Took advantage of a clear night and stable conditions in suburban Sydney the other night and imaged NGC 5139 Omega Centauri. Started at 8.30pm and finished around 2.30am in the morning. About 11.00am I stopped imaging Omega and slewed across to image the full moon for 20 minutes and then back to Omega again
6” f6 Bintel newt on an EQ6-R Mount
Canon 600D with Baader coma corrector ( no filters )
ISO 800
Omega Centauri
150 x 60 sec dithered guided subs
40 x darks
PHD2 guiding at 1.00 to 1.20 arc sec error
Goto and tracking EQMOD, StellariumScope and Stellarium
Frame , focus and capture BYEOS
Stacked in DSS
Processed in Startools
Full Moon
ISO 800 exp 3200
1200 AVI frames
Frame, focus and capture BYEOS Planetary mode
Stacked in Autostakkert 3
Sharpened in Registax 6
But your moon shot is just slightly out of focus. i have found that it can take several minutes, even up to 30min to get sharp focus, i normally zoom in on the edge and craters, and zoom as close in as possible then try and focus to resolve the smaller features. i have taken to doing a region of interest and getting the fastest frame rate as possible to zoom in on and focus. once i have that then going full frame the hard part is done. the other is the moon moves even though we select lunar rate. i actually manually guide on a crater for the length of time needed to get 2 or 3 thousand frames. Anyway just my experience for how i fill in my time...
Hi Martin,
Ill echo Ryan's comment as well.....Fantastic Omega!
Also the Moon image is superb. You Keep presenting excellent images from a bortle 8 Sydney sky.
Well done.
Cheers
Andy.
Thanks Ryan, David and Andy
Yeh pretty happy with this Omega considering the highly illuminated sky and backyard ( neighbours exterior lights left on again in both sides ) I’m finding under these conditions you need so much more data. I was going to try and push on and capture 180 to 200 subs but tiredness got the best of me plus my roofline was looming. Startools does a great job of cleaning up all the noise gradient and vignetting, leaves you with a nice clean image to stretch and process
David
Thanks for the comments
This is probably the worst lunar image I’ve posted.( I said to myself will I or won’t I image the moon as it wasn’t far away from Omega, should have chosen the latter ) I rarely image a full moon as it’s just to damn bright with a DSLR to focus.If you drop your ISO and exposure you still don’t get any contrast on the craters to define your fine focus, there needs to be a shadow. I used the thin outer edge half craters on the top side but not enough to nail tight focus.When the moon is down to around 80% I can focus on some bigger craters near the terminator and nail tight focus every time as BYEOS is tremendous on live view at 5x or 10x zoom with my DSLR
