M57 - and just barely - IC1296

I've taken some of the advice since I posted my first DSO (M81) a while (Month?) ago and reduced my exposure time. This image comprises stacking 113 images of 15s each. After performing stack I can oly find 110 files however (I've no idea the story there).
Image taken with 8" newt on Eq6 Pro. Imager Atik 16IC no filters.
No auto guiding - hardware in place but haven't got to grips with it yet. I might be expecting too much from the Meade LPI and it adds an extra dimension to balancing the scope.

There are still some tracking issues here but I'm getting there.
At least now my stacking software can auto-stack wheras when images were displaced by too much I had to manually identify star1 and star2 for each frame. A benefit of this is I can use the stacking log to (after plate scaling) to graph the tracking deviations.

North is in the 11 O'Clock direction and E-W is not flipped.
I found square-root brightness scaling to work out pretty well and I did a little wavelet processing. I didn't do any calibration frames and noticed a squigle in the one O'clock position just over half way out of the frame. I thought that this might be a reflection but was pleased to find that I captured just a hint of barred spiral galaxy IC1296.

Mark

Hi

Nice image. You captured the ring nebula very well.

What are you using to stack the images, have you tried using Deep Sky Stacker?


Best regards



David Branigan

I used AIP4WIN. I have not used Deep Sky Stacker.
AIP4WIN appears pretty comprehensive for many image processing tasks and has tools for astrometry / photometry and spectroscopy.

The accompanying book is an excellent read (well the few bits that I've read so far).

Mark