Having a play with data so far - Carina

[Muzfox (Murray)]

This year I'm setting myself a goal to spend as much time in a month as I can on one target. Coming into Feb I'm chasing the Carina Nebula.

First session on Monday night and I managed 4 hours of total integration time (81 x 3 minute subs at ISO 1600). I always process each nights data and add that to a batch of registered images to be aligned and stacked once all sessions are done.

I thought I'd have a play with the first nights data just to see what was there so integrated it and did some simple processing. Eventually I'll separate out the second channel and move the bright area of the "core" more to blue and possibly the red more to orange but i'm digging this at the moment.

I was kinda blown away by the data I got from 4 hours. Canon 1100d modified, Evostar 72ed on my HEQ5 guided. 30 darks, 29 bias, 29 flats. I dithered every frame (hence about 4 hours of data in 6 hours of shooting). I lost 9 out of 91 frames in all due to clouds and my pool filter kicking in at one point lol. I also drizzled the data in pixinsight to end up with an image over 8000 pixels on longest side. I like to print photos and find this helps as I'm undersampled anyway. I must be getting things right as there was ZERO noise in the inital stretch.

I did some simple processing, ran it through startnet++ to remove stars and had a quick play in Photoshop to see what details are there. I'm impressed and cannot wait to see what a few more sessions adds to the result.

Anyway, not a final result, just a fun play, and I find it rewarding to see how things progress, learn a lot that way.

[PKay (Peter)]

You would have to be happy with that result Murray.

A very good image showing lots of fine detail.

If going back to the same target, 'plate solving' makes life a lot easier

and worth investing the time to learn about.

Well done!

[Startrek (Martin)]

Murray
Wow a lot of time and effort there which has resulted in a nicely framed and processed image of one of our largest and finest nebula in the southern skies
Love the colour too, pretty wild
Well done you should be happy with that result
Martin

[Muzfox (Murray)]

Originally Posted by PKay

You would have to be happy with that result Murray.

A very good image showing lots of fine detail.

If going back to the same target, 'plate solving' makes life a lot easier

and worth investing the time to learn about.

Well done!

Thank you very much. I'm using Nina now and have I think worked out that if I save my session as a file, I can load it up again the next time, and use the platesolving and goto to get back to the same framing. Few screens to jump through but so far so good *fingers crossed* lol