M42 from Singapore

[Jean-Yves]

Hi,

Do you like my new avatar ?

In December, we had a very clear night in Singapore and I spent some time on M42.
The link below is the result of 24 images, 3 minutes each, unguided on an AP600 (that's a sturdy mount !) with a Sky 90 and canon 300D.

I did the same image the month before when conditions were not so good and the difference is quite big.

Processed using ImagePlus and photoshop, and following all the excellent advise from this fine group ...

Cheers

Jean-Yves

http://www.geocities.com/jybeninger/m42.html

[Ron]

Jean-Yves,

You did an oustanding job!  SUPERB!

Glad you finally got some good weather.

Have you used the Imagesplus to do rotation of images taken in Alt/Az, and if so how good of a job does it do?

Thanks,

Ron

[Jean-Yves]

Thanks Ron ! I managed to catch the unique night of good weather in the past few months !

With this new setup, I image on a GEM, no more Alt-Az.
I still use the LX200 in Alt-az and alignment using ImagePlus works very well

I used ImagePlus to :
- Convert the raws to TIFF format, it does a much better job than C1 Rebel that I use for usual images. I think it has been optimised for those night shots.
- Apply dark and flats : does it normally well
- Align and rotate images (a few pixels here and there): works very well
- remove background gradients : works very well. At the end, when I was almost happy with the result, I noticed that the red channel still had a gradient and I corrected it ... may be too much, thus the bluish background ...

There are still lots of features I have to learn and the video tutorials provided when you purchase the software are excellent, the best tutorials I have seen in my hobby and my professional life !

Cheers

Jean-Yves

[Ron]

Thanks very much Jean-Yves

I tried the demo version but wasn't too happy with it

If I continue with my Alt/Az method I definitely need to go to some kind of software to help in the rotation and stacking process.

Ron