Well, I finally dipped my big toe into LRGB imaging – and boy, was the water hot!
I chose M83 as the target for my initiation into the dark art, despite a 19 day Moon (waning gibbous) lurking just over 30 degrees away. Suburban Brisbane, night of 8th/9th April.
Equipment
Vixen ED102mm f9 refractor at prime focus.
SBIG ST7E ccd camera & CFW-8A colour filter wheel.
L=20x2 mins, R=10x2 mins, G=10X2 mins, B=10x3 mins, all binned at 1x1.
Processing
Sub-frames of individual LRGB components were Dark Subtracted, Flat Fielded, Aligned and Combined in MIRA AP.
An attempt to remove the strong light gradients on the LRGB components was made using MIRA AP.
The 4 Combined LRGB components were then Aligned and Combined in CCDSoft.
Final Colour Combine in Maxim DL.
Histogram and Levels tweaked in Corel PhotoPaint 12.
After setting up the gear, cooling the camera, focusing, etc., the image acquisition was the easy part and I even managed to have a snooze beside the ‘scope. Processing and colour combining hurt my head. A DSLR is looking quite attractive right now!
Good on you Dennis - that's an outstanding first image!! Welcome to the LRGB club!!
>Processing and colour combining hurt my head. ...
I hear you ... Every time I reprocess my first image (4 times now) to tease out some more/better depth, detail, colour, sharpness, smoothness & contrast (& because the clouds won't clear long enough to take another image) I learn something new in photoshop about colour balancing, layers (blending, adjustment and masking (normal and inverse)), unsharp masking, curves, histograms, noise reduction, gaussian blur, colour/area selection and lots lots more! (yikes! - took me 5 mins just to write that down!)
Thanks guys – it was a bit of a steep (and somewhat brutal) learning curve and the results are somewhat drab, but no doubt I will produce more pleasing images with better data and more experience.
At one stage, I almost threw away all the data, as I just couldn’t get a decent final image, but decided to persevere as I couldn’t afford H0ughy’s new, cooled DSLR!
Good luck Mate.
I too have a hankering to go another Mewlon, but the difference beteen the 2000+ focal length of the smallest of them, and the 433mm focal length of the Epsilon would be too tough on my hair. Even with a reducer, the mid 1600 - 1700 is still too long for me.
I have been imaging with the 10" f5 so 1250mm F/L, and that is challenging enough.
The "dob while imaging" scenario is what keeps me sane. That and biking down to the house to check the e mail and surf while the gear is doing the rest.
Gary
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