M64 The Black Eye Galaxy (Michael Feigenbaum)

M64 The Black Eye Galaxy

Here we have the Black Eye Galaxy, otherwise know as Messier 64.

So I think this image marks a turning point for me. I think I had become a little complacent. I've been employing the same methods for each new project and expecting improvement. Not smart and quite lazy which is not my nature.

I have discovered two things-

1) my guiding was not right. I had become accustomed to turning everything on and just getting on with things. I had noticed oblong stars but I didn't think they were poor enough to matter. Well, I decided to dig into that and discovered a lot of nuances about PHd2 that I had ignored. I re-did my settings and did some experimentation and the improvement was readily apparent.

2) I have discovered that I am in almost all cases, overexposing my subframes. This is leading to a myriad of problems, for one example, the pink cores of bright stars.

I read a bunch of stuff written by Jon Rista who is a smart guy (understatement of the year) and I watched a youtube video done by "Linda's Astronomy Adventures" that demonstrated the calculations Jon has written about for an optimum subframe exposure time considering all the variables.

I had been wondering why my raw stacked images were so overblown and difficult to process and now I know. Not to mention that this is exacerbated by imaging at f/2.3 as I have been lately.

I have this image and one more to be processed that represent the last of the old lazy regime...

I'm hoping that these changes and particularly the change related to not being lazy or complacent will lead to better images going forward.

So live and learn and of course, as soon as I figure this out here comes the poor weather.

Thank you AB community for indulging me... CS!!

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	3250372
PixInsight job	47D602EWY4SKGZXBX8BS4GMF9GD7YPJK
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	n/a

RA (center)	12h56m44s.877
RA (top/left)	12h58m10s.339
RA (top/right)	12h54m57s.990
RA (bottom/right)	12h55m18s.703
RA (bottom/left)	12h58m31s.920

Dec (center)	+21°41′09″.59
Dec (top/left)	+21°17′45″.30
Dec (top/right)	+21°23′03″.00
Dec (bottom/right)	+22°04′33″.36
Dec (bottom/left)	+21°59′14″.66

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