Barnard's Loop M78 and Bogeyman

[Carole]

I started this in early November, it has been laborious, not only with the cloudy weather, but I only get around half an hour between the houses and the tree, and then it disappears behind the tree for about 3 hours, only to reappear just before a meridian flip.  I then get about 1 1/2 hours if it doesn't cloud up before it disappears behind the bank of trees for the rest of the night.

So after 3 broken up evenings, pre and post flip, pre and post tree, I still only have less than 3 hours of data.  Decided to call it a day as it was too much faff, and hope to get it at Cairds whenever we can get there again.

Couldn't do any Luminance (I tried but it was awful), so I pinched some data from my M78 image from 2017.

So this is less than 3 hours in total over 3 nights!!!

Atik460EX and Baader filters EFW
Samyang 135mm Bortle 8
Ha 11 x 600
RGB total of 25 x 150secs between all filters.

Total imaging time approx 2h 50mins

[MarkS]

That's come out pretty well!  It's never going to be easy from your location.

The field of view is great and I love the "red river" meandering through.

Mark

[Roberto]

Looking great Carole!

Roberto

[Carole]

Thanks Mark and Roberto.

Carole

[The Thing]

That's super Carole. Interesting as well.

[Carole]

Thanks Duncan, I like the composition of this having seen someone else do it a few years ago, and it's been on the To Do list for some time.

Carole

[NoelC]

Very interesting Carole.
The loop has come out very well and complements M78 nicely.
Noel

[Carole]

Thank you Noel.

Carole

[RobertM]

A tad out of focus but very nicely framed Carole.

Robert

[Carole]

After 100 likes on Astrobin plus good feedback and an APOD on The SkySearchers website, no-one else has said it is out of focus.  Have you measured it with CCD inspector or just using your own judgement?

https://theskysearchers.com/app.php/article/1-25-2021-tss-astrophotography-photo-of-the-day

Carole

[julian]

Hi Carole
Just look at the large image and see for yourself, the stars are not round. May be a stacking issue.
It's a very nice image when I first saw it I thought it was part of the California Nebula 

Julian

[RobertM]

My apologies Carole.  Perhaps I should have just said 'what an excellent astrophoto' but I thought you would want feedback.  It looks very good at the scale of the image that you posted and I'm sure you processed it very well but at full size there are aberrations over the image and I don't think it takes a hard look to see that.

BTW. Donald Trump has tens of millions of likes on facebook so make of 'likes' what you will.  A 'like' is a personal opinion but that doesn't mean it's objective or correct.  As for SkySearchers, I've not heard of it, perhaps I should get out more.

Robert

[Carole]

I am aware there are some imperfections, but I don't think focus is one of them that's all I am saying.

Forget the likes, what I was trying to say is a good 150 people on Astrobin (and other forums) who are experienced astrophotographers have looked at it and no-one else has mentioned focus. 

If you had mentioned elongated stars I wouldn't have argued about that, not quite sure how that came about and I have now been back to the Ha data and there is some misalignment of the different sets of data which I am going back to re-do.  So although I think focus is not the cause, your comment has made me go back and look again, so I am grateful for that.

I am not one of those people who needs to be told every image is wonderful, but I just didn't feel it was the actual problem.

Donald Trump has tens of millions of likes on facebook so make of 'likes' what you will.

I get your point, despicable man.

Carole

[Carole]

Herewith better stars shapes in Ha. 

Thanks to Robert's comments it made me go back and find out why there was some misalignment in the Ha channel.  I think it was sloppy processing on my Laptop instead of doing it on my Desktop and I should have used Registar instead of stacking the post and pre-flip data instead of flipping and stacking the two in Astroart.  This time I was much more careful about it.

It is still noisy due to lack of data and being Bortle 8.

Hope this is better - Doug/George can you use this one please.



   

[doug]

     Carole ..... have done. It`s on the February report, which has yet to be put onto the website.

     Doug.