First mono M42

[etill (Elliot)]

This is my first image with a mono camera which wasn't really meant to be anything more than testing and making sure spacing to the corrector was right. I got a QHY268M recently from another member here and the capabilities and performance are astonishing.

Virtually no processing other than cropping out the dithering artefacts, dynamic background extraction, a little bit of noise reduction, color calibration and masked stretch (all in PixInsight). I adjusted the contrast a little with curves transform.

There are no flats used although I spent a little more time than I care to admit trying to remove the vignetting with DBE wishing I had grabbed some. I also mislabelled the subs and spent some time wondering why the core was blue rather than pink.

There are some pretty magenta stars in there that need to be fixed, but I'll figure that out next time.

10 x 30 sec each of RGB @ -5c, no L because clouds (the blue subs also had a tiny bit of cloud rolling in for the last couple).

Taken with my Vixen 200mm F/4 and a Paracorr. ZWO RGB filters. I really have to get me one of the QHY268 OSC cameras now, these things are amazing (the scaled down jpeg doesn't really do it justice). Looking forward to the next clear night to gather a lot more data on a lot more targets..

[xelasnave]

Excellent got the trap.
Alex

[Drac0 (Mark)]

Very nice...


Still tossing up going a new OSC or a 2nd hand mono setup in the future - not really sure I have the patience for the work with a mono.

[etill (Elliot)]

Originally Posted by xelasnave

Excellent got the trap.
Alex

Thanks Alex, I guess its the short exposures, 16bit, etc. When I was deciding on new camera options a 16bit adc + well depth were at the top of the list of selection criteria. In hindsight I probably should've used the extended full well mode because M42 is so bright.

Originally Posted by Drac0

Very nice...


Still tossing up going a new OSC or a 2nd hand mono setup in the future - not really sure I have the patience for the work with a mono.

Exactly what I thought too, and I'll still get an OSC (either ASI2600 or QHY268 now that I've used this one), but this setup came up for sale while I was waiting for most of the exact same items to get restocked in Australia. Couldn't really pass it up, plus so far it has been very easy to set up. I didn't bother with focusing on filter change, but I have an Esatto sitting on my desk waiting for one last adapter to become available again so I can automate that part too.

With software like NINA the sequencer can take care of all the filter changes and auto-focusing. The patience part probably still comes into it when you need to capture data over many nights before you can even start to stack and see if it worked out.