Seeing the date stamp on my last blog post is a little bit disconcerting, considering that I have indeed been actively imaging the past several months regardless of the lack of updates to the website. Half-way through my summer holidays, I seem to have found the effort to make some updates here. I will start with my latest images of the M101 Pinwheel Galaxy and the NGC4038-NGC4039 Antennae Galaxies.
M101 Pinwheel Galaxy in LRGB
NGC4038-NGC4039 Antennae Galaxies in LRGB
With the longer focal length of 1592 mm, it was impossible to fit the entire M101 Pinwheel Galaxy in one frame if I wanted the entirety of the spiral arms in the image. This image is therefore a 4-panel mosaic. Each panel contains 30 Luminance exposures and 20 exposures of each colour (Red, Green and Blue). All exposures were 15 minutes long, giving this image a total exposure time of 90 hours. A fair amount of work, I must admit, and I spent the last two weeks of it worried that I would run out of imaging time this year. Thankfully the clear nights held up just enough to finish it. The NGC4038-NGC4039 Antennae Galaxies image is a single panel with 31 hours and 15 minutes of total exposure time. I enjoyed imaging this target again because it was my last image with the Takahashi FSQ-85ED telescope and really my first target with the Altair Astro 8" RC telescope.
I am currently imaging the IC1396 Elephant Trunk Nebula in narrowband, at this longer focal length. I am nearly done with the 2-panel mosaic for it. Below you can see the current progress - the top is Hydrogen-Alpha and the bottom is Oxygen-III. I am a couple of nights away from finishing the Sulphur-II as well and then it is post-processing time!
I am currently imaging the IC1396 Elephant Trunk Nebula in narrowband, at this longer focal length. I am nearly done with the 2-panel mosaic for it. Below you can see the current progress - the top is Hydrogen-Alpha and the bottom is Oxygen-III. I am a couple of nights away from finishing the Sulphur-II as well and then it is post-processing time!
IC1396 Elephant Trunk Nebula in Hydrogen-Alpha
IC1396 Elephant Trunk Nebula in Oxygen-III
It really is a lot of fun imaging at this pixel scale (0.588 arcseconds/pixel) - the detail you see in objects imaged before is stunning. I look forward to post-processing this image later this week.
Regarding the tutorials, I have just looked through all my PixInsight tutorials to make sure they are as complete as they were a year ago, and to correct a couple of tiny errors in the text. I mentioned the relatively new Debayer process in the tutorial for pre-processing your images, doing away with the old BatchDeBayer script. Also, I edited my tutorial on preparing images for colour combination to include a few recommended settings on the StarAlignement process that prevents alignment problems with mosaic images. I noticed this issue when working with mosaics, whereby the corner stars would not be aligned compared to the centre stars. An odd issue but easily corrected with some StarAlignment settings.
Seeing that the PixInsight tutorials are still serving their intended purpose in full, I am making a short list of extra things I can add to a few and a few new tutorials I can write. For now, I intend on writing a new one on the narrowband Hubble palette and then a couple of extra example ones where I completely work through some data to produce a final image. A couple of examples would be good as I would cover different types of targets as well as different imaging filters.
Regarding the tutorials, I have just looked through all my PixInsight tutorials to make sure they are as complete as they were a year ago, and to correct a couple of tiny errors in the text. I mentioned the relatively new Debayer process in the tutorial for pre-processing your images, doing away with the old BatchDeBayer script. Also, I edited my tutorial on preparing images for colour combination to include a few recommended settings on the StarAlignement process that prevents alignment problems with mosaic images. I noticed this issue when working with mosaics, whereby the corner stars would not be aligned compared to the centre stars. An odd issue but easily corrected with some StarAlignment settings.
Seeing that the PixInsight tutorials are still serving their intended purpose in full, I am making a short list of extra things I can add to a few and a few new tutorials I can write. For now, I intend on writing a new one on the narrowband Hubble palette and then a couple of extra example ones where I completely work through some data to produce a final image. A couple of examples would be good as I would cover different types of targets as well as different imaging filters.