Mosaic in the making

[bmitchell82]

Well i was out again last night imaged from about 830pm though till 5am. This is a small project that im working on too :)

NGC 6357

This target is damn faint to the point where i have overstepped the 40d's capability by a fair shot. Does anybody know the actual magnitude of the object.?

18 x 10min ISO 800 ED80+finderguider

http://i700.photobucket.com/albums/ww3/brendanmitchell1982/ngc-6357processed.jpg

NGC 6334

This was a lot better, didn't have to stretch so hard on the processing!

13 x 10min ISO 800 ED+finderguider

http://i700.photobucket.com/albums/ww3/brendanmitchell1982/catpaw-NGC-6357-Processed.jpg

[RobF]

The Cat's Paw is my fav there Brendan. Looks wonderful. If you have overstepped the 40D somehow, then it was masterful processing, 'cause it doesn't show to my eye!

[bmitchell82]

hehehe Thanks Rob,

I guess you always see the bad in your own work. The reason why its pushed to within a inch of its life is due to the fact that there is 3 hrs of data there, all at near zenith and its noisy as anything. because i had to push the data to get it to lift out :( Ah well :) ill push on next target!

[multiweb]

Two very sharp and tidy shots. Nice work. :thumbsup:

[RobF]

That finder/guider attachment you made me has made all the difference in data acquisition I've found. One of the PixInsight gurus has recently developed a nice script for flipping through images, and its fascinating looking at an animation of 19 registered frames pre guider (the amount of bouncing, smearing etc when zoomed in on a single star) versus a dozen or so collected at the South Pacific Star P during an all-nighter. Nothing there CCDStack hasn't been able to do for ages, but really brought home to me the improved accuracy and productivity.

We're not talking Paramount guiding now of course, but for those of us keen to get decent results on minimal budget its VERY satisfying when you lock in something that consistently lifts the game for you. Thanks again Brendan. :thanx: (and also to Peter for kicking off the thread that reminded me to try this with a 2nd hand finder I'd bought for the purpose)

I'm not surprised to see you and the Newt collecting such great images.

[bmitchell82]

hehehe thank you Rob for that.

The ED 80 was the culprit of these 2 imgaes though rob, the 10" is sitting with its mirror out, im doing some work on the mirror cell and spidervane dept. but university exams are upon me at the moment and with 6 in the pipe and some nasty exam time tabling means that after next tuesday ill have the new spidervanes made, the new orion optics mirror cell and my new counter weight all milled/painted/fitted :) hopefully in time for a July DSO trip! w00t

Thanks marc for the compliment.

I have taken a bridging image for these two shots to make it a mosaic, how do you mosaic your shots as im getting frisky about getting it all together.! any ideas?

[multiweb]

I usually normalise all the panels to the one that has the largest dynamic range then save them all as TIFF 16bits. I then register them with registar as individual panels (union) then bring them in separate layers in Photoshop and they match without any manipulation. Don't use the photomerge function in PS. It doesn't work accurately enough on dense starfields or any field for that matter. Not consitently anyway.

[bmitchell82]

mmm i thought that is what i might have to do. looks like registar is on the to buy list.!

CCDstack does do it, but I cant get it to work properly, it keeps crashing with stacks over 8 images, im pretty sure its to do with running the system in 32bit instead of 64. things to work though!

Thanks for you help.

[Hagar]

G'Day Brendan. A couple of very nice images so far. I would think you are probably pushing a bit hard with the processing and may be better off just backing off a bit or making a lum layer with the stars a bit earlier in the processing then reintroducing it latter. You may even be at the top end of the scoped resolution also.
Nice just the same. You've captured a lot of detail.
Well done.

[bmitchell82]

Thanks doug,

Yes i do think that im at the top end of the scopes resolution, and as with my gear at the moment i think that i have nearly reached that point where all im doing is taking more images and not so much progressing in the hardware side of things. There is loads more to learn though with processing and i been working on some nice little processes of late.

All a work in progress

[multiweb]

Definitely - registar gets the job done.

Are you talking about CCDStack V2? I run it on an 2GB XP Pro machine. Nothing flash 5yr old system and it flies. Much more efficient than V1 was. CCDIS is ok to register subs with little rotation or offset but it loses it with matching subs with smaller overlapping areas. Although I use CCDStack for all my stacking and registration when it comes to match various panels I avoid it.

[bmitchell82]

yeah i have tried to use CCD stack V2 but i get no end of errors. I tried to use it to stack my NGC 6357 image. it would get all the way to data rejection then just pike itself. every single time. Plus it was having a very hard time stacking the images which was getting annoying, like it would align half the subs, the rest it would rotate them 90 deg and do stupid things. Ive used it for a fair while and havn't had any problems until this week. Not sure exactly what the issue is because im running a Win 7 2.6ghz + 2gig ram machine, it hammers though most things.