M83 luminance - first pass

[codemonkey (Lee)]

This was the first galaxy I ever imaged, and now I'm having another crack at it. Hopefully the weather will hold and I'll get some RGB in the coming days.

As always, I'll probably reprocess this 100 times, but this is the first rough draft.

5x600s subs
Saxon 100ED + CCDT67 @ ~650mm
SX Trius 674

[Eden (Brett)]

Glad to see that you're back in the saddle with your new gear, Lee! Nice bit of work for 50 minutes of data, looking forward to seeing more images from you with your new kit

[kosh]

I agree, very nice start for 50 minutes. Add another 10 subs and some RGB and you should be able to tease some real nice data out of this.
Looks like the new CCD is working well.

Goran.

[cometcatcher (Kevin)]

Looks good as it is. Will be fantastic when you are finished!

[codemonkey (Lee)]

Originally Posted by Eden

Glad to see that you're back in the saddle with your new gear, Lee! Nice bit of work for 50 minutes of data, looking forward to seeing more images from you with your new kit

Thanks Brett! It's great to finally be imaging again. Had a week of clear skies while I was waiting for the person I bought the CCD from to ship the power cable. Got my power cable, then got a week of cloudy nights. Then on Thursday, finally a clear night and my new power cable stopped working! So finally a truly successful night last night.

Not sure I'm done with my kit yet, might swap out the ED100 for a WO GT102, but I'm still thinking about it at the moment. Bought the ED100 while intending to get a different CCD, so now it's not quite what I'm after sampling-wise.

I've got a WO GT-81 for wider stuff, which gives me about 2"/px and I'm looking for something around 700mm to give me 1.3"/px - 1.5"/px coupled with a reducer.

Originally Posted by kosh

I agree, very nice start for 50 minutes. Add another 10 subs and some RGB and you should be able to tease some real nice data out of this.
Looks like the new CCD is working well.

Goran.

Thanks Goran! I was actually more aiming for the Antennae and M83 was just done because it was still there when the Antennae had dropped too low.

Not having much luck with the Antennae at the moment so I'll probably just continue with this one for now. I think my subs were too short originally and I was read noise limited, so I bumped the sub length last night, but then took the camera off before I remembered to take flats, and now I have dust spots on the subs I can't get rid of, and given the subs need so much stretching, it's kinda hard to miss... maybe more data would blend it out, I dunno.

Anyway I'll probably continue with M83 tonight; might just try for unbinned RGB and add a pseudo-L based off that.

Need to learn how to combine different length subs as well, the cores on the bigger stars look nasty and I imagine will probably look pretty funky when I've got colour in there. Well, either I combine different length subs or I do the stars separately and try to replace the ones in this... seems difficult.

Originally Posted by cometcatcher

Looks good as it is. Will be fantastic when you are finished!

Thanks Kevin, I hope so! :-)

[rustigsmed (Russell)]

very nice Lee, some very nice detail coming through.

[Flugel88 (Michael)]

Cant wait to see some colour in this one Lee some terrific detail in there.

[codemonkey (Lee)]

Originally Posted by rustigsmed

very nice Lee, some very nice detail coming through.

Thanks mate!

Originally Posted by Flugel88

Cant wait to see some colour in this one Lee some terrific detail in there.

Cheers! Might be a little while now, had more technical issues and now, cloudy skies again... might also go a bit closer in when I get another chance and redo the lum before gathering some RGB.