M51 Rother Valley Campsite 25 May 2012

[The Thing]

Friday night was cracking, really clear. I processed this very quickly on Saturday.

Meade LX90 8" UHTC at ~f5 on HEQ5, QHY5 on Meade finderscope, Baader Alan Gee II Telecompressor, Canon 1000D modified, Astronomik CLS-CCD filter, APT,PHD, EQASCOM, CdC.

Processed in Deep Sky Stacker, bilinear de-bayering, Kappa-sigma stacking (kappa 2, iterations 2). 1hr 20mins in 300s subs.

Full size.

[JohnP]

All looking very good Dunc - 3 quality images - amazing for a deep sky camp weekend - especially considering its end of May..

Well done - John

[The Thing]

Thanks John. Friday night was amazing.

The M101 would have been a lot better if I'd stayed up though as the guiding/ascom disconnected and less than half the subs were any use. C'est la vie.

[JohnP]

bummer.. i'm thinking m51 is my fav - even better as I saw it visually through Mr' G's scope on Friday night as well (that was a first for me)...

Colour balance looks a little red on the m101...

John

[RobertM]

There's some really good data in there Duncan, especially for such short exposure time.  Could be this screen but are the flats working well ?

Robert

[MarkS]

Hi Duncan,

That is my favourite image of your 3.  Probably because I really love M51.  Maybe it's not quite as sharp as it could be - I don't know the reason for that.

To be honest, I think you would have done better to spend 4 hours on one image than 1 hr 20 min on each of 3 images.  But here speaks a man who spent 50 hours on a single image and still managed to produce cr*p!

Mark

[The Thing]

There's some really good data in there Duncan, especially for such short exposure time.  Could be this screen but are the flats working well ?

Robert

DSS isn't very good with flats in my experience, though it was worse.(see Carols post http://forum.orpington-astronomy.org.uk/index.php?topic=8408.msg57265#msg57265. I'm going to reprocess in IRIS when I get a chance.