M83 - Southern Pinwheel ..color repro

leinad (Dan) · #1 10-04-2011, 02:54 AM

Been a while since I've had everything working the way I wanted. I haven't imaged in months.
I've spent the absence of time by acquiring a QSI583WSG and Lodestar guider. Cleaning the Vixen mirror. Collimating optics. Tuning the G11, and working out my checklists to ensure my setup is ready for a night to get some data.

Finally had a great clear night last night. temp stayed stable, seeing was acceptable and wind stayed at bay.

G11 was balanced, cables arranged, polar alignment checked(love alignmaster), and guiding was running exceptional.

The Vixen is very picky about collimation. Ive collimated the best I could and I was amazed that with good polar alignment and mount tuning at how well the guiding was and finally I was seeing round stars with 10min exposures. No tails or elongation in sight. Happy chappy!

I did experience one issue 8000sec into guiding where the lodestar would suddenly stop dead in its tracks. With MaximDL the guiding just froze! The camera didnt appear to freeze, but the guider images and graph suddenly froze which left the mount to start drifting. A quick guider stop, recalibrate and track again fixed the problem. Weird.

I have no idea why it happened and cant find any information on the interwebs about it as yet. Anyone seen this happen?

Was mostly a night of capturing L data and not enough RGB, so Ive tried to carefully pop some color out.

No calibration (must get a lightbox made! )
LRGB 160:15:15:15

I definitely think M83 will need at least 300:120:120:120 or similar to really shine.

Really looking forward to getting the most out of this scope now, and get some good data this year.

Jpeg doesnt do justice :/

http://i611.photobucket.com/albums/t...ro_50scale.jpg

subtle
http://i611.photobucket.com/albums/t...Reject_RGB.jpg

F/9 really blows the stars up :/

gregbradley · #2 10-04-2011, 10:13 AM

A very nice image.

I haven't had the Lodestar freeze on me but I did have a Starfish guider that would do that unexpectedly. Newer drivers helped and it also may be a RAM thing. Perhaps more RAM and check you have the latest drivers in case there is an issue.

Also with my Lodestar I get a white horizontal line in guide images. Do you get that? I think I may have gotten a faulty Lodestar.

Greg.

Hagar (Doug) · #3 10-04-2011, 11:04 AM

Very very nice. I love it. The fine detail and colour are superb. Looks like all the preparitory work you have done was well worth the effort.

Looking forward to seeing more like this.

desler · #4 10-04-2011, 11:10 AM

You've done exceptionally well, Everything seems to be working together. A fine result!

Darren

Ephemeral (John) · #5 10-04-2011, 01:58 PM

A good image dust lanes probably needs to be a bit more bluish IMO

leinad (Dan) · #6 10-04-2011, 02:33 PM

Thanks for the comments

Quote:

Originally Posted by gregbradley

A very nice image.

I haven't had the Lodestar freeze on me but I did have a Starfish guider that would do that unexpectedly. Newer drivers helped and it also may be a RAM thing. Perhaps more RAM and check you have the latest drivers in case there is an issue.

Also with my Lodestar I get a white horizontal line in guide images. Do you get that? I think I may have gotten a faulty Lodestar.

Greg.

My thoughts exactly Greg. Laptop has 2GB at the moment, I'll have to put another 2GB in. I'll check the drivers are the latest also.
I do have a white vertical bar to the left of the lodestar image which Ive seen with another, but no horizontal line.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ephemeral

A good image dust lanes probably needs to be a bit more bluish IMO

15mins of color in each channel is too little. I had to match color and saturate to bump the color up which was cheating.

Need to be meticulate with my processing also. Stretching without care causes all stars to oversaturate which I'll have to work on.
At f/9 alot more exposure time is needed to get some good data to use.
10m was just over the sweet point to stop the core being overexposed.

leinad (Dan) · #7 18-04-2011, 12:23 AM

5 hours of luminance. Need maybe a couple hours more I think.
Be interesting to see how much color is needed to make it pop out in color.
I only had 30mins each channel of RGB for the night(dawn creep) which is just way too soft.

Amazing what a full calibration of stacked data can do!

Cropped,resized, and processed with Adobe.(quick pp)

Thanks for looking.

leinad (Dan) · #8 19-04-2011, 02:00 AM

Bumped the RGB 30:30:30 I had. Need way more RGB data for better control(and more color in the faint luminescent arms), however the processing I think came out ok, maybe lost a bit of data. Better control on the stars this time round.

Lum and color repro.