Anyone here image with an Olympus E-5?

[Garbz]

My girlfriend wanted to have a go at imaging last night with her camera. She has an Olympus E-5. Ended up doing ISO400 60sec subs totalling 2h 35min.

The end result was severely banded when we pushed the image to get the eagle nebula out. I'm trying to diagnose this now.

It could be that the moon was out and relatively close to the eagle and we just had to push it too much, or maybe the eagle is such a dark target that it's hard to image (can anyone here compare it to say the swan or lagoon?). In any case the end result was not pretty.

The other option is there's something wrong with the camera. Now I know Olympus does not have the best reputation in the noise field but either this is really bad or I'm trying to do a target way out of its reach.

An example centre crop is attached and it doesn't even show the worst banding. This is also after several passes of SCNR to remove the banding which showed up predominantly green.

[MGTechDVP]

Hello,

To me it looks like a combination of heat up of the camera sensor and stretching the image levels a bit much. Try getting longer subs, 2 or 3 minutes for at least some of your total exposure time.

Mariusz

[Garbz]

Will give that a ago. My only basis for comparison is my D800 which is hardly a fair contest.

That said I did try the hamburger the other night with a D800 some 35deg from the moon. End result was an image that didn't look too good after stretching.

[A23649]

Your using Pixinsight correct? Try in the scripts section the canon banding module and let me know how that works out.

[Garbz]

OH WOW. Thankyou. Yes I am using PI, and since I'm just starting out there's a lot I don't know about it. This here just dramatically improved the pic.

This along with a liberal dose of noise reduction actually did wonders. Unfortunately I couldn't figure out any other way to remove the colour striations also visible along with the banding above other than to apply noise reduction to large structure sizes. It's no work of art but it's much better.

[MGTechDVP]

Give it another go when there is no/very little moon light. The D800 should give you a better result, that said, your last posting looks great.

What scope are you using?

[Garbz]

Yes I've had zero problems with a D800. Time to invest in some narrowband filters I think.

I'm using a Celestron C8, NEQ6, and an Orion finderguider. In this case also a Meade f/6.3 reducer.

[MGTechDVP]

Use the D800 every time you take astro images.

Correct me if I'm wrong, only learning here, I think narrow band filters are mostly useful when your camera/DSLR will see the specturm, using a H-alpha or SII filter on a unmodded camera might be stretching it a bit.

I have a set of narrow band/LPR filters but I only tend to use CLR, UV/IR or UHC/LPR filters when the sky is too bright. I only used my OIII a couple of times, and that was only because when I was shooting the moon through the DMK41, the OIII seemed to make the image more stable/crisp.
I'm waiting for a filter replacemement to come so I can modify a 300D that a mate gave me a couple of weeks ago, so I imagine then I'll get a bit of use out of the H-Alpha, SII and OIII filters to create some "Hubble Palette" images.

[Garbz]

I have a donor camera waiting for exactly that kind of modding. I know the easy answer is to use the best tool available for the job, but this was my girlfriend's effort and her camera. She wanted to see what she could do with her camera too. "It's not the same" is the answer I got as to why she doesn't just use mine. Despite of course using my telescope, mount, autoguider, laptop, and even chair. But hey if men could understand women we'd have complete world peace right? ;)

[MGTechDVP]

Thats funny Chris.

I'm hanging to see just how much difference it'll make in my images once the camera is modded. Time will tell, I should have the replacement filter end of this week, then to spend a bit of time pulling the 300D apart.