M31 D800 and FSQ106

[alocky]

Here's an hour's worth of M31 with the D800 @ iso 2000, 10 min subs and an astronomik CLS filter. This is about as high as M31 gets from Perth, and the light pollution is starting to mean I need to look around for a new dark sky site. A 10Mb version will appear eventually on my astrobin page, but it's been plate solving for the last two hours, so I'm not sure what's going on.
http://www.astrobin.com/users/alocky/
Had to do a lot of work in pixinisight to clean up the light pollution, so I'd appreciate any tips on how to improve the processing.
cheers,
Andrew.

[mithrandir]

Andrew, this version solved quickly.

[alocky]

Thanks -but the hang up is at the astrobin end as part of the upload procedure, it's been stuck on it for a while. On the assumption that I messed something up I'll have another go at loading it.

[rmuhlack]

i have been having some issues with the plate solving feature on astrobin as well...

[Peter.M]

I thought you could tell astrobin that you didnt want your images solved. Just select that it is a narrow field of view and it wont bother to try.

[bartman]

Great pic Andrew!
What light pollution? Cant see it in the pic????
Cheers
Bartman

[alocky]

Thanks for the compliment!
After an iterative application of Pixinsights DBE and ABE tools, I have it in a seperate file now. The airglow was pretty strong too. The background goes from green to red across the frame.

I still can't load the images to astrobin. I wonder what's going on there? Anyone been able to load images in the last day?

[RickS]

Nice image, Andrew! It must be very low in the sky for you. I had a go at M31 on Saturday night with my FSQ-106 but haven't had a chance to process it yet.

[iceman]

Very nice!

The whole scene looks a little blue and is missing some star colour but a lovely result.

[alocky]

Thanks Mike - the CLS filter puts a very strong blue cast to the image so I've paid a bit more attention to treating the core of the galaxy as white. It still doesn't have the reddish cast to the centre many images I've seen show, but I suspect that's a limitation of the DSLR's filter.
I also had a bit of a fiddle with the erosion tool in PixInsight to try and sharpen up the stars a bit, but I'm not convinced its much of an improvement.
I'm now having a chat with the guys at astrobin who are a bit mystified as to why my images aren't appearing.
If it does appear, it will be at:
http://www.astrobin.com/20303/
cheers,
Andrew.

[Octane]

That looks much better, Andrew.

I'd now go back and play with the midtones, increase your blues, magentas and reds, each very slightly at a time to introduce the blue to the arms.

I nabbed this one last year with an STL-11000M and FSQ-106N (you can search for it if interested). I think I got 25 hours of data on it. I haven't yet processed it with the hydrogen alpha data. I'll try and capture more this year to round it out some more.

H

[multiweb]

Like this shot very much. The field looks great and the colors and details are superb. :thumbsup:

[gregbradley]

Great shot Andrew.

The colour info is still there to some degree. I had a quick play around with it and there was some star colour data and some galaxy colour data.

Greg.

[alocky]

Finally!
http://www.astrobin.com/20395/
Thanks for all the helpful feedback and kind comments. I've tweaked the colour slightly to bring a bit of blue back in the outer regions, and tried to boost the red in the middle.
cheers,
Andrew.

[gregbradley]

That's pretty impressive Andrew.

You've officially earnt your D800 wings!

Greg.

[RobF]

Yep, great shot for sure Andrew. The repro has great colour, but agree bit more star erosion might boost the galaxy (or more stretching of galaxy?).

Its tough to get such a great image with so little data anywhere close to a city as you have done.

[Meru]

Beautiful Andrew, the D800 certainly is in a league of its own isnt it? 'How many darks did you use? I haven't pushed mine to 10min subs yet, I thought it might be pushing it.

Very well done :)

[Ross G]

A great looking galaxy photo Andrew.

The D800 shows amazing potential.

Ross.

[alocky]

Thanks again for all the positive comments!
I took 6 darks while I was packing up at 5:00am, and definitely need a few more. I was using iso2000 and an astronomiks 2" CLS filter, (otherwise 10 mins would be way too much). The filter introduces a whole new set of problems with colour balance and background, but does seem to do a good job on the light pollution. I took a widefield with a 14mm lens in between targets, 3200iso and 30 secs, and it looks like the sun is just setting, thanks to Perth's disproportionate skyglow!
I do like the D800, but cannot bring myself to modify it with a different IR filter, so I guess I need a 6803 chipped camera in the next couple of years, now I'm addicted to full frame...
However - with the D800 in Pixinsight, using 32 bit floating point, the working files are 414Mb. The files I was uploading to astrobin are 'only' 10-20Mb, but the number of pixels was enough to force the poor guys to have to stuff some more RAM in so their server could resize the images!
cheers,
Andrew

[Meru]

Wow only 6 darks? That's awesome! Haha yes for me the city lights are NW so any widefield in that area looks like a sunset too. I love full frame DSLRs, there's just something about them... I wouldn't touch the IR filter either, probably better to get a modified Canon I guess. Judging from your pics I was motivated to do some multi-minute subs last night from a dark site. Hopefully they will turn out good :) The file sizes are just absurd, especially if shooting and editing in Raw.

Looks like you'll have fun with this setup! Cheers