NGC4755 Jewel Box

[telecasterguru]

A small image of the Jewel Box from my back landing in inner Sydney last night. I need to practice drift alignment, guiding and processing as much as I can.
11 minutes imaging, 200mm Newt EQ6 ED80 guide PHD Canon 1000D iso400 DSS and PS3.

Frank

[iceman]

Nice work Frank, coming along.

When will you start with calibration frames? Darks and flats?

[telecasterguru]

Mike,

I am trying to deal with darks and flats but being the rather impatient person that I am, I don't particularly like taking blank pictures. So, I just picked up CCD Stacker which does a very good job of removing hot/cold pixels and doing sigma data reject so I maybe I won't have to worry about darks too much. Is this a fair enough assumption or am I stretching it a bit?
As a start I am practicing the CCD stacker with the SPSP imaging contest data and it is amazing.

Thanks
Frank

[multiweb]

Nice shot! Calibration makes a huge difference to your data. Once you do it you'll never go back and wonder why you didn't start doing it earlier :)

[spearo]

Hi Frank (that felt weird:lol:)

Nice shot!
I remember Mike also telling me to use flats etc a few years back...I eventually listened (i'm a slow learner i'm sure...) and never looked back.
Flats (even a few rapid shots with a t-shirt in front of the scope with camera unmoved) should make a huge difference.

For what its worth, I use DSS too and the cosmetix function set at 1pix, 1% removes all my noise so well that when I use darks it tends to make the image a bit worse so if you're a bit impatient like me, catch a few flats and defer darks for a while (i'm soooo gonna get flamed/kicked off IIS for saying this i just know it...)

The image as is could probably just be adjusted a bit with levels in PS (mainly the black point set should be moved a bit to the right to darken the background sky)

good work keep it up and keep having fun
frank

[telecasterguru]

Thanks Frank,
After your kind words I will post something in the main imaging thread for comments.
Thanks Frank

[Hagar]

Nice image but as the others have stated, it would improve immencely with calibration. Keep at it.

[Lester]

Nice image, tracking and star colours, and great tips from others on here.

All the best.

[RB]

Frank, that's a very good image considering you haven't applied darks and flats.
As others have said, please look into taking both darks and flats, you will be kicking yourself later that you didn't do it earlier.
It makes a *huge* difference when you process the data.

Lately I have been applying as much dark frames as light frames and also do around 15 to 20 flats and it's helped me stretch the data much further.

Anyway, I know what it's like when first starting out, it seems like such a waste of imaging time to have to do darks/flats.

You're off to a great start, much better than when I first started.

:thumbsup:

[telecasterguru]

Thanks for all the advice everyone. I have used darks and flats before but with my limited processing ability have found little or no difference in the final image. (What am I doing wrong?) Having said that, I believe that my 1000D has the capacity to take darks in tandem with the lights and I will be looking into that this afternoon. Obviously this will double the imaging time.
In addition, I was looking for a number of different galaxies on Wednesday, including the Sombrero and Centaurus A, and was unable to find any (no they wasn't behind the lounge) so I am going to Crago tonight to get a bit more darkness. GOTO says they're there but could find nothing. The pleasures of living within 2k of Sydney CBD.

Frank