# A few more astro shots



## griz (Jan 9, 2006)

Reworked the first MW shot with Pixinsight. Its a complicated beast but I found a nice set of video tutorials I've been following to try and learn it. Its very powerful and has lots of functions that I haven't seen before. Excellent masking tools and background extraction and noise control. Sophisticated stretch controls. Moon was up last night so no way I was going to get any nebula action. So here is a moon shot and a couple of Milky Way shots one is reworked one is just done with DSS and PS.










Here is the one done with DSS and Ps.










And here is the first MW pic reworked with PixInsight. Do you see the dog and its bowl in the middle of the pic?










Wish the encoder wheel would get here so I could finish up. That will up my image count a lot since now I spend most of the night looking for the fuzzies.

Griz


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## MichaelW (Jun 16, 2010)

Pretty cool shots Griz. Surprises me how much color shows up in the sky.


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## griz (Jan 9, 2006)

Yep its there you just have to let it sit there and gather the photons. The last one is close to an hour of total integration. What is amazing to me is how good these DLSR's are for this kind of thing. When I was into it 15 years ago the CCD's were piteful compared to now. With all the stuff I had I never got a photo as nice as the last one. Goto scopes had just come out and they had a myriad of problems. Combine that with a newbie operator and it was a total disaster. I had just about decided to sell the 11inch and mount and go back to a GM-8 mount and a 4 inch refractor when the health issues kinda settled the issue. The nice thing about the StarLapse is you can start out with just a DLSR then if the mood strikes add the other axis and go full autoguided setup with a scope or DLSR. Add a pair of servo motors and controller and go full goto. I'm leaning towards getting the other axis adding a dual saddle plate and a Orion 3in guidescope and guider ccd camera. But i don't see getting another telescope. It would be very expensive to get more focal length than I have already at the same or better quality. Close to what I have in this in total just for the tube. I did find an adapter for cooled astro cameras to EOS lenses that has an additional bracket for a guidescope. That would make a nice little cooled ccd rig. I could get a nice cooled astro camera for what I'm thinking about spending on a 7D MkII. The Bald Eagles are back at the Llano nest. They are having to rebuild the nest. The old tree the last nest was in fell over. So I'm going to head that way in the next few days and see what I can get with the 400mm lens.

Griz


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## griz (Jan 9, 2006)

The colors come from the different gases that are being ionized by the radiation and heat in star forming regions. As you see in the last pic the yellow/brown dust which has other gases mixed in. As you go toward the red area you notice lots of hot almost blue stars that are lighting up the hydrogen alpha molecules to produce the red color. Hydrogen alpha and Oxygen III are the red and aqua/blue colors you see. With the standard IR filter still on your camera sometimes the Ha shows up greenish red. I had Ha and OIII filters in my old setup. I was looking at my old supplier and now they have a lot more of the specialized filters and a line of them that clip in to the body just in front of the mirror assembly. Can't use the white dot lenses with them but all the others work. Ha is very faint. You have to have a lot of it that is very excited or long exposures with filters to even see it. Some of the really nice ones I've seen on Astrobin.com are 50+ hours of various combinations of exposure time and filters. They are very beautiful. http://www.astrobin.com/explore/wall/

Griz


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