Freds 1st M42, extreme NB, Gaud ;-)

[Bassnut]

Hi Guys

Well, I had to do it, eventually :P. If Mikes going NB, then I go M42...., and before him, so he can see how to do it :rofl:

Its over the top, and why not :D. Beware, does not suit eveyones taste :whistle:

M42 Orion Nebula Core (http://fredsastro.googlepages.com/M42NBfinalsitecopy.jpg/M42NBfinalsitecopy-full;init:.jpg) in Colour Mapped Narrowband
Ha:SII:Ha:OIII Ha 3nm 3hrs bin1; SII 45min; OIII 45min both bin2 Mapped as LRGB
Ha 10 and 1min subs, SII, OIII 5 and 1 min subs
Taken on a Meade 12" LX200R OTA, G11, ST10XME, at f6.7


I think ill have a beer now :thumbsup:

[RB]

Very seventies Fred.
Reminds me of the Brady Bunch !

:poke:

[Bassnut]

Geez, you got me there Andrew, umm, what does that mean ??? :help:.

Or........... are you insinuating random clicking in PS under some sort of "creative influence" was at play :D.

The Brady Bunch reference is a puzzle then :P

[renormalised]

Yes......great shot......colourful to say the least. Very 70's:P:D

More like something Cream, Osi Bissa or The Who would use, at the time. Or something from the Beatles "psychedelic Indian guru" period:P:D

[[1ponders]]

You've obviously never seen a Brady Bunch movie in colour then Fred. :lol:

[[1ponders]]

Very interesting shot btw :thumbsup:

[RB]

:rofl:
See we're obviously on the same wavelength !

BTW I do like it Fred, your work is always inspiring mate. :thumbsup:

[strongmanmike]

Oh YEAH!!!!! I LOVE IT MAN!
Far out man and groovey I love this narrow band stuff :2thumbs: bring it oooooon! Yeeehaaaaa!

Mike Brady

[Hagar]

WOW, Not really my cup of tea but definitely one to look at on happy pills.

[Bassnut]

OK, thanks guys. Geez, I was heading for a hiding it seems :P, lets see you lot get that close without core burn out he :poke::D.

[Garyh]

Psychedelic Fred! Wow man! Ah you have now fallen into the bottomless pool of the 70`s remakes lol.

M42 geez`s Fred, are you trying to be different? :lol::lol::lol:

But nice detail showing there! :thumbsup:
cheers Gary

[Alchemy]

dare to be different and push the boundarys, go for it fred :thumbsup:

[seeker372011]

"Picture yourself in a boat on a river,
With tangerine trees and marmalade skies
....................

Cellophane flowers of yellow and green,
Towering over your head."

yeah I can see all that

[jjjnettie]

Very trippy!
The detail of the trap is awesome.

[h0ughy]

mmm i have seen tie dyed headbands like that, but without the detail of the trap thats for sure.

Must be the new alcopop beers Eh Fred. though i cant wait for Mike Sidonio's reply image to this!!!

[multiweb]

Very cool Fred. Colors and details are awesome. :thumbsup:

[Matty P]

And I thought I have seen M42 in every possible light so to speak.

Well it is certainly different Fred. I like it. :thumbsup:

[Bassnut]

Thanks Gary, Clive, Narayan, Jeanette, Dave, Marc and Matt.

Geez, theres a fair few 70s hippies in here, what a nostalgia trip :D.

Mind you, Im a bit young for that :whistle:.

Dunno now if that different is actually worth it, so ill have to do a "serious" RGB version now, to regain some measure of credibility :P.

[peeb61]

'I'll have what your having Fred'
I can sit and look at it for hours and hours.....

Paul

[Peter Ward]

Careful mixing medication with Bourbon Fred....

:)

[Bassnut]

Yeah, youd have to be on someting to look for hrs and hrs :P :lol: (I remember that, you wind up looking at the the oddest thing for far to long ;)).

Medication ?, OK punk, thats it, boring RGB comming soon :mad2:.

[AlexN]

Fred, Fantastically close! The core looks great.. trap stars are well resolved, and very very small... Gotta love narrowband for that! :)

Tis surely quite a bit closer than my image at 1750mm with QHY8...

Very interesting indeed.. I look forward to a Ha+R SII+G OIII+B

[Bassnut]

Alex. ahh, finally an actual technical comment, thanks for that:).

Yes, 3nm Ha sure renders fine detail. Guiding at that position in the sky was fairly awefull though, so much time in PS.

Look, its so bright any rig could do a top job on it. All it needs is some short subs and use of layer masks in PS to easily resolve the core, its really not that hard.

[leon]

I'll be honest, :whistle: don't like it at all. :shrug:i

Leon :thumbsup:

[gregbradley]

Thats a pretty wild image Fred.;)

I like the detail in the core that is something you rarely see unless its a huge RC.

I think you are a rebel at heart:lol:

Greg.

[Bassnut]

Leon. I totally understand :thumbsup:, Ill do it properly with RGB.

Thanks Greg. The detail was just there in the short subs, no special effort, dont know why its not shown more often. Dunno about rebel, I actually intended to do it well, but I just gave up before it got even wierder :whistle:.

[gregbradley]

[Thanks Greg. The detail was just there in the short subs, no special effort, dont know why its not shown more often. Dunno about rebel, I actually intended to do it well, but I just gave up before it got even wierder :whistle:.[/quote]

Just joking about the rebel.

Ever since you got that 3nm Ha your images have shown extraordinary detail.

You are a good ad for those Meade ACF scopes. Made me think a few times about getting one. They really are extraordinary value and perform really well. Long focal length and large aperture at low cost compared to their competition.

Do you find the corrector can fog over in winter? Or is that just a matter of a dew heater?

14 inch OTAs come up occassionally and if you compare the cost to other 14 inch scopes there is really nothing that competes except maybe some Newts (not ASA though).

Can't understand why Meade haven't sold a gazillion of them - maybe they have.

Greg.

[Bassnut]

Greg

Well yes, I recon the 3nm does the trick, but it does require long exposures and a Hi QE cam (the ST10 is around 85% peak). Megadata also improves detail (in processing) that would not be required so much for a quality tube.

The Meade tube is good value, but I think if your serious, like your good self, you stump up the extra dosh for incremental quality increase regardless. So rich astro guys just dont own their 1st Meade anymore, so you dont see many images with them with expensive astrocams.

Interestingly, I wonder if a 3nm filter gives the same sort of detail increase than a way more expensive tube would with 15nm.

I suspect Meade have sold a gazzilion complete *systems* with my tube, but the mount wouldnt be suitable for long FL, very long exposure photography (20mins and more), and by the time a seperate mount/tube purchase is considered, users have moved on from Meade.

[renormalised]

The Meades are a good generalist scope. As Fred said, I wouldn't rely on them for very long exposure astrophotography (the mount's not really accurate enough for that), however taking subs of 10-20 minutes and stacking them is going to produce some pretty spec piccies. However, I wouldn't fault them for that, and whilst you can get better scopes for imaging, you're going to need the "doe ray me" to get one. Thing is, you're going to pay big bucks to get similar coma free FoV's from guys like Planewave and RCOS, where I can fork out $3700 for an 8" and get exactly the same optical performance (or near the same). Admittedly you're not going to get the big piccies out of an 8" like you can out of a bigger scope, but a 12-16" Meade is going to be one sweet scope. Now they build 20" Meades.

Visually, the Meades are a treat....the stars are pinpoint and bright right out to the edge of your FoV and nebs look crisp and defined. I'm very happy with my 8" ACF. It's not an "uber scope" and can do everything, including serving drinks:P, but it does what I want it to....and in the end that's what we all expect from our scopes.

[AlexN]

Greg - I dont know what its like in Fred's location, but here, the corrector fogs up quite a bit, and a dew heater generally is not enough to stop it completely.. I'm working on something that will sit inside the aperture just infront of the corrector, hoping that it will stop dew, at the moment with a dew heater band at full power around the outside of the tube just doesn't cut it.. even with a 1.2ft long dew shield.

I was back and forth between the C11/Meade 10" ACF... Chose the C11 due to price/availability... Im sure I can make it sing soon enough... SBIG ST-9E is inbound! :) Nice an sensitive, shame about the tiny images it will produce, but its a start towards quality imaging with the C11 :)

I think with a bigger chip, I'd definitely have stuck it out for the ACF scope...

My next camera will likely be a STL-1001, so still, not a "large" chip, my C11 should still handle well..

[renormalised]

The C11 is a very good scope, as are all Celestrons. I should imagine with its long FL you'd be looking at getting a fairly large px chip for the C11, more so than the actual physical size....although a chip around the 23-35mm diagonal size would be good to have. Only problem at long FL, are you going to have enough coverage to fill the chip's FoV with the object you're imaging. Trying to image large nebulae like this would mean using mosaics to cover the object. Look at Fred's image here taken at long FL...sheesh, it felt like I was flying past the neb, not looking at it from 1500ly away!!. That's why guys like Mike S and Peter W are using Taks and such for their widefield abilities. Ultimately, it's a matter of what you like doing and a C11 is more than versatile enough for taking good shots, even reasonably wide ones, with a focal reducer.

[Bassnut]

I must say, ive never had problems with dew on the FR, only on the front and the guide scope, which now have heaters.

[renormalised]

Good match for a C11.....how much, Alex??

[AlexN]

Fred - Does your heater stop the dew on the corrector plate of the SCT? I think my problem is that I turn mine on too late... and it takes a while to warm the corrector... mine will fog up, and once it fogs, its pretty much all over, I cant get the corrector to clear up just using the heater.. a hair drier helps, but it generally only buys me some time.. :(

Renormalised : Swapped the Megrez 102 + a bit of cash for ST-9E + AO-7 + Water Cooling :)

[Bassnut]

Alex. Oops, on a re read, Greg said corrector , sorry, yes of course, the heater is around the outside over the corrector. I have a home made controller on it with a Kedrick heater, but I found the fiddling with the setting didnt make much difference, so I dont bother with it, its on full all the time. In fact the heater, G11 and cam (it has a 12v fSBIG pwr supply) are all on the same supply, they all come on together with it year round so I dont even think about it. They all then turn off together on auto shut down . The corrector was very prone to dewing without the heater, so its on all the time, no brainer.

I considered a carbon C11 at the time I bought the meade, for less focus drift with temp (carbon tube) and much lighter, and still think it maybe a better option given the marginal G11 performance with the 12" meade, but I got the LX200R cause of its new (at the time) "RC" like optics and no mirror flop. I dont hear of mirror flop on C11s so much now, is it fixed?.

Im happy with the Meade BTW, I found it awesome on a PME for a while, as strange a match as that sounds.

[gregbradley]

Thanks for the insights.

With dewing a cheap solution I got one time was this insulation blanket much like a windscreen heat shield. It wraps around the objective of your refractor and you put it on at sunset. It kept the objective a little warmer than elsewhere and this inhibits dew. No power required.

It worked well. Had a bit of velcro so you could wrap it around the scope.

I was more talking about a Meade ACF OTA only mounted on a GEM.

14 inches is a lot of aperture and a 14 inch RCOS is huge money.

How much better is the RCOS? You can't entirely argue the corrector causes chromatic aberration as I don't see any in Fred's shots and a 14 inch RCOS needs a flattener anyway which introduces lenses and potential chromatic aberration. If you can conquer the dew problem in winter it could be quite a nice rig.

I know it would be only good for galaxies and super close ups. With a smaller chip camera you have a large choice of reducers from Meade, Celestron, Astrophysics, Tak, they'd all work.

I had a Nexstar 11 GPS. Wonderful visual scope but the main issue with SCTs seems to me is the bloated stars.

Greg.

[renormalised]

Well, yes and no. I've seen some good whole neb shots with the Meades too. However if you want to shoot widefield with one, there are some Meade and Celestron models which you can fit hyperstar lenses to which converts them into f/1.8-f/2.0 scopes.

[AlexN]

But widefield is for sissys Renormalised.. :P

Fred - From now on I'll just fire up the heater at full stick and leave it there all night... that might be the fix I've been looking for... The C11's mirror flop doesn't appear to me to be all that bad... Mind you, I've never imaged past the meridian with it.. (Im yet to run a single sub longer than 5 mins through it... so I suppose im hardly in a position to comment on the flop factor :))

[Bassnut]

Yes, the biggest obvious difference by far between my RCOS and Meade, was the tiny stars on the RC, and somewhat less obviously the increased detail. Im no perfectionist, and found (with megadata on the Meade) one instance of deconvolute fixed that real quick, althogh I guess the Meade stars still dont look as good as the RC.

The RCOS, as you know, has a whole lot more for the money though, focus hardly drifts at all with temp, and despite the problems ive had with it, when its working, the RCOS TCC (telescope control center) is a work of art.

But you know what, in the end, given a choice, I would MUCH rather have a Meade 12 or 14" on a PME for less money than an RCOS 12" on a G11 !!, no comparison IMO.

The G11 value is fine BTW :), no complaints, but for 12" long FL, the mount is far more important than the tube.

[renormalised]

I wonder how good the new Meade MAX mount and system are??. They seem to be getting good reviews.

[renormalised]

Bah humbug!!!!:P:D

[Ric]

Great image Fred, luuurve the colours.

Triggered a bit of 70's flashback episode though :P but that's ok coz I can now remember a few more things that happened. :rofl:I used to wear flairs.:scared:

Cheers