Not happy with this yet, but after spending way to much time at it think the problem is in a lack of subs rather than how i'm processing. Either way, for today at least i give up and this will have to do.
38 x 300 sec
SW Equinox 80
Modified Canon 450D
CLS Filter
NEQ6
QHY5 on SW Startravel 80
Captured with APT
Stacked and processed in Iris with some tweaking in PS.
(http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8232/8442022284_153500f6cc_c.jpg)
Bigger Version: http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8232/8442022284_c0838faeb6_k.jpg (http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8232/8442022284_c0838faeb6_k.jpg)
Well you seem to have a lot of info there Jon. i think, as you do, it is the processing. i am sure you will be able to make a nice image out of this
Lots of detail but a bit over processed.
Bullseye stars and colours a bit bright
Lots of potential though
I agree with Mick. You've overdone the stars and I'd say at the expense of noise, still, it's a very good start indeed. Some dithering will most likely help reduce noise but more subs always help.
Robert
Robert, I did use dithering....
Something didn't go right with the stacking, there is a satelite or plain trail in the top left that the sigma clipping should have removed and lots of little artefacts from hot and cold pixels.
I think re-stacking the whole lot and starting from scratch might be in order. :-?
You've got some good data there Jon but not quite enough for this demanding object. In an effort to bring out all the data I think you've stretched the image to a point where the noise is becoming troublesome and it's also caused the weird problem with the centres of the stars. As you said, the sigma stacking needs tweaking because there are remnants of a stellite trail and also clusters of hot pixels.
More data would definitely make a huge difference to this.
I had a go at IC405 myself, last January, and I wasn't happy with my result, either:
http://www.markshelley.co.uk/Astronomy/2012/ic405.html
Mark
Hi Jon, I have only ever attempted a section of IC405 as I don't have the field of view you do.
I would go through your subs and remove any that aren't very very good i.e. remove the one with the airplane and any that had guiding glitches (zoom right in to a star so you can see lit pixels where they shouldn't be), also ones where a bit of thin cloud has floated across. This should improve matters without using the sigma value to exclude more data. I think 30+ five minute subs is a lot of data to be going on with, it's always tempting to say you need more subs but they will only help to improve signal to noise once the processing is sorted. I reject about 10% of my subs. I am hoping my OAG will improve the guiding glitches but it won't sort the cloud!
Just my two pence worth :)
Duncan