M33 taken from Nagao Toge, on the Kanagawa-Shizuoka border.
Conditions were poor; cloud cover came and went, though it wasn't windy at the site. Most of my subs seem to still have some haze in them. A couple have much darker blacks; my
guess is that for those frames I got lucky, and the clouds were covering the town to the west but not me.
You can see quite a bit of noise in the image, despite the high number of subs. The limiting magnitude is also quite a bit worse than my
M31 from Nagao Toge, post-typhoon image from last week. I suspect both are a result of the cloud cover.
Tracking is still a problem. I'm still manually tracking (hoping to buy a guide camera and controller soon, though), and my mount still isn't robust enough (that's a bigger purchase than I can manage right now). This limited me to 30-second subs. I'm hoping to push that to two minutes after getting a guide and controller.
This job took >20 hours of computing on my Macbook Air, using APP. After accepting APP's recommendations for stretching, I edited in GIMP. Raised the curve once, then two more S curves, then finally set the black level fairly high using the levels tool. I was afraid this would steal some of my detail, but there seems to be almost none down at the bottom, anyway.
I also experimented with raising the saturation. That seemed to increase the detail when looking at the image in a brightly lit room, but as soon as the sun went down and the room got darker it was evident that it made the noise dreadful, so I backed it out.
My flats are still poor, that's something I need to work on.
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