NGC253 - ST2000XM first light!

[JohnH]

Sorry for the unoriginal target - and I know it in not all that good either but it was my first go with the ST2000xm I recently purchased on IIS (thanks Zane!).

There has been a fair bit of pain for me getting it to work but I am chuffed to bits with sensitivity and dynamic range, lots for me to learn.

This is 16x2mins Lum binned 1x1 and 16x1min RGB binned 2x2 with a fair bit of moon in the sky.

Regards

John

[cventer]

Great stuff John.

Its an awesome camera and a very nice first image.

I suspect you can get a little more out of it though. Your background is very black indicating you may be clipping some data and the main galaxy could do with a bit more curves work in photoshop to birghten a little.

Good luck with the camera. Looking forward to seeing many more shots.

What are you using to process your images ? Also what filters you using with it ?

[Alchemy]

Plenty of detail there, I do agree wih chris, just a bit more in curves to brighten up the galaxy ( I did it with your image and it looks great).

[cventer]

John

Hope you dont mind. I spent 5 min in photshop and adjusted curves, color balance, and a bit of high pass filtering and you can see a lot more of this little beauty now. I messed up your stars a bot as I only did this quickly and did not mask them out when doing curves.

You got a decent amount of detail in here for such short subs.

[TrevorW]

Longer exposures to get detail work on the colour balance

Clear skies

[ozskywatcher]

Can't actually put in print what I said when I clicked on the link to enlarge the image! :-)

Beautiful image.

Regards,

Paul Floyd.

[JohnH]

Thanks for the kind comments guys. I will do better with this - longer subs especially for the colour frames which were noisy - I did not do flats (well I did but they were to0 short so I could not use tham (due to shutter effect - not used to a mechanical shutter) plus there was a fair bit of light pollution (hence the clipping). All in all it could be heaps better, better data and better processing, but I just wanted to get an image...now I will try to make a good one.

The filters are the ones SBIG supplied - I guess that makes them Astrodons, but I also have a set of Astronomics. Not sure which I should keep and which I should sell - I do not need both.

Chris do I mind - are you nuts - I am thrilled folks take the time to provide feedback and examples - your re-process looks great. Yes I need to mask and push the bright areas to get the galaxy details and keep the stars under control, the results are very promising.

The data was collected in CCDSoft, calibrated with DSS, LRGB processed in AA4 and tweaked (badly) in Photoshop. Why so complex - I am using what I know from previous ccd work with CCDSoft addded as I have not found AA4 support for the SBig CCDs to be very good.

[Ross G]

A nice photo John.

Lots of detail.


Ross.

[multiweb]

That's a really cool shot. :thumbsup: John's got the idea re:color balance but I reckon he's white clipped the stars and your rendition is much more natural. Here's the best of both worlds: your details + his color.

[JohnH]

Here is my second go at this object - this time 8*10 mins L plus 16*1 min RGB. I have my flats under control now. Processing is better but not brilliant. And I had the AO unit working this time....happy!

[Osirisra]

Nice!