[Peter.M]

Originally Posted by jase

Great capture, Peter. Enjoyed the faint extension you've presented. I'm looking forward to seeing the end result with OIII added (and possibly some RGB starts to balance the image). Good work.

Thanks Jase, I will see what the stars look like after making a synthetic green from O3 and HA but yes RGB stars might be in order.

Originally Posted by RickS

Nice work, Peter. You've captured a lot of very faint stuff.
This is correct but the reasoning is wrong. Long exposures are better for narrowband because the signal is relatively weak and the camera read noise swamps it in short exposures.

Ahh yes that makes sense, less signal in HA images to overcome the readnoise.

Originally Posted by Peter Ward

I've been hacking away at the Helix myself and can say from my also-rans results so far that's an impressive image. Nice one

I have seen the images you have posted of the helix and that scope has some great resolution. Im sure your rendition will be great!

Originally Posted by Shiraz

Crikey Peter - that's a beautiful deep image. regards Ray

thanks Ray, Im glad you like it.

Originally Posted by marc4darkskies

Very impressive depth in that image Peter! Looks like you're headed for a mega data image! Look forward to seeing the final result!

Cheers, Marcus

Thanks Marcus, I love the images you present on here so that is high praise. I am very happy that I am able to setup every night and get results, thank god for alignmaster it is the only reason I can get 30 minute subs.

Originally Posted by cosmophoton

Nice work Peter! Do you have images of your homemade carbon fiber telescope?
Cheers,
Luiz

Thanks, I will try to take an image tomorrow for you, it is pretty basic though. I purchased a packaging tube and wrapped it in carbon layer by layer.

Originally Posted by Paul Haese

Looking good Peter, very deep.

Thanks Paul, lets see how much of the halo is left when it gets made into colour.

Originally Posted by gregbradley

That's a great result. With longer subs you need to use even colder temps on your CCD. So if you are not already maxing out the temp it can do it would pay to increase the cooling as much as possible. Especially taking advantage of the extra cooling that winter already gives you.

Also depending on your scope I find I get a good gain using 2x2 binning on Ha very often. It depends on the final use for the Ha. If you are doing narrowband and intend to use to show detail then perhaps not. But you could do a blend of 1x1 and 2x2 with the 2x2 picking up more of the outlying super faint neb. You have almost all of it but there is a tad more there. I used a 17 inch scope and 2x2 binning with a .6x reducer to really show it all and its quite extensive.

Greg.

I am running the camera at -30 at this time of year. It is sitting at around 55% cooling power maintaining that but I dare not push it harder. As for binning, this image is at 1.4 arc seconds per pixel. I hadn't thought about binning the HA. I would wonder if you would lose detail by doing so.

compiling the outer halo from binned data is interesting, but then I would feel like im missing out on noise reduction on the rest of the image.

Food for thought at least, thanks Greg.