So I typically only post on here when stuff goes wrong with my setup. I thought I’d try something new and post about when it all went right instead.
I went out for some quality time with the scope last night, and everything just went right. Alignment was easy, picking a target was easy… I even had a meridian flip that went off without a hitch. The result was this image of the Western Veil Nebula.
The only thing that went wrong was that in the process of re-balancing my mount, I seem to have turned it into a really efficient seismometer, so every time I moved my chair or walked too close to the mount I got trailing. Not SGP’s fault… guess it’s time to invest in some anti-vibration pads.
Even still, thanks Jared and Ken for making astrophotography less work and more fun!
The large stars are from stacking. I stacked 24 x 2 min subs, the stars were normal when I started, but stacking and manipulating them caused a little swelling. I’ve tried to reduce them, but in the end just decided to leave them be.
I stacked in DSS, and then did manipulation in Star Tools and CS2. Noting I did would unbloat them.
That’s interesting but not something I’ve runinto before. I wonder what it’s doing? You could see if you could generate a mask and do a reverse curve to them.
I was going to upload the unmanipulated TIFF file, but its about 150mb, so instead here’s a screencap of it. I haven’t done anything to it but drop it in PS and then save it as a PNG for forum use. You can see the stars are a but more sane, but in the course of processing, they all get halos. I tried the minimize trick in photoshop, but it just left them looking weird.