The next image I have been working on, I have decided that I have hit the point of diminishing returns. “The rolling waves of Vela”
This is still within the constellation of Vela, but not really in the area typically seen as being part of the Vela SNR. There are not really any objects of note to mention, no high profile stars, a number of tiny background galaxies, no planetary nebulae, the area is basically dominated by HA and Sii with no Oiii worth gathering.
53 X 300 second Sii, 79 X 300 second HA and a tiny number of RGB subs (5 each at 300 seconds) all captured with Voyager of course.
An image I shot on 28/06, the only clear night I have had in a month. I have been hoping to complete a fairly large scale mosaic in this area but with Australia firmly held in a La Nina weather pattern, the weather has been dire for imaging this winter.
Shot with Voyager of course, using my Stellarvue SVX80T-3SV with 0.8 focal reducer and an ASI2600MM Pro camera, and Astronomik LRGB filters, on the iOptron CEM70G mount.
70 X 120 Second Lum at 0 gain
35 X 120 Seconds each R, G, B, at 100 gain
Integrated in Astro Pixel Processor and post in Photoshop, including the new NoiseXTerminator noise reduction filter. An AI noise reduction filter that was designed for astro images and to my eye does a great job of noise reduction without creating the “False” detail that AI noise reduction filters designed for terrestrial images tend to produce. Overdoing the “Detail” slider will mess with star profiles so they look ugly and over sharpened but it still seems to be highly resistant to “inventing” detail.
An image I have been working on since December 2022, NGC2170, the “Angel” nebula. A very pretty target but a tough one to process due to a pretty extreme dynamic range.
Shot with a 10"F4 Newtonian with a Paracorr, ZWO ASI2600MC and MM cameras, and all capture managed using Voyager advanced.
This was 105 600 second RGB subs shot with my ASI2600MC Pro (Befoire I decided to add luminance and HA to it) and 35 600 second HA and 33 600 second luminance.
The RGB was split to individual R-G-B files in Astro Pixel Processor for an easier workflow to keep all the frames registered together in a single processing run (You can not debayer OSC and straight process Mono at the same time) The RGB image was recombined in APP and then layering of the LRGB and HA and final post processing was done in Photoshop.
I reprocessed this image more times than I care to count before I was happy with it, sometimes all the way back to basic integration in Astro Pixel Processor.
This one just made top pick on Astrobin overnight (My time) which I am pretty happy with. I think image of the day is not very likely as Astrobin has had at least two NGC2170 IOTD’s in the last month.
Thank you, this one took a lot of work to process in a way that I was happy with (And I still see lots of ways I could improve it if time was not an issue) but I am very happy with how it came out.
Using Advanced, the data capture was the easy part of this one by a very long way.
And a nice surprise for my Saturday, the NGC2170 image did make it to IOTD on Astrobin. I really did not expect that to happen when other images of the same target had been IOTD’s recently.
It has been some time since I have added anything here. I have been very very busy, but I went out to a star party at a dark sky site recently, and we were lucky enough to have four clear nights. These are my first two images from Nhill. A shot of the Grus Quartet, and one of NGC300. I have other data to process but work means it will be a little while.
It is a long time since I Have put anything up as I have been very busy with work and the weather has been dire. Last week I finally got to set up and shoot some HA data for a new image, and as expected, everything worked perfectly (Except for me, I wasted a night due to a silly error on my part) and Advanced just did it’s work.
There is much more to be shot and much more processing to be done but this will be the basis of a HA layer on a fairly wide shot of the Tarantula nebula and surrounds. Processed and stars removed in Pixinsight.
Thanks, it might be a while until there are even some RGB stars to add to it the way the weather has been going. Hopefully I get a clear night around the new moon to collect RGB. This is a circumpolar target for me so I have many months yet that I can image it.
The test shots did not show a lot of detail (Just single 30 second images to look at framing) so the interesting little blob in the top right did not look like much and it is positioned to be cropped out of the final image, but I think I am going to want to do an image of that object with my longer focal length scope, I think it would make a good stand alone target.
Thanks, I have never really tried going to long integration times on this area so I was not sure what I would get out of this.
There are a few northern targets I would love to shoot, but I reckon we are pretty lucky with globular clusters, big supernova remnants, and of course the galactic core in really great spots to observe and image.
Work in progress continues, this is the HA data above, with a full night of RGB laid underneath it. Oiii to go yet and potentially Sii, but I have never yet found a HA-Oiii-Sii mix that I actually like so I normally do bicolour on the narrowband component.
RGB shot last night with Voyager advanced which did exactly as expected, RGB all night except when the moon rose where it shot one sub of Oiii before the end of astro night.
