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The first 6 months (impatient impact)

8 Images in this post.


The images below are in order from oldest first, these are after I bought my first dedicated Astro Camera, which I went with a monochrome ASI 183 MM Pro Cooled Camera + filter wheel. It took some time to get the spacing correct for the camera etc and learning how to use a dedicated astro camera. Also, and probably like most beginners, I was too eager to see the final image and skipped on those important Dark, Flat and Bias calibration frames, that combined with far too short integration times (Most pictures were around just 30 minutes or so of total integration), really shows in these images. I learnt the hard way but then learning by your mistakes is how you improve.



M101 - The Pinwheel galaxy

April 2020

This was the first image I took with the Astro Camera, you can see big dark circles all over the image, this was my first lesson - don't skip the Flat calibration frames. These circles are caused by dust particles on the camera sensor window.



NGC 2174 - The Monkey head Nebula

April 2020

This is a very faint object and I took this with limited time left in the year to capture it. As a result I only had luminance data so the end result is this B+W image.



M67 Open Star Cluster (Top) and M13 Globular Cluster (Bottom)

25th April 2020

These images were created from just a handful of R, G and B images.



Virgo Galaxy Cluster

19th May 2020

Again short integration time and no flats made this image suffer, more learning ;-)



M51 Whirlpool Galaxy.

25th May 2020

This one turned out better that previous galaxy photo's, a bit more detail is visible but again only about 35 minutes integration.



M57 Ring Nebula

30th May 2020

This photo was a pure off the cuff test photo, surprised how much colour I got. Definitely a small target but really cool. I certainly plan on revisiting this with a much longer focal length/



NGC 6992 The Eastern Veil Nebula

12th July 2020

This one has a little more integration time, this is both a picture I'm happy with and also not happy with. I don't think the red's are quite right, think I got my colour balance off a little. This is a month or so before I found out that I'm doing LRGB incorrectly. I was giving little time to Luminance and primarily creating the image purely from R+G+B. I recently found out I should be doing much more time on Luminance and maybe 20% on RGB. Again more learning ;-)




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