Tyler Allred wrote:
Hi all. I finally got a chance to image last night and picked an obscure target: NGC7380. It turned out pretty nice.
This image is a combination of Ha and RGB data. The star field is really colorful on this one.
Here is a link to the small version:
Hi Tyler, The kind comments I've received here about my recent pictures are certainly appreciated (thank you all!) but looking at your latest beautiful image shows me just how far I have to go. You are using a smaller chip than I am and your pixels are bigger and yet your stars are sharply focused, tiny pinpoints as opposed to the ugly splotches the stars form in my pictures. What is the effective focal length of your system? I'm running at about 1,800 mm. You note that your exposures are "Ha 10x1200s RGB 6x300s each". From that I'm guessing you mean the Ha is a combination of ten 1,200 second (20 minute) exposures and then you made an additional six 300 second (5 minute) exposures for each of red, green and blue. So that would be a total of 290 minutes or nearly 5 hours of exposures. Have I got all that right? Also, for your 1,200 second luminance exposures did you also make 1,200 second darks? If so, did you make a series of 1,200 second darks and then combine them into a master dark? If so, how many in the series? How's about 300 second darks for the 300 second color exposures? More than one and, if so, how many? Would you be willing to email me one of those ten 1,200 second raw, unprocessed FITS images you used to make your NGC 7380 picture? I'd really like to see how your stars look before they've been dark subtracted, flat fielded or PhotoShopped. Carpe Noctem! pw