First real attempt at Deep sky imaging

Dave,

I've looked at the full size image and can only see a *slight* brightening near the centre. This *may* be the central star or mabey just part of the nebula. I'd prefer to take a longer exposure before stating for sure I've got the central star.

I've looked at the other stars and have found the faintest star to be mag 14.7 which isn't too bad I guess for only a few 30sec exposures. I used Brian Skiff's photometry chart of M57 to confirm. I've found that Starry Night Pro doesn't go down that far. i might see if the Hubbel guide catalog is on the cdrom - if memory serves me correctly this goes down to mag 16 but I could bve wrong on that.

Michael

Michael, Great shot, very impressive! I think the ISO 1600 setting is fine, very low noise indeed - that goes to show that camera is a gem, nice choice. I think that it's softened well also, i would'nt go any further, but that's just me I don't know how to improve this shot as i'm only getting started with photoshop myself.

Tell ya what, definitely try Globular cluster M13, that would be a super target, from what this shows, the camera is well capable of a stunning image. I took one myself, but am still working on it.

Once again - well done, Keith...

Keith,
Thanks for the kind words. As for the softening, i certainly wouldn't take it any further. I had used unsharp mask to bring out the detail. However, when I went back to it later I thought it was a touch too artifical looking. Stars were just a touch too charp looking so I gave it a touch of Gaussian Blur.
M13 was actuallythe first target I had tried with this camera but my focus was way off. I must give it another proper go though some night.

Dave,
Further to your comment about seeing two stars, I took another look at the image. I stretched the levels and hey presto, the two stars appear much more clearly, albeit at the expense of the remainder of the image.
Below is the result:

You can see a very distinct star on the left inner edge of the ring plus a brightening near the centre. The central star is mag 15.3, however, I can't seem to find out the brightness of the other star.
An image worth looking at for comparison is from the astropix.com website:


Michael

After playing around with the levels a bit more, I was able to isolate the central star from the surrounding image a bit more:


Michael

Hi All,
We had a fabulously clear night last monday here in Limerick, one I just couldn't pass up, so out came the scope and camera, performed a rough 1 star polar allignment (30 seconds work) and started clicking.
I got this pic of M57, from stacking stacking 24 frames at iso1600 and stacking in registax2d,


homepage.eircom.net/%7Esac/graphics/deepsky/m57aug.jpg

I nearly fell of my chair when the 2 central stars became visible during processing, :lol: , and when I "overenhanced" the image you can stars fainter then the faintest whose magnitides are identified above (mag 16.6) and fainter, presumabily beyond mag 17, I never thought I'd get these kind of magnitudes through the light pollution of Limerick city. Starry night pro goes to about mag14 for this area, nearly 3 magnitudes brighter !!

I had to reduce the quality of this image in order to Michael Scully to get it on the website, I reduced it from 4.5 megs to approx 0.080megs, the "second central star is not as visible and the oval is a small bit grainer.

BTW, its best to have your computer monitor brightness and contrast up full for looking at this,.

that's a fantastic image Dave . . . well done! I think think you might have also captured the core of the faint barred-spiral galaxy IC 1296 that lies within the same field of M57. If you do a search on Google under "Images" for the galaxy's name you'll find a few deep photographs that show the region to identify the object. It'd be interesting see the more heavily processed image you have to see if the galaxy shows up better.

John