M45 – Pleiades (ashley)

Celestial hemisphere: Northern · Constellation: Taurus (Tau) · Contains: 16 Tau · 17 Tau · 19 q Tau · 20 Tau · 21 Tau · 22 Tau · 23 Tau · 24 Tau · 25 eta Tau · 26 Tau · 27 Tau · 28 Tau · Alcyone · Asterope · Atlas · Barnard's Merope Nebula · Celaeno · Electra · IC 349 · LBN 770 · LBN 771 · LBN 772 · M 45 · Maia · Maia Nebula · Merope · Merope Nebula · NGC 1432 · NGC 1435 · Pleiades · And 11 more.

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M45 – Pleiades

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M45 – Pleiades

This is my first time using guiding, which is just... amazing. However, because I spent most of the night configuring and learning how to use PHD2, I only was able to capture 13 frames of M45 before it went out of view. Having said that, I'm honestly not sure why I'm posting this, because I'm not very satisfied with it. I mean, it is technically better than my last attempt, but I know I can do better with more than 13 stacked frames. I think it's the small number of frames that resulted in a very poor SNR and made processing difficult. Ideally I plan on getting around 100+ frames to see if that improves the SNR and allows me to stretch the fainter areas further, but I'm also planning on stopping as soon as the image is clean enough.

Edit B — Added more data to the stack from earlier this month.

Edit C — Added 13 x 480 second frames, there seems to be an improvement, but I still have a LOT more data to add before I'm guessing I'll be satisfied. This will continue to be a work in progress as I'm able to collect more data. I just really want to get the noise level down so I don't have to apply such aggressive noise reduction.

Edit E — Yes it's noisy, but I think I prefer this to the excessive noise reduction. Hopefully with many more frames stacked I can get to this point sans the noise.

Edit H — Added some more darks to the 480 second stack and reprocessed. I now have 28 vs the previous 5, which seems to make a fair difference. Hopefully once the moon phase is ideal I'll be able to add more lights.

Edit H — Added 14 more 480 second frames, this time using dithering. SNR is very slowly improving.

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	5434943
PixInsight job	PNG6NYV5NXGZKOKD8W5KK2B04SC1QH8H
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	03h46m53s.72
RA (top/left)	03h49m23s.73
RA (top/right)	03h43m48s.70
RA (bottom/right)	03h44m25s.25
RA (bottom/left)	03h49m58s.31

Dec (center)	+24°07′42″.1
Dec (top/left)	+24°43′18″.3
Dec (top/right)	+24°32′56″.2
Dec (bottom/right)	+23°32′00″.1
Dec (bottom/left)	+23°42′12″.1

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M45 – Pleiades

M45 – Pleiades

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