Continuing on from Friday nights efforts, I got M8, M20 and M21 all into the field of view at once....
M8+M20+M21 in Ha - 10x1200s exposures - 3hrs 20mins.
The following picture uses M8 data from Friday and Saturday nights, This contains 18x1200sec exposures in Ha, and 24x300sec OSC exposures.. a total of 8 hours exposure. This is my longest exposure image to date.. Im still not 100% happy with it.. I will be much happier when I can get some fresh colour data with a matching focal length..
Doug - Im amazed to be honest.. the amount of detail I'm able to capture from light polluted suburbia (astronomy hell, if you will) by use of the Ha filter is tremendous.. Now I'm able to capture images from home, and just wait till new moon to get corresponding colour data... Its very helpful! I still can't get over how wide and flat my field of view is! it sort of blows my mind sometimes...
Kev, More to come mate.. This weekend coming im off to dark skies, I'll try and get 2hrs colour to add to the M8/M20 wide field, and might try to get another 2~3hrs Ha during the week to produce a deep, wide, full colour image of the area.. Fingers crossed !!
Thanks Marc, Yea I did boost the contrast a fair bit.. Just trying to make the best use of the super contrasty Ha data... I probably could have backed it off a little... I like it though.. has a real sharpness about it!
Getting a print done in the next week or so on A3.. hopefully it comes out ok!
Matt - Cheers, the scope sure is a winner.. I always used to wonder what people meant when they said that their gear did most of the work on an image.. Now I know... This scope provides the sharpest images I've ever captured, and thats before I start processing... I'm loving it.
Marc - Thanks mate.. High res images are linked at the bottom of this post... The field of view is amazing considering Im used to imaging with 1600mm + focal lengths.. What is achievable now is quite amazing. On the full res I backed off the contrast a touch on the HaRGB crop of M8. Let me know how that looks...
Doug - Cheers. I too prefer the Ha only shot mostly for its brooding FOV... I do love colour shots though...
hahaha... nope, got 3 dudes to carry it through the door... and it aint a TV... Its a high definition computer monitor. It has never had a TV antenna plugged into it... It is for DVD's and image processing work only!
Holy c**p - talk about pixels in your face! You'd need a 5m USB mouse extension to sit far enough to see the whole picture no? If I had a screen like that I'd be shooting a lot more people on my PS3.
If you mean the actually aligning of the colour image on the Ha channel, then you are most likely correct... I did this manually in photoshop, and the colour data was taken with a different scope, with 200mm more focal length... It was quite a task.. however I got it to that point and thought, bugger it.. its good enough, I'll get matching focal length colour data next weekend and all will be good!
Holy c**p - talk about pixels in your face! You'd need a 5m USB mouse extension to sit far enough to see the whole picture no? If I had a screen like that I'd be shooting a lot more people on my PS3.
haha.. Wireless mouse mate. I have a 3m extension on the keyboard cable though..
Its got a decent resolution.. 1920x1080... When I set astro images as my desktop background, at night time, the whole room lights up the same colour as the image... Fred's image of M31 from one of the GRAS FSQ setups was my background for quite some time... amazing to view high res images on a 52" HD LCD.. Nothing beats it.
If you mean the actually aligning of the colour image on the Ha channel, then you are most likely correct... I did this manually in photoshop, and the colour data was taken with a different scope, with 200mm more focal length... It was quite a task.. however I got it to that point and thought, bugger it.. its good enough, I'll get matching focal length colour data next weekend and all will be good!
Cheers mate.
I register my colour and luminance images in Registar prior to combining in Photoshop.
Registar does a good job on images of different FL and on images that have been rotated.
IMHO the color blend is a bit too contrasty but that's me. I like my M8s softy. 
Holy c**p - talk about pixels in your face! You'd need a 5m USB mouse extension to sit far enough to see the whole picture no? 
