First light EQ6 Pro - M8 & M20

[Matty P]

After a couple of failed attempts at Polar aligning my EQ6, I finally got it right. The Weather Gods must have had a day off leaving the skies crystal clear. The only problem was the almost full Moon that dominated the night sky.

I met up with Prova (Mark) earlier during the night and helped him with the drift alignment method before trying to get my EQ6 polar aligned properly. Just by helping Mark get correctly Polar Aligned it really helped me to get my mount setup properly. I spent roughly around an hour and a half drift aligning to get the tracking good enough for some short exposures.

It was great to acutally have a mount that can accurately track a star without any field rotation.

I decided to image two of my favourite DSO’s the Lagoon and Triffid Nebula. I didn’t really go as deep as I would have liked to but it is a start.

Celestron 8SE SCT with f/6.3 Focal Reducer on an EQ6 Pro. Both images are 8 x 1 minutes subs stacked in DSS and processed in PS CS3, ISO 1600 and ICNR darks, cropped and reduced to 800px for the web.

Thanks for looking. :thumbsup:

[madtuna]

YEAH!!!!!

Matty you have no idea how I've sat with fingers crossed waiting for this post lol :D

go you!!!

[AlexN]

Well done Matty.

Great for 8mins of data!!

[Robert_T]

Both look great Matty, and great to see you getting the hang of the polar alignment and guiding thing... this is something I'm still struggling with:thumbsup:

In photoshop levels or curves have you tried clicking on the black eye-dropper icon and then clicking somewhere that should be black in the image. This has been a boon for darkening the background on my images.

cheers,

Rob

[AlexN]

Matty: I hope you dont mind my doing so, but I've just done a quick job on the curves/saturation/color balance in photoshop.

The images seem to have HEAPS in them, with more time and fine tuning im sure you can get alot more out of these...

I had to drop the quality to around 80% to post them back up..

[Matty P]

Me too. It has been well worth the wait. :thumbsup:

Thanks.



Thanks Alex. :thumbsup:

Hopefully next I will capture more subs to stack.



Thanks for the tip Rob. :thumbsup:

[Matty P]

I don't mind at all Alex. Thanks :thumbsup:

A big problem I have is that I do all my processing on a laptop then move the final processed image across to the desktop. Both the laptop and desktop screens are not calibrated making the image appear different when compared next to each other. It makes trying to get the a good colour balance extremely difficult.

It may be a good idea to calibrate them both. :)

[bluescope]

Good effort Matt ! I don't think you mentioned them being auto guided images, am I correct ( eggy stars ) ? I think you would have done longer subs than 1 minute if they were !
I hope you don't mind I adjusted them a little ... just quickly ... GradienXTerminator ( course setting ) and desaturated a duplicated layer to use as luminance 50% then slightly increased saturation overall before saving as web image. Bit hard doing anything with small images as I'm sure you know mate. Anyway I hope you like the result.
Onwards and upwards from now on Matt.

:thumbsup:

[AlexN]

mmm Calibrating the monitors to the same level is a great idea... I have a hard time getting my laptop to match my desktop due to the massive difference in them (15.4" laptop that isnt very contrasty -> 52" Sony HD LCD with contrast all over the place)

If your monitors can match up it will make all the difference! :D

[Matty P]

Thanks for the reprocess Steve. :thumbsup:

These shots were unguided.

[Matty P]

The weird thing is that these images look perfect in terms of colour balance on the laptop but when viewing them on my desktop the colour looks totally wrong and it appears quite dark.

So I don't really know what the image will look like on an correctly calibrated moniter.

:shrug:

[AlexN]

then it gets tricky when you ask yourself the question "did i calibrate it correctly?" and then you wonder what it looks like on everyone elses monitors...

Trust me, it never ends..

[prova]

Great to meet up last night Matty and glad I could (a little) with polar alignment.

Great first shots and hope to see many more to come..

To: AlexN - wheres my 350D!? lol

:lol:

[2020BC]

Congrats, Matt. Looks like you've got yourself a nice mount there. Nice shots. :thumbsup: What you've captured looks about right for an unmod camera. You'll need more than 8 mins total exposure for these targets. When you get more data, process it the same and then try cranking up the contrast a bit. Looks like you're going to get some beauties soon.

[Matty P]

Thanks Mark,

It was great meeting you last night.

Hope to do it again.



Thanks Bill,

I would have liked to capture a lot more subs but I just wanted to see how accurate the tracking was etc.

Next imaging session I am definitely going to go much deeper and collect more subs.

:thumbsup:

[Ric]

Hi Matty, great looking shots the detail is starting to come through very nicely and the colours are very natural looking.

Looking forward to your deeper shots.

Cheers

[Matty P]

I decided to reprocess both of the images using my desktop computer instead of the laptop.

I used exactly the same processing techniques that I used to process the first two.

I would like to know what you think of these images compared to the first lot and how they look on your moniter.

Thanks. :thumbsup:

[Screwdriverone]

Hi Matty,

Top effort! Very good results in my opinion.

Using my fabulously experienced Afocal eye for detail of DSO's :lol: I would have to say that I prefer your original Trifid M20 shot and Bluescope's reprocessed version of M8 Lagoon.

Ps. Sorry Alex, you know how much I like your images, but YUCK! those reprocessed images are waaaaay to red/magenta for me..... sorry, it might not mean much coming from a noob like me but I thought I might risk the abuse., ;)

Cheers

Chris

[AlexN]

chris. I was waiting for someone to say something like that... I'm color blind, so to me, they look fairly natural.. Perhaps a bit red.:) i'm going to have a lot me trouble in a few weeks when i fire up the eq6 and dslr on my 6" refractor.. I.ll be constantly asking for help..

[Screwdriverone]

Hi Alex,

Yeah, sorry to say it but bleaaargh! its 'orrible.

I also thought I might put up or shut up so I had a go at Matty's originals and used my high tech processing method of -5 brightness and +30 contrast in Gimp for both and just some colour saturation balance for the M20 shot to bring out the blue a bit more.

edit: just did some more high tech work on images and posted the new unsharped ones as M8b and m20b. I think they look good? used 0.7/0.76/0 in the unsharp settings in gimp.

Come on, let me have it (cringe)

Chris

[Matty P]

Thanks for the reprocess Chris.

I quite like the M20 but I thought that the Lagoon was supposed to red? :shrug:

I really aprreciate the helps guys. :thumbsup:

[madtuna]

Matty..I thought your orginals were lovely but seeing as everyone's having ago I thought I would too.
Yours and everyone elses processing skills are much better than mine so I just added a tree, a flower and a smiley face :D

[Matty P]

Steve you crack me up. :lol::D:rolleyes:

It works though, it takes the attention off the eggy stars! ;)

[AlexN]

lol. Awesome

[madtuna]

Feel free to enter it in CWAS.. just mention me in your acceptance speech :D

[Screwdriverone]

HA HA HA HA Steve,

Ahh, I see you are using the new Sesame Street unsharp mask in Mr Squiggle 5.2 ("upside down Miss Jane!). It came out rather well, now because you've had a long day it's time for your nap. There's a good boy!

;)

Chris