Trifid Nebula

[RyanJones]

Hi All,

My capture from Thursday night. With the moon starting to grow in luminescence for another month and patchy nights without cloud, this was really my last chance for a while to capture something. The sky was beautiful and clear ( minus my hideous Bertole 8 LP ).

I've also just fitted my Rowan Belt Mod to my HEQ5 pro so it was a first night to give it a whirl. I must say I'm impressed with the difference it has made purely with calming down the periodic error. It made for much more consistent subs and more round stars.

Sadly I set my mount up in such a way that I lost an hour of subs as the OTA slewed past the gutter on the corner of my house.

Processing was also changed, still in Photoshop, but taking tips from a workflow by Trevor from astro backyard.

64 x 90secs @ iso 400
Celestron C5
Nexguide guiding
Modded Canon 350d

Thanks for looking

[Startrek (Martin)]

Ryan
Good effort there !!
Looks like your ISO maybe too low as most Canons sweet spot is 800
My 600D is always set to 800 regardless if I’m imaging at my home in Sydney ( Bortle 8 ) or at my holiday home near Ulladulla ( Bortle 3 )

Also try and push your subs a bit longer if can

Give Startools a trial , it works beautifully to remove all types of gradients and noise

My image of Centaurus A was in Sydney ( Bortle 8 ) and the subs were 3 or 4 minute at ISO800. On the laptop the raw frames looked like a white sheet and when the stacked image was processed through Startools it cleaned up beautifully
Give it a go , there’s no levels , curves , histograms tweeking to do to it’s really intuitive

Cheers

[RyanJones]

Thank you Martin,

I've been playing around with this modded 350d since I got it a few months ago. Although most Canons " sweet spot " for SNR is iso800, this particular camera copes much better at 400. The other thing I gain massively between 800 and 400 is dynamic range. This is something that again I have had so many frustrating hours to find out. Yes it means more data is required, hence why I was so annoyed that I lost an hour in this set because of a gutter. But as far as the cameras setting go, I think I've finally found what this camera likes. Now I can start bumping up the sub lengths again and find what works best.

As far as Startools goes, I'm just going to come out and say it, I don't like it...... I honestly can't tell you why, I just don't. PixInsight on the other hand I think is awesome. And at some point, I will head in that direction.

Thank you for you input Martin

[ChrisV (Chris)]

Looking good Ryan. I also moved to pi from startools. I liked it but PI is so much more- but costs a lot more.