M16

[Benjamin (Ben)]

Had a crack at using my 8" Newt on my HEQ5 Pro last night. Not the best combo in terms of weight but easily balanced and guiding was okay with the TOAG. Had massive issues with Astrotortilla until I realized that the f5 Coma Corrector reduced the field by 0.9x! Put in the correct limits and I was away. Moon was of course terrible and the photos picked up some glare and noise. Also had the dew heater running but at one point the cable snagged and it detached mid connection without me knowing! Secondary was a bit cloudy by the end so who knows how long that had been building. Anyway I was determined to image with and without the CLS filter to see colour differences. Results below. The first red image is with the CLS (processed as if white balanced, given the combo between the filter and the modded camera) and is 30 minutes of data (6x 300s subs). The second is without the filter processed as if not white balanced and is only 24 minutes of data (6x 180s subs). Understandably it's very noisy. The last image is a combo of both. I did get a little bit of unfiltered M8 too and tried that as a combo with the previous image. Thoughts welcome as always.

[RickS (Rick)]

Detail is good, Ben. First thing I'd do is get rid of the blue cast in the background.

Cheers,
Rick.

[Benjamin (Ben)]

I have such noisy data from my DSLR (sensor temps 17-20 degrees for the M16 images) and I struggle to get anything close to a black background. I guess that I need to keep learning the modules in StarTools and that it is not really a one-stop-shop and that some other intervention is required. Gets to point where you wonder how much pain might be solved by a cooled mono camera and some LRGB filters, or whether really the time invested in messing around is actually a useful thing. Anyhow, more StarTools forums to read on backgrounds!

[Benjamin (Ben)]

Binning helped rather a lot as did the isolate tool in life. Biggest mistake seemed be redoing a global stretch after wiping instead of stretching as is. A mistake I picked up form an online tutorial somehow. Also I guess there are always compromises to be made between noise and dark backgrounds: basically it seems there's only so far you can stretch limited data. Anyway a version with darker backgrounds attached (one cropped for more to show more detail here) although the scope of the nebulosity is a little less.