Hi,
It was one of those nights after a more thas long day in the office that I could not muster the energy to set up my telescope. But sky was clear, new moon, so why not try something quick. So I set up my camera in my roof top window and just let it shoot the sky above.
Therefore, the attached picture is notable because of the equipment that was
not used to create it:
- no telescope (just a 85 mm lens)
- no astro CCD camera (just a plain Canon EOS40D without modification)
- no mount (just the edge of my roof top window)
- no tracking, no guiding (just 380 second shots of 10 seconds each)
Pictures were calibrated with Deep Sky Stacker, aligned and integrated with PI. General procedure:
- use DSS to calibrate with bias, flats, darks (using the intermediate files option)
- create master registration frame from shots 1, 150, 300 using Star Alignment-Register Mosaic-Union. Using only one of the frames for registration leads to notable lens distortions in the regions were the master registration frame is just black. Basically, this is the reason why I did registration with PI this time: DSS would not allow me to provide a master registration frame.
- use PI to align & integrate. Currently I am limited to integrating 300 pictures due to a restriction in version 1.60 (see
http://pixinsight.com/forum/index.php?topic=2053.msg13262#msg13262)
- Dynamic Crop
- Dynamic Background Extraction (what a fantastic tool)
- Histogram Transform
- Color Saturation boost (to better show the H-alpha regions)
I am truly amazed to see what could be done with equipment that almost any serious photographer somewhere has in his/her desk.
Enjoy,
Georg
PS: The picture still has a couple of artifacts that I hope to remove in a second run. I plan to do it when PI 1.61 becomes availble (i.e. next week on the relativistic time scale
).
