Had a great week of imaging since last Sunday until last night. Clouds are back now but I managed to do 6 panels totalling about 30h of data. Tuesday was the best night by far. Seeing was ok. Saturday/Sunday were windy and the other nights the seeing wasn't great but the transparency was good and the air was dry so it did helps.
I shot these with a QHY9 and an SMC Pentax-M 150mm lens stopped down to f/5.6 and the subs vary from 20x to 30x10min. Baader Ha 7nm.
I did a couple of versions of this file as it is pretty big at about 8000px wide.
There's a 75% version here. [10MB - 5342x2779]
a 50% version here. [5MB - 3816x1985]
and one HD version here [1.6MB - 2076x1080]
I also did a platesolve which is available here [1.2MB]. Stacked with CCD Stack, saved as scaled TIFF files then registered in registar. The panels were then blended in Photoshop, noise reduction, levels, etc... If you need any details about processing steps fire away.
Thanks Greg. Not the best but pretty happy with it. The longest imaging run I've had to date. 1 week straight.
Quote:
Originally Posted by RickS
Very nice, Marc!
What do you use to do the plate solve and annotation?
Thanks Rick. I use unimap that you can download here. You first do a star detection then give a hint. I typed M8. Then you give the FL (150mm) as it's a mosaic you multiply the sensor size by the number of panels. So 6 x 2 in this case. It will then do its thing and overlay the grid and annotations. I then just invert the picture so it's clearer to read.
U sure do produce some nice work Marc, make a great planner for some more detailed stuff
Thanks Marcus. Yes it's good to see it all in one shot. Makes it a lot easier to go and dig stuff at long FL. I use a lot of my milkyway shots to go find nebulosity. It also helps when you process long FL pics and you might have a gradient which is in fact real and part of a larger structure.
Cool field of view Marc. Heaps of objects to see and dark dust really sets off the image. I looked at the 10mb image and my only comment is like any image is more data to get that pesky noise out. On a coolness level though it is chilly.
Cool field of view Marc. Heaps of objects to see and dark dust really sets off the image. I looked at the 10mb image and my only comment is like any image is more data to get that pesky noise out. On a coolness level though it is chilly.
Thanks Paul. I used to think that widefields don't suffer from seeing but in closer look you can see the difference in star resolution in the various panels shot under different conditions. The best night was the panel in the bottom center. The bottom right and top left were shot in high wind. The Lagoon and Swan/Eagle pair were shot in average seeing.
When you stitch together the good panels with the bad ones the myriad of faint resolved stars turn into mush so you have to do the best you can to match the seams. This is not quite visible at 50% which is ok. I'm trying to portrait the whole area with decent resolution which the 150mm gives me. 100mm doesn't and 200mm is too narrow FOV. There is also a tilt in the field which I need to shim the lens for. To get top-res you'd need an FSQ106 and consistently good seeing. One day...
probably should have cropped it out 
....nah, great piece of work there Marc, very well done 
Thanks mate. I actually started with M8 then the sky kept being clear ... so I got side tracked. 
