Here's an hour's worth of M31 with the D800 @ iso 2000, 10 min subs and an astronomik CLS filter. This is about as high as M31 gets from Perth, and the light pollution is starting to mean I need to look around for a new dark sky site. A 10Mb version will appear eventually on my astrobin page, but it's been plate solving for the last two hours, so I'm not sure what's going on. http://www.astrobin.com/users/alocky/
Had to do a lot of work in pixinisight to clean up the light pollution, so I'd appreciate any tips on how to improve the processing.
cheers,
Andrew.
Thanks -but the hang up is at the astrobin end as part of the upload procedure, it's been stuck on it for a while. On the assumption that I messed something up I'll have another go at loading it.
Great pic Andrew!
What light pollution? Cant see it in the pic????
Cheers
Bartman
Thanks for the compliment!
After an iterative application of Pixinsights DBE and ABE tools, I have it in a seperate file now. The airglow was pretty strong too. The background goes from green to red across the frame.
I still can't load the images to astrobin. I wonder what's going on there? Anyone been able to load images in the last day?
Nice image, Andrew! It must be very low in the sky for you. I had a go at M31 on Saturday night with my FSQ-106 but haven't had a chance to process it yet.
Thanks Mike - the CLS filter puts a very strong blue cast to the image so I've paid a bit more attention to treating the core of the galaxy as white. It still doesn't have the reddish cast to the centre many images I've seen show, but I suspect that's a limitation of the DSLR's filter.
I also had a bit of a fiddle with the erosion tool in PixInsight to try and sharpen up the stars a bit, but I'm not convinced its much of an improvement.
I'm now having a chat with the guys at astrobin who are a bit mystified as to why my images aren't appearing.
If it does appear, it will be at: http://www.astrobin.com/20303/
cheers,
Andrew.
I'd now go back and play with the midtones, increase your blues, magentas and reds, each very slightly at a time to introduce the blue to the arms.
I nabbed this one last year with an STL-11000M and FSQ-106N (you can search for it if interested). I think I got 25 hours of data on it. I haven't yet processed it with the hydrogen alpha data. I'll try and capture more this year to round it out some more.
Finally! http://www.astrobin.com/20395/
Thanks for all the helpful feedback and kind comments. I've tweaked the colour slightly to bring a bit of blue back in the outer regions, and tried to boost the red in the middle.
cheers,
Andrew.
Beautiful Andrew, the D800 certainly is in a league of its own isnt it? 'How many darks did you use? I haven't pushed mine to 10min subs yet, I thought it might be pushing it.
Beautiful Andrew, the D800 certainly is in a league of its own isnt it? 'How many darks did you use? I haven't pushed mine to 10min subs yet, I thought it might be pushing it.
Very well done
Thanks again for all the positive comments!
I took 6 darks while I was packing up at 5:00am, and definitely need a few more. I was using iso2000 and an astronomiks 2" CLS filter, (otherwise 10 mins would be way too much). The filter introduces a whole new set of problems with colour balance and background, but does seem to do a good job on the light pollution. I took a widefield with a 14mm lens in between targets, 3200iso and 30 secs, and it looks like the sun is just setting, thanks to Perth's disproportionate skyglow!
I do like the D800, but cannot bring myself to modify it with a different IR filter, so I guess I need a 6803 chipped camera in the next couple of years, now I'm addicted to full frame...
However - with the D800 in Pixinsight, using 32 bit floating point, the working files are 414Mb. The files I was uploading to astrobin are 'only' 10-20Mb, but the number of pixels was enough to force the poor guys to have to stuff some more RAM in so their server could resize the images!
cheers,
Andrew
Wow only 6 darks? That's awesome! Haha yes for me the city lights are NW so any widefield in that area looks like a sunset too. I love full frame DSLRs, there's just something about them... I wouldn't touch the IR filter either, probably better to get a modified Canon I guess. Judging from your pics I was motivated to do some multi-minute subs last night from a dark site. Hopefully they will turn out good The file sizes are just absurd, especially if shooting and editing in Raw.
Looks like you'll have fun with this setup! Cheers
