I headed up to the
Rolnick Observatory with fellow astrobinners
Dan and
Dave on Saturday for a night of imaging. I had already selected what I wanted to image for it's position away from the moon and position near the zenith. The moon was almost full so I wasn’t confident of catching anything. Dan got [url= http://www.astrobin.com/169994/]this shot [/url] of myself and David with the ISS shooting through Orion while we were imaging. My scope is the 8” pointing directly up center bottom.
Some background. I had
connected a webcam to my finderscope a few weeks earlier. After I was given the challenge of making the setup guide, I decided to
give it a go on the M97. Thought it was going to work but when PHD Guiding was doing it’s setup, it came up with an error that the alignment star wasn’t moving enough in RA. Tried a couple of things to rectify the problem to no avail. What can I expect from a $1.95 webcam.
Managed to get 100 x 45 second non-guided frames and 10 darks of the Owl. When I downloaded the images though, the camera thought that 80 of the shots were portrait so had rotated them. This proved to be very problematic as I couldn’t figure out how to rotate the CR2 files to be landscape and preserve the CR2 format. I converted all shots to TIF and rotated them no problem but PI kept crashing during stacking. It would only stack the 10 darks with the 20 landscape CR2s. In the end I stacked all 100 lights and darks with DSS no problem. The result was far superior to the PI 20 shot stack so that’s what I processed and uploaded.
Revision Notes
R1 Enhance outer nebula with levels and curves.
R2 Enhance outer nebula and core highlights with brightness contrast.
R3 Balance background gradient. Reinstate original nebula pixels.
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