Quote:
Originally Posted by strongmanmike
Yes, it does look soft for sure but the colours are spot on.
If this is a result of the seeing I imagine an AO will do little,they just make your guiding essentially perfect, which "is" pretty useful if your guiding isn't already perfect.
It's a tough one but I am leaning toward focus being the issue here actually 
Mike |
Always possible Mike. I do focus manually. I have found out how to get Focus Max to work so I should try that. There was quite a variablility in sharpness between subs. You could see the seeing improve as time went on looking through the subs. I did delete the worst. Perhaps I should go through them more savagely as some acutally have some decent seeing in them Must've been early in the morning.
There is plenty of data there really.
I thought the AO helped with seeing?? I now routinely get pretty round stars now I finally got the PEC recorded properly. So tracking errors are pretty minimal and not really an issue.
Thank for the advice.
Quote:
Originally Posted by marc4darkskies
I feel your pain ... a 17" aperture and seeing won't give you a break. I had to abandon imaging the night before last because it was so bad - I could barely achieve any focus! BTW I don't bother imaging at all if average FWHM is 4 arcsec or more.
I agree with Marc and Mike. I compared yours with Mr Ward's rendition for detail and the difference is pronounced. It's the detail that lets this image down mate. Did you do some decon?
IMO there is also a blue cast you need to get rid of to make your colour pop.
I admire your work tremendously Greg so I'm sorry if I'm coming across as harsh. But you're a seasoned "pro" with the best equipment and a zillion gorgeous images behind you, so it's only natural folks are going to be more critical.
Cheers, Marcus
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I did deconvolve all of them including RGB which I don't normally.
I can be more selective in which subs I use as some were pretty sharp.
Have we had a bad period of seeing lately? I must admit looking through the scope visually was like - wow, check out how bad the seeing is. Saturn was boiling in and out of view. I guess when focusing if one shot is sharp, you don't change anything and the next is soft then the seeing is really poor.
I will have another go at this one to see if I can select out the worst.
I did actually interrupt the imaging to do repairs on the scope. I did 60 minutes of luminance. I had collimated the scope and when putting in the visual adapter I loosened the base plate of the focuser thinking it was part of the adapter. Some spacing shims fell out. I out 2 back in and later found a 3rd on the floor. I noticed slight coma and the left was slightly out of focus compared to the right Yikes!
So I pulled everything apart and repositioned the shims so they were venly packing out the focuser plate and the scope returned to normal -Phew. Haven't had that happen since my STL 11 shims fell out after loosening the mounting plate on the face (they are shimmed out by the way and in exact spots to make it orthogonal).
So those 60 minutes of Lum weren't the best.
Regarding the blue cast the smaller image is more blue for some reason and seemed to lose the deeper richer reds of the larger image for
some odd reason. The softness is the issue though.
I did highpass filtering as well as a tad of smart sharpen so there's no room for improvement there. Its in the data that there needs to
be an improvement.
I'm gonna have to get the adapter plate so I can cart it all down to my dark site on a good forecast and see what it can do and make sure the optics are in fact sharp and adjusted correctly.
Thanks for the uplifting words.
Back to the drawing board.
Greg.
