One dark night in 2 months!! What is going on with this planet!!!
I got 18 subs of 12 minutes and 26 Darks subtracted.
I am still not happy with this. It is SOOOO faint, there has to be a happy medium between getting enough light from the DSO, and not washing it out with light pollution from the 'burbs.
I think I will have to go back to 15 or even 20 minute exposure and see how that goes.
So here it is, 3 hours 36 minutes of the Helix (Eye of God) nebula.
I am still going to get more subs to add for a total of around six hours hopefully.
How do you guys stop the image going all Jpeggy when you save it small enough for posting?
I use image resizer after I have saved my HUGE .Tiff as a smaller JPEG, but it is still usually a couple of MB at least. When I use image resizer it gets lots of artefacts and looks terrible. The .Tiff I have here looks wonderful by comparison.
Baz, in Photoshop I usually resize the full image down to 1280 pixels using the Bicubic Sharper option.
Then convert to 8bit and "save for web" down to the file size I want in jpg.
its well on its way, these objects really do need lots of data to do a picture on the wall job, its an often imaged object but nowhere as easy as m8 eta and the other ones.
Looking good Barry. Longer exposures seem to be the way to go but LP still can ruin ultra long exposures also.
The outer ring is starting to show through so even some more exposures of the same length will improve it further.
Nice work Baz. Good to see you got something for the wait. Longer subs and more of them mate. That is my goal with this target too. Maybe over several nights.
Nice shot though, I can see the Northeast Arc, that ultra faint hard to get band of nebulosity extending above and to the left. Theres also plenty of detail in the helix itself. It is a very low surface brightness object. What camera are you using, the Orion CCD now?
Scott
Nice shot though, I can see the Northeast Arc, that ultra faint hard to get band of nebulosity extending above and to the left. Theres also plenty of detail in the helix itself. It is a very low surface brightness object. What camera are you using, the Orion CCD now?
Scott
As I said, I am not happy with it yet. At this point, on such a dim object, I have stretched 3 hours 36 minutes as far as I can to bring out the nebula. This means the black point is a bit washy. If I set it lower, I start to lose the fainter area's. Sometimes, we have to sacrifice or compromise to get what we want out of a photo.
In this case, when I get some more subs, I will be able to set the black point a little darker without losing the fainter areas.
Nice imaging rig there too. Good to see youre using a Q guider type guide cam too
Yep, add some more data from subsequent imaging sessions when you can
Scott
