[naskies (Dave)]

Originally Posted by Paul Haese

Impressive given the sub length. Heaps of detail. Maybe a bit dark in the background, but I will keeping an eye out for the further developments. How did you happen upon the notion to image for 60 minutes per sub? Did you find that 30 minutes was not producing enough signal?

Thanks Paul. I agree about the background - this is just a quick process, and needs a bit of dynamic range compression for the bright central blobs.

I've just been following two principles for exposure length: expose-to-the-right and use ideal exposures when sky limited (overwhelm the read noise with sky background). The Astrodon filters really suppress both stars and sky background, so even with 60 min subs all the nebulosity is bunched up on the left side of the histogram with minimal sky background.

I did start with 20 min subs and while the bright areas of nebulosity came through fine, the background was very noisy and didn't improve even with long integration times such as 36x20 min (12 hours). With 12x60 mins, I noticed the background was much cleaner but I have a lot more thermal noise and hot pixels. I'd prefer a larger aperture scope and/or more sensitive camera, but for now longer subs are free

I think I read on here that you've ordered Astrodon filters? I think you'll find that with the same length subs as before, your histogram will be bunched up to the left compared to the wider filters.

Originally Posted by astronobob

SX adaptive optics unit & RC scope, sounds a very practical combo for going deep Dave, great result I can imagine your auto set-up working and you inside studying skin cells what-have-you, , Lol !
Great Effort and awesome result

Thanks Bob! Back to learning about macules, papules, plaques, patches, nodules, pustules, vesicles, ...

Originally Posted by pluto

I have a SW ED80, which I love, but I have been tossing up between the RC or a nice WO 110 f7 triplet or similar. I just have to decide whether I want to chase those smaller objects, and deal with the extra challenges a long FL brings, or whether I want to image the same kinds of objects that I am now but with better glass. Unfortunately my budget demands that I not make the decision any time soon
Either way it's good to know that I'm free to choose without having to worry about the extra outlay on a better mount!
Thanks for the advice

If you're a galaxy hunter, maybe go for the extra aperture of the RC8 or larger? If it were me, I'd love a WO 110 f/7 triplet. It'd give you great image scale and FOV for nebulae, and throwing in a GSO RC8 for smaller targets would be peanuts ($700-$800 used).