M57 - The Ring Nebula, 3x120 second

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.

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.

Normal Guiding Service Resumed

A little less drift, but again, seeing conditions not ideal, so I am just happy to be imaging M13 again...

I've just noticed PHD was set to not guide on declination, so recalibrating with it set to north.

After getting enough data on M13, although it's late, M57 (the Rin Nebula in Lyra) came up into view, above the dirty grey zone of the horizon.  This is one of the joys of imaging where an image seemingly so bland as a grey smudge, will turn into a beautiful nebula once enough data is captured.  Yes, the grey smudge in the middle is what I am so excited about...

When I zoom in, this is what the camera is capturing, a planetary nebula 2,300 years from earth:

Once the image is processed, although it won't be nearly as good as the colour image below (from Stellarium), it's one of the personal rewards of astrophotography.

Below is one 120 second image converted to colour.  No other processing...

I wish I had more time to get more data, but as is often the case, M57 will have to wait for another day until I and my equipment can do it justice.

Apart from the odd blip, as below, (probably caused by "stiction" (static friction in the gears) - the CG-5 mount is reknowned for it), guiding has been good tonight, just a pity I have to close up shop...  The clouds are due to descend for a few days however, so at least I have plenty of data to process.