Sailing the southern skies

[AstroViking (Steve)]

Hello all,

I took advantage of the clear skies on Tuesday to get the 'scope out and try my hand at capturing Eta Carinae, Omega Centauri and IC2602 (aka The Southern Pleiades).

I would have been out longer and tried for other targets but I had to work the next day.

I'm trying Siril for the initial stacking and processing before passing the images across to Affinity Photo as a 32-bit TIFF. Siril has a reasonably hefty learning curve when it comes to the various transformations, but I seem to have muddled my way through...

I'm still not totally happy with how the background stars are too prominent for my liking, but I have a feeling I can get around that by some judicious masking and darkening within Affinity.

Any advice or pointers gratefully received!

Cheers,
V

Gear:
Sky Watcher EvoStar 72ED + 0.85 reducer
Nikon D7100
Star Adventurer 2i tracker

All subs were 15 seconds, ISO 1000.
Omega Centauri - 250 subs
IC2602 - 200 subs
Eta Carinae - 200
Darks - 50
Bias / Flats - none

[PKay (Peter)]

Hi Steve

Good effort on 3 popular targets.
Always learning in this game, so keep chipping away.
And keep a log book and take notes!

Well done

[Stephane]

Steve, these are three really nice images. Great effort! Flat frames would take these images to an even better level. I struggled quite a bit at the start with flats, but once I found a suitable panel, and learnt what settings to use for my camera, I noticed a great improvement. Personally, I find the star prominence looks great. Again, well done

[Crater101 (Warren)]

These are really nicely done. Hoping to achieve something similar one day. Good work!

[AstroViking (Steve)]

Thank you for the compliments, folks.

@Stephane - thanks for the pointers about using flats. I will investigate and see what I can come up with.

I'm hoping to get out again soon and image more, but the weather is not looking good for the next week or longer.