M83 Lrgb

[rogerg]

G'day all,

The other night was doing some work on scripting etc and had the scope free for a bit. So I found a suitable 'pretty picture' target and left it snapping images. M83 was the chosen object.

Never have got a brilliant picture of M83. It's too big for my FOV, has a bright core, and so on. This is better than previous attempts, which is kinda funny because I relaly just left it going while doing other stuff, see what turned out.

All the pro's here will be able to instantly see the several faults with the image which I myself can see, but oh well, I don't do this kind of thing often (LRGB processing) and it's been a long time since I took any exposure longer than 30 seconds to deal with autoguiding! I think I calibrated my autoguider last about 4 months ago. Must get back to the PEC too.

Anyhow.. when just glancing at it without a critical mind, it's a nice little colourful galaxy :)

http://www.rogergroom.com/items/m83_lrgb

Roger.

[renormalised]

Not bad shot, Roger:)

[iceman]

Nice work, Roger. Some lovely detail in the arms.

[rogerg]

Thanks :)

I should probably point out after my initial negativity towards my shot in my original post, that I did really enjoy taking the shot, it's a nice change from other stuff I do :) It's great to have a colour shot again :)

[bluescope]

Looks pretty good to me Roger ...... lots of nice detail.

:thumbsup:

[jase]

Hmm, yes, haven't seen too much imagery from you Roger. Pleasing to see some more of your work. M83 certain fills the full frame of the ST7. You've obtains some lovely details in the spiral arms. Nice framing to also include the two little galaxies at left. Look forward to seeing more.

...and how is the NGC project coming along?

[rogerg]

yes... bring on the ST8 or similar :whistle:



Good, it's become something I've really been enjoying. Quite rewarding to end up with images of 60 odd objects from a night's run and only a little of my time. 820 objects now, out of a possible 4500 or so. I hope to complete it this year. :) .. which will tie in nicely, as I hope to be able to save the money for something like at ST8 by the end of the year or early next.

I just have to not let myself get lazy, and instead keep trying to improve the results. Always better PEC, pointing accuracy and processing to aim towards :)

Thanks for your reply.

Roger.

[rogerg]

Thanks Steve :)

[Ric]

Very nice Roger, I enjoyed the detail and the faint galaxies as well.

Cheers

[Dennis]

Hi Roger

Having only dipped my cowardly toe in the water a couple of times with my ST7 and LRGB, your M83 is a great image even with the issues you have mentioned.

Maybe its time for me to pluck up the courage again – thanks for the inspiration.

Cheers

Dennis

[jase]

Roger, have you worked out a way of displaying all these images? I'd be keen to check them all out. Perhaps use them as a reference similar to the information on the NGC/IC site (http://www.ngcic.org/).

[rogerg]

Not really :( I have been testing free options like picasa and other similar products but am not happy with using them (the ones I've tried at least). I can't use my other websites due to bandwidth limitations. At this stage I'm looking at registering another domain with hosting, but am tossing up the worth-whileness of it considering the cost to me would be min $55/year with it unlikely I'd make any money from it to cover costs. Sure, $55/year isn't much, but I already spend a bit on hosting etc so it's just that bit more.

Just last weekend I was testing some software which would generate me html thumbnail pages with the file details included, etc. That might be my cheats option, on a dedicated domain, rather than building a web application to serve them up in a smarter way.

Roger.

[jase]

What would be a real time saver is if you can rip the information you want out of the FITS header during the upload/convert process (similar to EXIF data). That way you could pull RA/DEC, exposure time, platesolve info etc and simply display it in a form. Perhaps use template files (tpl). Crawl before you walk, I guess. If the images are small, then bandwidth shouldnt be too much of a problem. Anyway, please keep us posted on your adventures.

[skeltz]

Good to see you post roger,looks allright to me.
Your ngc project sounds interesting.
cheers mate