Tadpol galaxie, UGC 10214, Infinity mono

[klaus]

Hello all,
I am Klaus, new to this forum.
20 years ago, my interest in astronomy started and I jumped into the hobby getting myself an 8” Meade LX200 SCT. Over the years a large number of accessories has accumulated and tons of books e.g.” how to observe the Deep Sky”. But after a few years I realized that due to the light pollution, I had only a small number of DSO´s to choose from. All these years, I haven't been able to observe a galaxy! I was already starting to lose interest in visual observing when astro-video cameras entered the scene.
Since I own my Atik Infinity mono I can view all the faint stuff mentioned in the books from the comfort of my office. I am observing from my backyard outskirts of Hamburg in a suburban (Bortle 5, MPSAS 19. zone. It is fascinating to watch on the monitor how an image of a DSO that is millions of light years away gradually emerges. Most of the time I take 30 light frames of 30 seconds maximum. Before pointing the telescope to another DSO, I save the stack as fits-image for later processing and documentation.
What is your workflow to process stacked b/w images to get most out of it?

[bwa]

Why does your image have 'wavelets' in it, i.e.: they look like standing waves of some sort?

As for processing, I use a combination of PixInsight and Lightroom.

bwa

[klaus]

Why does your image have 'wavelets' in it, i.e.: they look like standing waves of some sort?

Hi bwa
,
thanks a lot for your answer .The `wavelets` are due to the intensive use of AstroFlat Pro and/or Astronomy Tools to bring out the tidal tail of Arp 188. (You need a pretty dark sky and an aperture >> 20" to glimpse the tidal tail visually !!)
I am not trying to make the pretty pictures like you would get with a great astrophotography rig.The tadpole galaxy is 420 millions!! from earth, apparent v mag is 14.4 . I would like to know where my limits are in terms of my location and equipment.
Processing is in FitsLiberator3 (ArcSinh(ArcSinh(x)) stretch with respect to peaklevel is 3times StdDev plus mean/median.

Greetings and clear sky

Klaus

 

[klaus]

Hi Sirius19,

thanks for your input and comment.

I played around with a trial version of StarTools for some days. I think it is not the right software  for me, because I am not dealing with colors (b/w only). I found that a non-linear stretch (ArcSinH !)and tweaking the individual parameters works best for me. Finished with curves and levels in CS2,  NeatImage or Astronomy Tools.
What is your workflow?
I attached a photo from M97. It is pretty faint, so I did my best to pull out the outer shell (s.o)

Greetings

Klaus

[klaus]

Hello, Sirius 19,

of course I have nothing against you editing my data from M97 with StarTools. Please note that it is an 8bit jpeg image, which was already edited.
Your version is too heavily edited for my taste (dark halos around the stars) ...
That's why I developed some fits data, also from other recordings, with StarTools in the last days. At second glance the software has a lot of potential and I start to like it. I bought a license, because without saving a comparison of the different workflows is not possible. Thank you for your advice !

What kind of equipment do you use and how do you use the Infinity OSC (number of shots, length of shot)?

By the way,
my English is not perfect because it is not my mother tongue.


Have a nice weekend and greetings from Germany


Klaus