P Holdsworth Posted April 4 Share Posted April 4 Hi all, finally two consecutive clear nights! When I started the hobby 3 years ago I bought a bundle package of reflector telescope and mount then quickly added a 500mm refractor which seemed easier as a beginner not to have to deal with collimation etc . The newtonian has sat at the side of the computer gathering dust.....until now! I Bought a laser collimator a few weeks ago and thought I'd give it a go again especially with galaxy season starting. So here's my effort on the whirlpool galaxy (M51) which is 5 hours of 3 min subs over the last two nights using the optolong lpro filter and zwo 294 mc pro. It's only the second galaxy image i've done so lots to learn galaxy processing. I fully intend to add some Ha data to this by extracting some Ha from a L extreme narrowband to see if that adds anything but for now this is just plain old RGB data. Cheers Paul 9 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Astrobdlbug Posted April 4 Share Posted April 4 That’s a really good result Paul and you’ve got a lots of colour in there as well. what’s the f/l of your reflector ? definitely been worthwhile ‘dusting it down’ and collimating - having the right tools for the job, in this case galaxy imaging. how did you cope with the big ‘ol Moon - I haven’t bothered doing any imaging as it’s so bright - Bryan 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
P Holdsworth Posted April 4 Author Share Posted April 4 58 minutes ago, Astrobdlbug said: That’s a really good result Paul and you’ve got a lots of colour in there as well. what’s the f/l of your reflector ? definitely been worthwhile ‘dusting it down’ and collimating - having the right tools for the job, in this case galaxy imaging. how did you cope with the big ‘ol Moon - I haven’t bothered doing any imaging as it’s so bright - Bryan Thanks Bryan, the reflector has a focal length of 750mm but it's paired with a relatively small sensor in the zwo 294 mc pro so probably equivalent to around a 1000mm field of view . Regards the moon I had huge difficulties with gradients so I used the light pollution tool in APP and then did a DBE and a ABE process in pixinsight. I also followed a tutorial on you tube for masking galaxies where you create three masks first one for the whole galaxy, second the outer spirals and then an inner mask for the core which seemed to work quite well for producing some colour. Definitely not the best of conditions but I wanted to test the laser collimator .......love a new gadget !! Cheers Paul 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Adam Y Posted April 4 Share Posted April 4 Beautiful result! 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TerryMcK Posted April 4 Share Posted April 4 Great results Paul 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RaDec Posted April 5 Share Posted April 5 'Plain old RGB' my foot - that's a gorgeous image. You've got loads of the subtle wispy stuff that's so hard to process as naturally as you have. Excellent result 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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