Western Veil Nebula

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!

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I think it’s great :blush: thanks for sharing! I really liked the Orion TOAG, looks like you’ve got it dialed in.

my critique would be you have large stars. How did you focus it?

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.

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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.

A sweet image :slight_smile:️ I love that section.

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.

If you want post the data calibrated, I can integrate it in PI for you. Send me a pm.

@jje64

Thanks for the kind words.