I've seen some others where they have used the S50 doing some long (hours not minutes) exposure sessions and was interested in trying this myself. I picked NGC2237 or the Rosetta Nebula as it is up and it is a nice target. Where it gets interesting is when I put it all together. To collect the images for this project I used my Seestar over 3 separate nights. Each night I acquired images from about 8pm until around 1:30am when the nebula finally set below the houses and horizon. Over this period I collected 2,427 images, each image being a 10 second exposure. Usually I pretty much process all my DSO images with PixInsight but this time I added Astro Pixel Processor into the mix. APP really does a quite painless integration of rotated subs such as what you get with the Seestar. I loaded all 2,427 images and loaded them into APP and I did all of the calibration, register and integration of the subs using APP. Here is a screenshot of the final integration.
For me, what is different with this image vs previous S50 images I've posted are:
1) The image is much wider than my standard S50 picture but a little shorter in height. The raw S50 image is 1080 x 1920. My finished image is 1320 x 1710. I gave up some height to gain more width. Overall I like the different aspect ratio. With some practice I'm guessing I can increase the effective box that can be placed inside the rotating S50 FOV.
2) There is far more detail in this image most likely due to the shear number of images used to construct the final picture.
I'm liking both the size and quality of this image. I will have to pursue this technique more over time and see if I can't improve on it.
Comments