Wednesday night was a great night for both visual and imaging
I Setup just on sunset with a quick simple alignment and set in for visual observing NGC 4755, M8, M20, M 16, M17, NGC 253, NGC 104.
M20 Triffid (NGC 6514) looked really good so I just slotted in the cheap camera quick focus and set it on auto for continuous groups of 5 shots at 25sec exposure all this took only 2 minutes to setup then I went in for dinner. After around 1.5 hours returned, removed the camera and loaded the data into DSS and went back out for more visual viewing until the moon was high.
Then a quick setup again for imaging 47 Tuc (NGC 104) this took only 2 minutes then I let it go on auto for around half an hour while I looked at the moon in my 8x56 binos.
I am pretty happy with this result considering the scope was only setup in Alt/Az mode with a quick rough alignment and the cheap camera and adapters cost me less than $200 on ebay. Also I am still very much a beginner at this only been imaging a few months now.
All in all a good night imaging and quality visual observing time, the best of both worlds.
M20 Triffid (NGC 6514)
160 x 25sec subs at iso 1600
50 flats
50 darks
50 bias
Stacked in DDS
12 inch LX200 (Alt/Az setup) and Sony Nex 3 Camera
47 Tucana (NGC 104)
70 x 10 sec subs at iso 1600
50 flats
50 darks
50 bias
Stacked in DDS
12 inch LX200 (Alt/Az setup) and Sony Nex 3 Camera
Looks great. Very sharp. My only comment would be that in the area where the bright bits fade to the dark sky there's a whole group of tones which have a distinct green tinge. You can see it quite clearly when you extract only the green channel. (Attached) It shows a clear ring of green, whereas the other two channels seem to gracefully fade to the background.
My photoshop isn't working, but if you have PS then the HLVG plugin should take care of it in one button press.
Thanks Chris I tried following your advice about the green channel but still can’t seem to correct it fully, I don’t have Photoshop I am using an old 1996 version of Corel Photopaint it is the only photo editing program I have, it is very basic not as many nice plugins as Photoshop. I think Photoshop and all those great plugins will help me a lot.
I have attached new images of the edited original and the separated channels red, green and blue, I also added an image of the un cropped original with oversaturation it seems to show my problem may be linked to vignetting even though I added 50 good flats into the stacking process. Any ideas about this are welcome.
Nice pictures .Have you tried reprocessing in DSS without the flats to see if they are anygood? How did you take the flats ? I have an nex5 and use the aperture priority , "A" setting on camera mode to take twilight flats. Seems to work ok and remove vignetting. If your flats are suspect you could replace the camera in the same position and get some new ones.
Philip
