'Twas a perfect night last night. I had a lovely family come to look at the heavens through the telescope, preceded by a laser-guided tour of the sky, followed by a bit of a photographic slide show and explanation of the life of stars.
After they left, the moon set and the sky remained clear, crisp, cold and sharp. Upper atmospherics were pretty stable and there was not a cloud or even suggestion of dew point being reached for the entire night.
I set the camera for a few 15 minute darks and left to watch a companionable movie with my wife while my target got up above the horizon. The movie finished an I got straight into it. No sleep on a night like that! Many layers of clothing, a beanbag, blanket and settled in for the night.
As dawn broke, i switched to taking flats of the evenly lit pre-dawn sky and packed it all up.
I got 22 x 15-minute exposures all up on the nebula. That's 5.5 hours total. I'm pretty chuffed to get that much data in one night. Last time it took me a week to get that much between clouds...
I locked it up, cooked my lovely wife some brekky and a cuppa before waking her, then sat down and enjoyed the treat with her (no mad rushing around this time) and off we wandered to work. Who says astronomy is bad for family life?....Though I reckon I will crash and burn around 3 this afternoon...lol.
Stay tuned, hopefully I will have it processed and posted here by tonight.
Baz.
Last edited by bloodhound31; 01-05-2009 at 12:46 PM.
Can't wait to see the image. It was quite clear here in Melb as well but probably a bit windy in my suburb. Had to give up on long exp after trying for a while.
It's probably going to be Baz's favourite Eagle Nebula or did he slew his scope away to the nearby Swan .......
I myself was up 'till 4 am this morning trying to do some widefield images with my Canon 35-70mm FD lens on my Sbig ... don't know if any of it will be worth posting at this stage.
Barry
Nice shot, great colours. Just a quick query, I notice you use DSS and Photoshop elements. I am trying to use the same combination of software, but the tiff files made by DSS are 16 bits and Elements just doesn't like them. How do you work around this?
Barry
Nice shot, great colours. Just a quick query, I notice you use DSS and Photoshop elements. I am trying to use the same combination of software, but the tiff files made by DSS are 16 bits and Elements just doesn't like them. How do you work around this?
Malcolm
Thanks guys, I am pretty close with the focus now. I know I should check it through the duration of the night as the scope changes angle and cools, but it doesn't look like it needs it badly enough at this point.
Malcolm, I stack and align the RGB in DSS, usually turn up the saturation a fraction (up to about 21% tops), a bit of highlight/midtone/shadow adjustment then save it as a 16bit TIFF. When I open it up in photoshop, I do all the things I can when it is a 16 bit still. When it comes to the actions that it doesn't agree with (I do these last if I can), I convert it to an 8 bit and carry on. When finished, I save it as a TIFF AND A JPEG.
I can go back and play around with the TIFF, but it's not really worth it with a JPEG.
I shot a single 720 sec of it the other night just to make sure it was still there
You're putting in a lot of hours on these objects mate.
I hope you don't mind I tweaked the background a little ... it seemed to have some green in it ... probably a bit of LP ... or maybe it's just my monitor ... anyway keep up the good work.
p.s. I might pop out to the obs for a while later ... I'll see how I feel and see how much smoke is around ... those bloody farmers have been burning off again
Thanks Troy, I always appreciate your encouragement mate. I have seen your photos! Make my beginnings look like a 2 year old with a box brownie!!
Steve, ARE YOU KIDDING!!!??? Canberra is the only place I have lived in Australia (and I have lived in every state for some time...(except SA (mexico) ) Where I can get away from drug smokin' hookers and pollies!!
The prob I have (and I thought it was to do with the 16 bit tiffs) is the images saved from DSS come up with a message about not supporting High Dynamic Range (HDR) images in elements, so I cannot even open them up to try processing. I have opened them up in another editor and resaved as jpgs but that seems like a bad way to go as I am bound to loose data.
