It’s the middle of galaxy season and I’ve managed to grab some photons from the Leo Triplet over the last week or so. I figured this target would be ok for my field of view and it was, just about. I had to crop this quite a lot but I think there’s just about enough detail there to make it worthwhile. I’m reasonably pleased with the effort. Processed in Siril using bayer drizzle and SPCC.
It’s been ages since I got any clear sky, and now it’s galaxy season. This is not great for me because my equipment is relatively wide-field and most galaxies show up like tiny blotches in the middle of a bunch of stars. However, I’m keen to make the most of it so I thought I’d do Markarians Chain. I decided to approach this by taking lots of short exposures (60 secs) with regular dithering and stacking them with drizzle to try to extract some extra detail. On paper, this should have worked well but not so much in practice. Perhaps my sky isn’t dark enough, or my equipment is just not good enough, or perhaps I just didn’t spend enough time on it, but it’s not quite what I wanted. On the plus side, I did find that -20c gives less noise than -10c so that’s my new standard. I also experimented with the beta version of Siril with its new SPCC colour correction and proper bayer drizzle, and I spent some time to perfect my dark/flat/biases library. Hopefully this will pay off in better quality images in future. For now, here’s an annotated Markaians Chain
I was lucky to get 3 clear nights here in UK. Again, guiding was going very well, so I spent two nights gathering narrowband data and one night grabbing RGB. I discovered that my sv220 filter can’t deal with Alnitak! That star is BRIGHT! Anyway, it’s nothing I can’t fix with the addition of some RGB star data. Anyway, I’m relatively pleased with this image and I’ll probably spend weeks “tweaking” it.
We had our first clear night here in UK for months, and it turned out to be the clearest night I can remember in the past year! I was guiding at 0.6-0.8” and I was able to take 10min exposures with and indicated ~2.0 HFR in NINA. To complete this wonderful evening, the wind was very low, the temperature was around 0c and there was no moon. We had a slight hiccup for ~45mins to wait for some cloud to clear, but other than that it was a wonderful evening. But what should I target? I wanted to get a decent Rosette Nebula before it disappeared below the horizon and I managed to get a really good 5hrs of data, mostly consisting of 5min subs although I did get some 10min subs as well. I also got some Jellyfish Nebula which I will save for another day. Anyway, the results are below. This is processed entirely in Siril with a few curves tweaks in Gimp
This is the Tadpoles Nebula, IC410. It’s a star forming region in the constellation of Auriga. It’s near to the Flaming Star Nebula, the Spider Nebula and the Fly Nebula. I imaged this over a week where the sky was reasonable clear but not perfect however very window. My guiding was not well at all. I think this is why it looks a little less sharp that I would like. Anyway, I’m reasonably happy with it for now.
