First light for the AT8IN. Conditions not optimal, really fighting weight with the mount.
Date: 15 Jun 2012
Subject: M51, Whirlpool Galaxy
Scope: AT8IN, 0.5x Antares telereducer
Filter: none
Mount: CG-5 (Synta motors)
Guiding: Orion ST80 + 0.5x Antares telereducer + DSI Ic + PHD
Camera: DSI IIc (cooled at 2 A, 7.5 V)
Acquisition: Nebulosity 3.0.3
Exposure: 14 x 300 s
Stacking: Neb 3, align, 1.5 SD stack (no flats or bias)
Processing: levels, digital development, GREYCstoration, saturation in Neb 3; Gradient Xterminator, Astronomy Tools color blotch reduction, deep space noise reduction, star color enhance, levels in CS5.
Revision:
23 million LY
First light image for the AT8IN. Conditions not optimal, really fighting weight with the mount.
Date: 15 Jun 2012
Subject: M51, Whirlpool Galaxy
Scope: AT8IN, 0.5x Antares telereducer
Filter: none
Mount: CG-5 (Synta motors)
Guiding: Orion ST80 + 0.5x Antares telereducer + DSI Ic + PHD
Camera: DSI IIc (cooled at 2 A, 7.5 V)
Acquisition: Nebulosity 3.0.3
Exposure: 17 x 300 s
Stacking: Restacked using 18 Jun 2012 flats, 23 Apr 2012 bias, and 23 Jun 2012 darks averaged into a bad pixel map.
Processing: StarTools first doing Wipe:Gradient, then Develop (aggressive), HDR:Reveal Core, Sharpen, Deconvolute (~3 pixels), Track, Magic:Grow Core, Magic:Shrink, Repair:Warp, Life:Moderate with a little saturation thrown in along the way. This still left a very noisy image in the dark parts due to very bad gradients (I think due to clouds passing through some of the subframes, or possibly I was down in the Provo light pollution; I don’t remember now). So in CS6 I made a duplicate layer, darkened out the gradient with Levels, desaturated the result, then used a Gaussian blurred layer mask to recombine and get this result. The color is still bad, but I’ll have to wait until I can get new data to fix that.
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