ATiK 16IC - Not too shabby for an entry level camera - Helix and Dumbell
Just some luminance shots of the Helix and Dumbell planetaries from last night. The Dumbell is 4x5min shots and the Helix is 4x8min shots. No darks or flats. Simple levels and curves in Photoshop. Some of the star cores are burnt out so next time I'll use less exposure but more of them.
It as more a trial than anything else, but I was quite surprised with the results for an entry level cooled camera.
ATiK & Orion ED80, autoguided, images registered and stacked (average) in Registar, processed in Photoshop - levels and curves only.
Nice shots Paul. And so it starts, this bottomless pit that is astrophotography.
I too have problems with the stars looking like yours, but put it down to seeing?
Gary
I went looking for a low price peltier cooled ccd camera a while back and found the ATiK. I've carried out a few measurements with it as far as response curves, linearity etc and it came up pretty good for a sub $1000 astro ccd camera. Compared quite favourably with some of the more expensive cameras actually.
Great results for an entry level CCD there Paul. I wouldn't worry too much about the stars on luminance data. RGB is where it counts. Indeed take short exposures, then layering them using the lighten blend mode to reduce their saturation. Another thing you can do is before you perform sharpening (of any form), drop the white point by ~50 counts. Sharpening typically brightens highlights so you are preventing clipping by dropping the white point before hand.
Thanks Jase. The stacking was done in Registar and I only used and average. It would be nice to have a max/min exclusion average in it. I might run them through Maxim or CCDsoft and see how they come out.
I'll tell you one thing I like about the ATiK/ED80 combo is the great image scale for large objects like this. I actually started out trying to get Barnards Galaxy last night but was having probs with finding it so decided to try out something a bit brighter. Anything in the 5 - 15 arcmin range is ideal for this setup. I'm looking forward to trying NGC253 with this setup. It should just fit in corner to corner. Or even whack the ol' meade 6.3 reducer in line for a bit more room.
There was an IR filter there Ken. I wasn't very careful with the levels and curves when processing as I didn't intend them to be used for anything else except for show and tell. They didn't look too bad before I clipped them
The biggest problem for me is I can't see anything directly east until it gets up to around 50 degrees above the horizon (whooping great palm trees). and nothing from about 85 deg above the western horizon (someone place a damn house there ). Great views north and south though, so I spend my evening literally scanning north and south and catching objects as they pass through my narrow window.
So I'll try for a few more sessions over the coming weeks and see what I can come up with. (Or I could cheat and just use the Canon )
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