From about 8 frames captured, only 3 were worthy of stacking - I have found being very discriminatory with the calibrated images really does improve the end result. This image is unprocessed, but saving it as jpeg does not look good. I have still to collimate the telescope, and this is also before I cleaned the optics yesterday. Deconvolution does not work well on wide-field images such as this. It's much better at bring out detail in nebula, galaxies, and other finer structures.
![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyMJQe9QJHbqv0DKvOM_d0Xy9YPxL3yola883Vo35uZGJzoBVHQmhDHYB9RLMnhJ1Z7tkBLsyHsLO44XOiIENKX5mNTjToYf0zpuh4bzYKUt37mxG6uRkZ_BryLEFLIOdtdkxpAYNsJOcV/s1600/M57RingNebula.jpg)
Having stacked the image I decided to crop it very close to the centre, and then played about more with the deconvolution settings in MaximDL. It brings out a little more detail and contrast in the (relatively) hot centre of the nebula, and the cooler outer regions, but as this is a raw single-shot colour based image with only a light pollution filter, not much detail of the nebula comes through. Can't wait to start using hydrogen-alpha and combining that data, but the telescope and camera are not suited to such small objects - the resolution falls off a cliff when zoomed in to this level. However, given the time of year, weather, and other limiting factors, I have had no choice but to image objects that are unsuitable for my set up. It is a good learning experience though...
For a much better idea of what I could be producing if someone gave me half a billion dollars, or a few hours with the HST, see
here.
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