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California in H-Alpha

willsonjared #94751 Did a little maintenance on my remote equipment during the last full moon cycle a couple weeks ago, and thought I would post a result. The maintenance was fairly simple--check the mount for any lubrication issues or the like, clean the corrector on the Honders, install a Gerd Neumann tip/tilt adapter to allow a me to adjust out some very minor tilt in the optical train, put the dew heater on its own power supply so I could control it separately from the mount and focuser, improve polar alignment (which was surprisingly poor), install a new driver into the filter wheel to allow unidirectional rotation, and a few other minor things that had cropped up over the last year. The telescope is currently at Deep Sky West in Rowe, NM, and I'm in California, so I don't get over there too often. Very pleased with how reliable the Astro-Physics equipment has been over the last year or so of remote operation. Anyhow, here is the image... This is a 4 x 2 mosaic of NGC 1499 with two hours or so of H-Alpha on each of the eight panels. In my opinion, this isn't a subject that benefits much from RGB data since there is so little color contrast within the nebula, so I decided to leave it as a monochrome image. Astro-Physics 305mm Riccardi-Honders AP1100AE mount running unguided using a dec-arc pointing model in APCC Pro QHY600PH camera at -20*C using a Chroma 50mm x 50mm 3nm H-Alpha filter, binned 2x2 Data acquisition was in NINA. All post processing in PixInsight. Calibration and post process involved the following: Weighted batch pre-processing including local normalization and Drizzle 1x integration (helps with the 2x2 binned panels) using x50 darks, x20 flats, and x50 dark flats Photometric Mosaic to stitch the frames together Dynamic Crop to taste Very light noise reduction (perhaps a bit too light?) Morphological Transformation to shrink stars a touch prior to stretching Stretching using Generalized Hyperbolic Stretch (which I'm finally starting to get the hang of--used to struggle to get natural looking stars and contrast) MMT against several layers to improve micro and macro contrast/visibility of details A little work with the clone tool to get rid of the dark horizontal band near Xi Persei which the QHY600 is prone to producing near bright stars Pretty simple processing overall. For anyone interested, the full version can be found on Astrobin here.
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Roland Christen #94752 That's pretty amazing picture with details I haven't seen before. Rolando toggle quoted message Show quoted text -----Original Message----- From: willsonjared via groups.io <willsonjared@...> To: main@ap-ug.groups.io Sent: Mon, Nov 28, 2022 10:31 am Subject: [ap-ug] California in H-Alpha Did a little maintenance on my remote equipment during the last full moon cycle a couple weeks ago, and thought I would post a result. The maintenance was fairly simple--check the mount for any lubrication issues or the like, clean the corrector on the Honders, install a Gerd Neumann tip/tilt adapter to allow a me to adjust out some very minor tilt in the optical train, put the dew heater on its own power supply so I could control it separately from the mount and focuser, improve polar alignment (which was surprisingly poor), install a new driver into the filter wheel to allow unidirectional rotation, and a few other minor things that had cropped up over the last year. The telescope is currently at Deep Sky West in Rowe, NM, and I'm in California, so I don't get over there too often. Very pleased with how reliable the Astro-Physics equipment has been over the last year or so of remote operation. Anyhow, here is the image... This is a 4 x 2 mosaic of NGC 1499 with two hours or so of H-Alpha on each of the eight panels. In my opinion, this isn't a subject that benefits much from RGB data since there is so little color contrast within the nebula, so I decided to leave it as a monochrome image. Astro-Physics 305mm Riccardi-Honders AP1100AE mount running unguided using a dec-arc pointing model in APCC Pro QHY600PH camera at -20*C using a Chroma 50mm x 50mm 3nm H-Alpha filter, binned 2x2 Data acquisition was in NINA. All post processing in PixInsight. Calibration and post process involved the following: Weighted batch pre-processing including local normalization and Drizzle 1x integration (helps with the 2x2 binned panels) using x50 darks, x20 flats, and x50 dark flats Photometric Mosaic to stitch the frames together Dynamic Crop to taste Very light noise reduction (perhaps a bit too light?) Morphological Transformation to shrink stars a touch prior to stretching Stretching using Generalized Hyperbolic Stretch (which I'm finally starting to get the hang of--used to struggle to get natural looking stars and contrast) MMT against several layers to improve micro and macro contrast/visibility of details A little work with the clone tool to get rid of the dark horizontal band near Xi Persei which the QHY600 is prone to producing near bright stars Pretty simple processing overall. For anyone interested, the full version can be found on Astrobin here.
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willsonjared #94753 Glad you liked it! There is a bit more in this object than most people are able to capture with a small refractor or telephoto lens, which seems to be the most common way to go after NGC 1499 simply because of its size. Multi-panel mosaics are a pain in the neck.
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ROBERT WYNNE #94759 All corners appear sharp as a tack. Great imaging. Congratulations. -Best, Robert toggle quoted message Show quoted text On 11/28/2022 8:31 AM willsonjared via groups.io <willsonjared@...> wrote: Did a little maintenance on my remote equipment during the last full moon cycle a couple weeks ago, and thought I would post a result. The maintenance was fairly simple--check the mount for any lubrication issues or the like, clean the corrector on the Honders, install a Gerd Neumann tip/tilt adapter to allow a me to adjust out some very minor tilt in the optical train, put the dew heater on its own power supply so I could control it separately from the mount and focuser, improve polar alignment (which was surprisingly poor), install a new driver into the filter wheel to allow unidirectional rotation, and a few other minor things that had cropped up over the last year. The telescope is currently at Deep Sky West in Rowe, NM, and I'm in California, so I don't get over there too often. Very pleased with how reliable the Astro-Physics equipment has been over the last year or so of remote operation. Anyhow, here is the image... This is a 4 x 2 mosaic of NGC 1499 with two hours or so of H-Alpha on each of the eight panels. In my opinion, this isn't a subject that benefits much from RGB data since there is so little color contrast within the nebula, so I decided to leave it as a monochrome image. Astro-Physics 305mm Riccardi-Honders AP1100AE mount running unguided using a dec-arc pointing model in APCC Pro QHY600PH camera at -20*C using a Chroma 50mm x 50mm 3nm H-Alpha filter, binned 2x2 Data acquisition was in NINA. All post processing in PixInsight. Calibration and post process involved the following: Weighted batch pre-processing including local normalization and Drizzle 1x integration (helps with the 2x2 binned panels) using x50 darks, x20 flats, and x50 dark flats Photometric Mosaic to stitch the frames together Dynamic Crop to taste Very light noise reduction (perhaps a bit too light?) Morphological Transformation to shrink stars a touch prior to stretching Stretching using Generalized Hyperbolic Stretch (which I'm finally starting to get the hang of--used to struggle to get natural looking stars and contrast) MMT against several layers to improve micro and macro contrast/visibility of details A little work with the clone tool to get rid of the dark horizontal band near Xi Persei which the QHY600 is prone to producing near bright stars Pretty simple processing overall. For anyone interested, the full version can be found on Astrobin here.
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willsonjared #94790 A word of caution--it's an eight panel mosaic, so "corners" are distributed all around the frame. All the same, thanks, I did manage to get rid of the last vestiges of tilt during the trip on-site. FWHM is not very different between the center of the frame and the corners.
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Stuart #94793 Jared, at first I was thinking "How on earth did you do THAT with the Honders!?" then saw that it was a 4x2 mosaic and ... well WOW! Love it! Stuart Heggie http://www.stuartheggie.com/ toggle quoted message Show quoted text On Mon, 28 Nov 2022 at 11:31, willsonjared via groups.io <willsonjared=yahoo.com@groups.io> wrote: Did a little maintenance on my remote equipment during the last full moon cycle a couple weeks ago, and thought I would post a result. The maintenance was fairly simple--check the mount for any lubrication issues or the like, clean the corrector on the Honders, install a Gerd Neumann tip/tilt adapter to allow a me to adjust out some very minor tilt in the optical train, put the dew heater on its own power supply so I could control it separately from the mount and focuser, improve polar alignment (which was surprisingly poor), install a new driver into the filter wheel to allow unidirectional rotation, and a few other minor things that had cropped up over the last year. The telescope is currently at Deep Sky West in Rowe, NM, and I'm in California, so I don't get over there too often. Very pleased with how reliable the Astro-Physics equipment has been over the last year or so of remote operation. Anyhow, here is the image... This is a 4 x 2 mosaic of NGC 1499 with two hours or so of H-Alpha on each of the eight panels. In my opinion, this isn't a subject that benefits much from RGB data since there is so little color contrast within the nebula, so I decided to leave it as a monochrome image. Astro-Physics 305mm Riccardi-Honders AP1100AE mount running unguided using a dec-arc pointing model in APCC Pro QHY600PH camera at -20*C using a Chroma 50mm x 50mm 3nm H-Alpha filter, binned 2x2 Data acquisition was in NINA. All post processing in PixInsight. Calibration and post process involved the following: Weighted batch pre-processing including local normalization and Drizzle 1x integration (helps with the 2x2 binned panels) using x50 darks, x20 flats, and x50 dark flats Photometric Mosaic to stitch the frames together Dynamic Crop to taste Very light noise reduction (perhaps a bit too light?) Morphological Transformation to shrink stars a touch prior to stretching Stretching using Generalized Hyperbolic Stretch (which I'm finally starting to get the hang of--used to struggle to get natural looking stars and contrast) MMT against several layers to improve micro and macro contrast/visibility of details A little work with the clone tool to get rid of the dark horizontal band near Xi Persei which the QHY600 is prone to producing near bright stars Pretty simple processing overall. For anyone interested, the full version can be found on Astrobin here.
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