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Some General Updates

7/8/2018

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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. 
Picture
M101 Pinwheel Galaxy in LRGB
→ View on AstroBin
→ View on Flickr
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NGC4038-NGC4039 Antennae Galaxies in LRGB
→ View on AstroBin
→ View on Flickr
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!
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IC1396 Elephant Trunk Nebula in Hydrogen-Alpha
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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. 
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