Sunflower Galaxy

Taken from my garden near London with a 10" RCT. Unsupervised acquisition by SGP. I might have another go at the luminance to shrink the bigger stars down a bit more and tease out more detail.

9 Likes

buzz:

Beautifully done! Congratulations on acquiring so much of this unattended. This is one of my favorites.

Ben

well done!

any details on the subs? looks like good Ha

Brian

I didn’t really use Ha much. I blended it with the red channel a bit but it did not do much to the luminance. The Astrodon filters have quite a narrow red filter in the first place (narrower than say Baader).

nice. any more details on camera etc. would be appreciated

Brian

Well done Buzz. Beautiful galaxy.

Mark

Wow! Nice lanes and HA!

Camera was a QSI683wsg, on a Paramount MX and a 10-inch RC. Luminance was through an IDAS filter and the RGBHa (all unbinned) was through Astrodon filters. I only did an hour of Ha and just used it to pep up the Red channel. I would set it going in the evening and go to bed. By morning SGP had acquired the images, meridian flipped, continued and then put my ROR observatory to bed by morning. 5-minute subs on the wide-band and 20-min subs on the Ha.
Processed in PixInsight.
There are some stunning examples on the web which are humbling. On closer inspection they were done with dark field observatories and 17/20-inch RCs. One hernia is enough.

I forgot to enhance the Lum channel with the luminance from the RGB files. Adds a little more peripheral halo. I also protected the stars during the stretches, which reduced the bloat.

4 Likes

That’s a fantastic catch. Simply saying…WOW!! Thanks for sharing.

Rajib
Digboi, Assam, India

I think the color is a bit too warm and I re-ran the color calibration on the galaxy, rather than the stars. I changed the stretch slightly too. I think I prefer this version even more:

3 Likes

Quite stunning picture. Thanks for sharing. Can you explain further the benefits of the IDAS filter when using a monochrome CCD. I currently have Astrodon LRGB but hadn’t considered replacing L with IDAS. My locations are either very light polluted (London) or moderately (small town on the Atlantic coast in France). In London mostly doing narrowband.
Thank you

I live in a fairly light-polluted area so the faint tracery tends to get washed out. I have an Astrodon Lum filter but also an IDAS LP filter. When I compare frames back to back, the IDAS ones show better faint detail. I have not done a rigorous comparison but I do know it is highly dependent on the subject too. In my first book, I numerically compared IDAS with other LP filters and it did not fare well on the flaming star nebula. I kinda worked out afterwards that this neb has quite a bit of SII - which does not favor some of the filter passbands. In other circumstances, IDAS is extremely useful, especially in the presence of the common LP wavelengths. Goodness knows what will happen when my local council replace Sodium lamps with LEDs.

Thank you for the feedback.