Ngc6357

[peter_4059]

Another frustrating night last night. Had a lot of trouble with the guiding and finally resorted to drift aligning again. Guiding did improve thereafter however I'll need to review the balance for imaging to the East as I was getting some unusual jumps occasionally.

After 2 hours of wasted time I did manage 1.5 hrs on NGC6357 before the clouds rolled in. Clearly not enough data to do this justice.

As always, comments and advice welcome.

[ozstronomer]

Looks good for 1.5 hrs Pete, shame about the guiding always frustrating when things just all of a sudden don't work :P

[RobF]

I reckon you're being too hard on youself again Peter ;)
That's a wonderful image. I love the presentation of the brighter stars - its so easy to get the "flat disc" syndrome and oversaturate them with a Newt, particularly if processing is overdone. That's subtle and smooth. Pretty damned good for city imaging I would have thought :thumbsup:

[multiweb]

Nice close-up Peter. Really sharp details in there. Amazing actually. :thumbsup:

[peter_4059]

Thanks Geoff. I've had a couple of tries at this but have never really been happy with the result. I'm beginning to think a wider field of view would make processing a bit easier as it is hard to know if the surrounding area is nebulosity or a colour cast.



Thanks Rob. I did end up clipping the white point a bit despite keeping a pretty close watch on this however the colour seemed to be maintained in the brighter stars. I'm looking forward to getting under some dark Duckadang skies to give this another try.



Thanks Marc. The Catseye and Bahtinov mask sure have made a big difference to the detail in my images.

[RobF]

I think the difficulty level really does go up a couple of notches shooting these fainter nebs against the city skyglow. Signal to noise gets hit both ways. Are you planning to do any Ha on this one Peter?

[Paul Haese]

It took me a moment to recognise it, not seen it at that scale before. Pretty good presentation for 1.5 hours.

[Ross G]

I would be so happy with a shot like that Peter.

Looks great.


Thanks.

Ross.

[h0ughy]

i dont think i have seen this one before - for only a short take looks ok to me - looks like some thing blue to the lower right - whats nearby there?

[troypiggo]

Good stuff mate! First time I looked at it on a small screen. Didn't to it justice - much better at this scale on my bigger laptop.

[peter_4059]

I hadn't thought to try Ha but this sounds like a good project for Astrofest. It is hard to judge the brightness of these in Astroplanner - the DSS images all look good.



Thanks Paul. I didn't have a good perspective of the extent of this until I googled it. The DSS images I use for framing are all 1 deg fields and it looked like it fitted in my FOV based on this.



Thanks Ross. I wasn't happy with the guiding and have some elongated stars unfortunately.



Cheers Dave. I went looking at wider field images but couldn't see anything obvious that would contribute to the blue glow. Might be light from the house?



Cheers Troy. On the downhill slope now mate. Soon you will join the 40 something club and will be reaching for your reading glasses!