Cats Paw NGC6334

[peter_4059]

Finally got some clear skies last night and thought I'd give the DSLR a try before the moon cleared my horizon. I've been wanting to try the cats paw for some time so here it is...14x3mins, ISO800, ICNR.

I wasn't completely happy with my guiding - I think I needed it to be a bit out of balance in RA and I think this shows in the stars. I also noticed quite a bit of grain creeping in when I applied iterations of curves - something I wasn't expecting given the number of stacked images - perhaps due to my choice of settings in Deep Sky Stacker?

Comments (help) welcomed...

[TrevorW]

Can't get a lot of info on this one but from what I gather its a relatively dim object under 6:00vm so longer exposures would be the go nice though as you said tracking appears a bit off from the star shapes but otherwise very good I'll put this one on my list.

[CoolhandJo]

This is a good image regardless. All I can add is maybe go for 6 to 8 minute subs if you are confident you have your tracking ok. Just adding maybe 4 x 8min at ISO 800 may add quite a bit more depth to this nebula (which in itself has depth that requires teasing out).

[peter_4059]

Thanks Trevor and Paul. I would like to try some longer subs but the moon/sky glow is pretty bad here and I seem to have a guiding problem that needs resolving. I added a counterweight bar to improve the RA balance but perhaps I've got it too well balanced now. I also had problems with Guidemaster not wanting to calibrate however PHD seemed to work fine. Very strange?

[Hagar]

Hi Peter, another very nicely composed image. I think you can probably stretch it a little more and extract a bit more detail from the nebula without over doing it. Don't be frightened to work the image hard from the start as if it doesn't work out you can always re do it anyway. This could be a good one to add too in the future.

Guiding looks pretty good even though you said you had some problems. The resolution from this setup is very good as your images show.

Great stuff again.

[peter_4059]

Thanks Doug.

I was finding the image became really noisy when I applied another round of curves so stopped there. I thought this might be to do with using Average stacking in DSS and just gave it another try with Median but got a similar result.

I'm going to spend tonight trying to sort out my guiding as it has been really tight in the past but I was getting egg shaped stars in the RA direction last night. The whole guiding thing was really weird last night - Guidemaster was ok to begin with but later in the evening it wouldn't calibrate telling me there wasn't enough movement in Dec. When I switched over to PHD it calibrated happily?

Here's the "median" repro