United we stand, divided we...

This data was collected over the previous weekend. After the end of this data collection my laptop conked out and lost it's mind. Won’t boot anymore. The image is 7x10 light and 12x10 dark frames. The flat and bias were collected on my Mac then using iCCD but I screwed up and the data is invalid now. Cannot open them anymore. The processing is very basic and I took a new approach and am very happy with it. Instead of splitting the frames into LRGB and then processing each channel individually, I calibrated and combined the light frames without splitting. I then converted it into RGB in Maxim and brought the tiff file into Photoshop and processed the various channels. The results are very pleasing! There is still some coma in this image which should be taken care of by the MPCC which I am yet to receive. Also I would probably benefit with some stretch and DDP in this image to tease out more of the details. All said and done, I think I will be processing my future images this way as opposed to splitting them before working on them.

Return of the Astro-Jedi

So, I have been away for almost 2 months. I was off getting married and on my honeymoon etc. A much needed break from the daily grind. Now I am moving in with my wife and long-time girlfriend into a single bedroom apartment :( Which means I won’t get as much face time with my tele anymore. But, over the span of these two months, I did get robofocus and feathertouch focuser installed on my trusty reflector. Make a huge difference in the focus. First, it’s a much shorter and more pleasant experience. And then, it’s spot on!! Just look at some data I gathered while playing around. I am using focusmax to achieve critical focus. Some images of the focuser and the motor will come soon.

This image is 12*10min light and dark images. No flats. I was playing around with robofocus and wanted to get some data to see what improvement it brings and wasn’t really trying to get really good data. But it’s obvious with some better data and calibration this image would shine. The focus is really good and very little coma. Although a coma corrector and a light pollution filter would really help. This also happened to be the march challenge for the tac-imaging mailing list.

Maxim DL+EQMod = Flame

I got my EQDirect mod from Shoestring recently and I now have the capability to control the telescope completely from my Laptop and doing PulseGuide through EQMOD Ascom driver. Took a bit of experimenting with the settings on Maxim DL and a bug fix to EQMOD before I got this working, but once I had it working, this was the result. This is a 3 hr exposure (18 * 10 min exposures) with equal darks. 50 4 sec flats were taken with 50 bias frames to go with it. The clarity and details are far better than my previous attempts.

NGC2403

This is not a very good representation of this object. But this is the best I could given the data I collected. I was struggling with Maxim DL and it’s settings when I was trying to image this. This is a 55 minute exposure (5 min * 11) with equal number of dark frames but no flats. I need to revisit this object sometime soon. This is a fairly bright and big galaxy in the local group that Charles Messier missed!

Eskimo Nebula

I just don’t have the right FOV for this object with the telescope/camera combination I have right now. This is a 3 hour exposure (5 min * 36) with an equal number of dark frames. No flats. This is a beautiful planetery, but you can’t see any detail in this image. Maybe I should use a barlow or something.

Horsehead Sequel

I gathered data from scratch. This time there was no moon, and I did this in an attempt to participate in the december challenge for tac-imaging mailing list. I think it worked out well. The processing worked good too. 20x3 min exposures totaling 2 hours. Equal number of darks. Flats were collected the next morning. Alignment and calibration in Maxim DL and final RGB composition in PS CS2. Another thing I realized while processing this is that the three AA plugins I had to split the exposures into LRGB were not all doing it the same way. One produced better RGB frames and one produced better L frames. I used both plugins. Deconvolution scripts used in Maxim DL to make the stars sharper. The color balance is probably also closer to reality although this is still a learning process for me.

M1 Reprocessed

Since I could not manage to do any imaging for almost two weeks now, I decided to reprocess the M1 data I had with the IR filter. Same data as the one posted on December 11th, but this time, I used better black and white point setting and also deconvolution scripts on the L master frame using the scripts developed by Robert. This did wonders. I used to cycles. The first cycle was gaussian kernel with 5 iterations and 4 pixels. The second cycle was again a gaussian kernel with 3 iterations with 2.5 pixels. In both cases the Standard deviation on the background was 6 (derived from the information panel of Maxim DL in aperture mode). This gave me a much sharper L master. The LLRGB was combined in PS CS2. Using some basic curves on R,G and B frames (from Ron Wodaski’s tutorial) and also black and white point settings. I also used DDP script for photoshop. Layer 1 was 40% opaque. You also notice that with the deconvolution all the doubles are also split nicely. There is some halo around the big stars and that’s probably because I pushed the deconvolution too far. I think the color balance is also better on this one. Although I still have no clue on how to do the color balance right.