle detail.

The second reprocessed image is just great.

Well done. :thumbsup:

[leon]

Your doing well Matty that one has come up a treat, well done, with your darks, best to do INCR on, and the flats, no need for a light box, you can even shoot the clear sky 20 minutes or so after sunset, and set your exposure on AV, or use the white cover of the lens trick, they all work fine, but a bit of getting used to I suppose.

leon

[monoxide]

Thanks guys, i was really happy with the detail i got in this one.

i still dont think the top left part of the frame is from vignetting or the lack of flats (even though thats still a big problem) i think its more to do with the way the dark is being applied.
that entire corner is filled with amp glow in my subs and when the dark subtracts it, it seems to subtract the data with it causing it to clip before the rest of the image.

Leon: this thing doesn't have INCR or AV mode mate :lol:

i'm going to shoot some more darks in a minute and try calibration again, ill also try to get some flats somehow, even if they aren't 100% they should be better than nothing.

[multiweb]

That's awesome mate! :eyepop: The details and contrast are mind blowing.:thumbsup:

[monoxide]

i took some flats and started again from scratch so heres my final version calibrated with darks/flats/bias images:

http://i289.photobucket.com/albums/ll226/t0nesAstro/carinacalibrated.jpg

pretty crude way of taking flats but it seems to have worked, i did expect to see some gradient from my neighbours floodlight though.

[strongmanmike]

Wow, that's rather spectacular :thumbsup:

Mike

[monoxide]

thanks Mike,
i'm still finding it funny that a few 'shopping bag flats' actually worked and worked well.

i actually thought Theo was joking for a bit

[Gama]

Did you think i was kidding ?..
Cause i wasnt. I do it this way, and it works great, as you can see.

Theo.

[monoxide]

i had been searching for different ways of taking flats and i never even saw the shopping bag way, made sense when i saw it over the end of the tube though.

i didnt think it would diffuse the light enough for where i was aiming the tube (a painted brick wall) thats why i was suprised that it worked so well

[Gama]

I sort of have to thank my wife for this method, cause at the time of me trying to do flats by different means (As yourself), my wife calls out to me to help her bring the shopping inside. On my way to and from the car picking up the shopping, it struck me to use the bags.. Even i thought it was a crazy idea, but it worked.

Theo

[Hagar]

This is a really wonderful image. The detail is so in focus and the colour spred is wonderful. Better get me a shopping bag me thinks.

Great work Steve.

[Bloodbean]

Amazing details! Which of your scopes did you use to capture this image?

Troy

[AlexN]

awesome! extreme detail captured throughout. :)

The newest calibration is a great improvement over the originally posted image, and to think its all thanks to a plastic shopping bag! :) Is there no end to their usefulness?

[monoxide]

thanks guys,
credit goes to Theo for the shopping bag flats lol.
Troy: the image was taken through my 6" newt