[Stonius (Markus)]

So I did this the other night shortly after I shot the Mars photo I posted in the other thread. As mentioned, it was blowing a gale - so much so that my plans to try and get the hang of PHD2 went awry because it kept losing the guide star during calibration. That could be me doing something wrong though. So I *think this is an unguided pic, despite the OAG setup (exposures were short anyway). Still it was good to go through the motions. The point was to get some data to play with, so I'm pleased to have anything at all.

One of the issues I had was the shadow along the top edge. I assume this was a prism shadow? I guess I need to back it off a bit?

Also the DynamicBackgroundExtraction Process in Pixinsight made things a lot worse for me (I've been following the Light Vortex Tutorials). It seemed to remove the background in a very uneven way. Not sure if that was due to my sample placement or due to noise in the image, or what, so I stuck with the gradients because the end result was better for the time being.

Anyway, this is the result of 20 x 30 sec LRGB exposures shot from light polluted Melbourne. For the more experienced dudes - is this pretty much the result you'd expect from a 10" RC operating at around F5.36 with an ASI 1600?

Looking at it now, maybe I've burned out the stars a little too much while trying to bring out the dimmer ones, I guess.

I realise many wouldn't bother shooting the luminance channel on this target, but I'm glad I did because I wanted to play with the luminance data, and besides, it disguised a multitude of sins in the RGB combination image caused by differential gradients that I am not yet skilled enough to rid myself of.

Thanks for looking and for any comments - I'm very much in need of guidance at this stage (no pun intended) :-).

This is the full frame, ie, the full ugly - only cropped to remove the black edges from channel combination.

Markus