M17, Swan Nebula, East-Heavy Guiding (David Dearden)

M17, Swan Nebula, East-Heavy Guiding

I had to pull the camera off and find the Swan visually, which was easy. It is clearly recognizable in the AT8IN with 19 mm eyepiece. I'm trying the east-heavy mount trick; 2 Gold's Gym weights extra on the east, which is about 2 lbs (I tried 3 but it was so far off I couldn't get a good PHD calibration). Conditions tonight are poor despite the clear sky chart saying the seeing is good, because there is gusty wind. It's also pretty warm tonight, but the camera is cooled to 10-15 °C. Very large periodic error (7.74 arcsec RMS) with the weights tonight, but the stars don't look too bad (nor are they too good; I'm still working on it), so perhaps the error was guided out OK. I could probably process this better, but I've got a real job I'd better work on.

In the B revision, reprocessed: auto color balance, StarTools 1.3 Develop, HDR:Core reveal, Sharpen, Deconvolute, Track, Magic:Shrink, Life:Isolate, CS6 Astronomy Tools Star Color Enahance, AstroFrame

Date: 9 Jul 2012

Subject: M17, Swan Nebula

Scope: AT8IN

Filter: none

Mount: CG-5 (Synta motors)

Guiding: Orion ST80 + 0.5x Antares telereducer + DSI Ic + PHD

Camera: DSI IIc

Acquisition: Nebulosity 3.0.8

Exposure: 78 x 180 s

Stacking: Neb 3, bias included, normalize first, trans+rot align, 1.5 SD stack

Processing: auto color balance, levels, curves, GREYCstoration, unsharp mask, saturation boost, CS5 curves and levels, unsharp mask, Astronomy Tools, deep space & space noise reduction, star color enhance, star reduction

Final
Original
B

Please note: The following tables are updated every 24 hours.

Distribution of astrophotographers

This table shows the number of distinct astrophotographers who have been assigned and IOTD/TP award compared to the total number of images awarded.
	Distinct awarded users	Total awarded images
Image of the day
Top picks
Top pick nominations

Distribution of subject types

This table shows the distribution of awards per subject type, compared to the popularity of images of that subject type.
	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
Deep sky
Solar system
Extremely wide field
Star trails
Northern lights
Noctilucent clouds
Landscape

Distribution of data sources

This table shows the distribution of awards per data source, compared to the popularity of images acquired from that data source.
	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
Backyard
Traveller
Own remote observatory
Amateur hosting facility
Public amaeteur data
Professional, scientific grade data
Mix of multiple sources
Other
Unknown

The “AstroBin Image of the Day and Top Picks”, or IOTD/TP, is a long-running system to promote beautiful, interesting, peculiar, or otherwise amazing astrophotographs, with a focus on technical excellence. Learn more.

Submitted The date and time when you submitted this image for IOTD/TP consideration.	...
Views by Submitters (available since September 19th, 2023) Every image is assigned to 50% of available Submitters. In the event that at least 80% of them don't view the image before its time in the IOTD/TP process expires, it's assigned to the other 50% of Submitters and the process begins anew.
Promotions by Submitters When 3 distinct Submitters promote the image, it moves on to the next stage of the process: evaluation for Top Pick status. This requirement, in addition to anonymization of images and distribution to only a subset of them, prevents biases and ensures that the best images are selected.
Promotions by Reviewers When 3 distinct Reviewers promote the image, it moves on to the next stage of the process: evaluation for IOTD status.
Early dismissal Staff members have a lot of images to inspect on a daily basis, and they can dismiss images if they believe they don't meet the requirements for IOTD/TP selection. If an image is dismissed 5 times, it's removed from the process. This streamlines the process and ensures that any bias present in promotions could be overruled by other staff members.

Status	n/a
Started	n/a
Astrometry.net job	n/a
PixInsight job	n/a
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	n/a

Image Index:

Contribution Index (beta):