First real attempt at Deep sky imaging

Thanks,
I went back and re-did the image, and there it was, a very faint blip where IC1296 should be.

www.irishastronomy.org/user_resources/fi...03336-m57_ic1296.jpg
Again, turn your monitor brightness and contrast up full for this.

Its rated magnitude is 15.1 with a diameter of 1.1 arcminutes, keep in mind thast magnitudes in galaxies dont always reflect their surface brightness.
This is more about detecting it at all, other then seeing it clearly, for now

Great shot Dave! I did a test shot last Tuesday night at m57 and I think 1 minute exposures at 1600 iso might be worth to try. You need to have an equatorial mount else field rotation won’t allow. With a bit of luck tonight I might have a go at this nebula myself


Larry
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larryo.org

Super shot Dave!
It is indeed amazing what can be captured by the 300d.
I see you tok 24 frames. Were they 30sec exposures you used?
How did registax cope with the images? Did you need to reduce the file size first?

Michael

Registax 2 has no problem. I usually stack 3072x 2048 fine jpegs and I did stacks sometime as many as 180 frames. Even when you stack raw images converted in bmp went smooth. You want to have a s much ram as possible – I have 512Megs on my laptop and is just enough.

Larry

Hmmm .... I thought I had noticed IC1296 on images of M57 I had taken during VTIE sessions so I dug up the images I took of M57 with the 14" Telescopes In Education telescope on Mount Wilson.

This is a 2 minute exposure of M57 processed to show the nebula clearly. If oy look really carefully you can just about see the galaxy:



However, today I re-processed the raw fits in an attempt to bring out the galaxy. This resulted in the nebula getting horribly over lit but I was really pleased to find the structure of the galaxy clearly visible!

Have a look:

Thats a great image of tha galaxy, something to aim for.
Can you remember the exposure time ??
All I need is a 14 inch scope and the seeing on mount Wilson

I used 30 second exposures at iso1600,
I might try longer exposuresd at lower iso ratings to see if it prodices less noise.
Once i get the polar allignment fully sorted (wont bother until the dome in built) I'll try it with ds/o2 filters at much longer exposures.
I used the low image quality on fine detail mode, registax seemed to be ok with them, I wish I'd taken more shots, imagine what 100+ stacked images could produce.

I actually tried 1 and 2 minutre exposures but the missaligned mount and light pollutiuon for the 2 min exposure didnt help..