M104 Sombrero Galaxy

[Striker (Tony)]

Image taken from my house Tingalpa Brisbane.

8 x 7 minute ISO400 guided exposures with the 20DA on the C11.
I used the UHC-s filter which again helped greatly.

AutoGuided with Guidemaster which looks to be a great program..thanks Allan.

I think I will need to play with this image a little more.

I have a street light that used to be blocked via a large palm tree which is now been chopped down, it's causing me a little grief but saying this I am still happy to be able to take 7 minute guided images.....well past my expectations 6 months ago.

It's a little too dark then what I wanted....but I may be able to improve this a little with a bit more processing.

What do you think

[[1ponders] (Paul)]

G'day Tony. Lots more detail than I've been able to capture that's for sure. So far anyway

Looks a bit heavily processed for my liking. The image looks great at about one third size but at full size it seems really grainy. Is the image size native or have you cropped and enlarged for upload? What are you using to resize your images, maybe what I'm seeing are jpeg artifacts from conversion and resizing. Also the halo of stars around the galaxy appears to end abruptly, again it could be a compression problem or a curves/levels/masking issue. Without knowing what processing you have used it's hard to tell. Did you use ImagesPlus autoprocessing and Digital Development then export to Photoshop?

[Striker (Tony)]

I know what your saying Paul..the halo is definetly a Jpeg compression issue as it's not on the high rez image.

The image has been cropped and enlarged slightly....I had to get rid of the street light reflection by cropping

I used autoprocessing on imagesplus then went to photoshopCS

[danielsun]

I'd be proud of that Tony!!
Thats a fantastic shot!!!! I like it!!

[allan gould]

Great Shot. I'd be very proud to have taken it and the file size reduction to show your efforts doesn't do it justuce. I really like the current DSO shots that show a wide star field around them as it puts it into context. Most people think that a 'large & bright' DSO resides in every field of view of a telescope.
Guidemaster is great and I can't wait for the rain to PO to use my 350D with autoguiding

[cometcatcher (Kevin)]

I like it, but for some reason I feel compelled to turn my head to the left 90 degrees.

[Striker (Tony)]

Thanks guys,

I am even happier that I guided for 7 minutes on each exposure.

The sbig st402me has just arrived so I will be using the sbig for guiding now meaning CCDsoft will be used but when and if I ever guide with the toucam I will most definetly be using Guidemaster.

I can almost say it's time to delite guidedog...lol

[Striker (Tony)]

hahaha...Kevin...I feel the same way...blame the galaxy for being on that angle.....next time I will adjust the camera to suit.

[tornado33]

Great shot there, plenty of detail in the dust lane and the disk.
Scott