Well sort of, light cloud rolled in about 4.30am. mind you i was getting a bit cold by this time anyway.
To cut a long story short, got myself a new fetheartouch focuser and digital drive, and after much mucking around and re-installing drivers for just about everything astro related on the lappy. I managed some images.....
I did however have problems using focus max, when I ran the first light wizard it kept failing with a fault listed in the log like, failed to find maxim main window, failed to find maxim ccd window ????? Anyone had this problem? I'd appreciate some feedback. I finally got the Maxim focus routine to get some decent V curves and set about two targets.
First was a second go at the Helix, 12 x 10 min subs, with the Qhy8pro through a LPS filter, no moon, but still get gradients from suburbia.
Second was 15 x 10 mins subs of NGC 1316 and 1317 in the Fornax Galaxy cluster with the same set up.
Comments / tips / suggestions appreciated.
Darren
Last edited by desler; 13-09-2010 at 10:01 PM.
Reason: Repro Added
A couple of nice images there Darren.The software sounds like a real head ache.
Still, good to see you took advantage of the brief time without clouds.
You have to take the opportunity, been so little here lately. Cant help with the software, the helix shows the outer loop.. Always a sign you got nice and deep, it does appear smooth, a little too much perhaps I can't help but feel you have removed a bit of detail particularly on the inner edge of the ring where there are knots of gas. A little noise can also suggest detail. As you have the files you can be more the judge.
Thanks very much for the comments, I ran noise ninja over the Helix a couple of times and looking at it on my Mac suggests that I need to lower the smoothness a bit.
Other than that, it was curves, levels, saturation and a little color balance change.
Excellent data there. I'd agree with Clive in that it is far too smooth. Of course, the processing of images is a very subjective thing, but, I feel that these fall in the too far processed or fine art category.
Time for a reprocess, me thinks. This time, ditch Noise Ninja -- I don't think you need it to be honest.
As you probably already guesed H, I'm well into the Re-pro!
As I said in another thread, I've had my one night of clear skies! Plenty of time for repro's.
I'm certainly trying to live by the rule that "less is more" when it comes to processing. When making any change to a sliders in PS, I look at the image and think does that look overprocessed or unnatural.
Looking good Darren
Yep the Helix is a bit over smoothened but if you use noise ninja you can use the lasso tool to lasso the Helix and then do expand by 5pixels and feather by 4pixels then inverse the image.
Then run noise ninja, this will only smoothen the back ground and not the Helix.
If your stars loose color, go to the next tab in noise ninja and back off the color a bit till the star colors come back.
Then you can inverse the image again and do the same with the Helix.
This time you can control the luminance channel so the noise is just gone and also the same with the colors in the second tab.
Nice images Darren but as has been said, Helix has melted into the background. A bit of selective smoothing and sharpening might be a better approach without softening the entire image.
I wish I could get some clear skies.
Keep them coming.
