Horsehead and Flame Nebula ASI2600C

[nexusjeep]

Well having not had any good weather and the general Apps saying Wednesday 3rd Feb was going to be no better thought sod it will look at the satellite feed on Windy.com and it looked to me as if we would have a clear window from 19.00 -22.00 ish so went out and set up for imaging and low and behold managed to get 135 mins of usable data which is the image below. This was processed through APP and it is the first time I have used the star colour feature to balance the image and then used affinity phot for the final tweaks as I have gotten fed up of paying adobe £9.98 a month for photoshop.

This is the first time I have had any real time on this target as my ASI1600 suffered from micro lensing so I could never get any decent data due to Alnitak blowing the image up but the ASI2600c worked a treat so well impressed with the new camera in the future I am also debating whether I actual will bother with dark frames as the sensor is pretty damn good in that respect I have tried a test and cant really see a difference although for this image I used darks as I already had them.

Imaging kit : APM-LZOS 130/780 + 1.0x MR flattener, ASI2600MC-Pro+EAF
Mount : M-UNO
Guide : Skywatcher ED72Pro+0.8x reducer Altair 290M guide camera
Software: SharpCap, GSS Mount control software, PHD2, Stellarium, APP, Affinity Photo 1.9

Image 45 x 180s at 200g -10C / 50 Darks / 100 Flats / 100 FlatDarks / 100 Bias

21_02_02_Horsehead_and_Flame_Nebula_2hrs_15m_3m_subs by Nick Davis, on Flickr

Thanks for looking and clear skies,

Nick

[timh]

That is an excellent deep-looking image. ...looks to be a very good new camera! Trees mean that I can never get more than 15 min on any targets in Orion. The same experience on Wednesday - I also ignored the weather apps and was rewarded with 3h or so of imaging. Also bought Affinity for the same reasons although am now using PixInsight for most things - which also has a photometric star colour balancing feature.
Tim

[admin]

Hi Nick,

that's a great image – definitely worth a click to see it full-size as there is more detail there than is visible in the preview shown in the forums

The noise levels are very low, did it just come out that way or was that partly helped by some of the postprocessing?

I did a quick search for the Affinity Photo software – the price looks very reasonable and the name of the manufacturer- 'Serif' - was a real blast from the past. I remember their PagePlus desktop publishing software back on Windows 3.0 in the 90s. I've tended to use paint.net for lightweight processing and Gimp for more complex stuff, but there's definitely a gap between those two where something like Affinity Photo could fit in happily.

Cheers, Robin

[nexusjeep]

Cheers Tim/Robin,
There is a denoise applied as the last layer in affinity but blended at 50% and likewise a clarity adjustment again blended at 50% in t he uploaded image but the background noise was not too bad which I am tending to find with the new camera, and the darks are very clean hence the thoughts of not actually doing them as with the dither and the stack any few hot pixels should get removed as part of the APP integration and this means I can use any gain and any duration as I no longer have to plan for what I have in the library of darks.

As for Affinity I can't fault it and the new 1.9 release actually has the feature built in to do Astrophotography stacking although I still use APP as I prefer it but it will be interesting to see how the feature matures in Affinity Photo and as I got it on sale 50% off it cost me £24 to buy were as Photoshop was costing me £10 per month and I actually find I get better results using Affinity as I like the work flow and processing and it can natively load FITS which is a big plus (Just did a check and you can only load FITS in the Astro stack part and not just open a single image, going to post on the Affinity Forum about this to see why as it can obviously use them).

Cheers
Nick

[oopfan]

Hi Nick,

People hate it when I show up making comments, but I figure if you want love, get a dog.

IC434 emits large amounts of Ha (red) and SII (deep red), with only trace amounts of OIII (cyan). SII is only one-quarter the strength of Ha. Your color camera is picking up a LOT of red in the emission nebula, and some blue from the reflection of light from Alnitak. Your image is close to what the human eye perceives. Many other images, those seen on Astrobin, use mono cams and narrowband filters. As a consequence those images are very colorful intended to show chemical composition.

I have two suggestions:
1. Promote your image as being faithful to what the eye perceives. The knee-jerk reaction is for people to judge your image based on what they've seen elsewhere. Sure, it's not fair, but it is human nature.
2. Lower your black point to reveal more of the faint nebulosity. This will have the effect of showing more noise but in my opinion I would rather see more nebula. Also, lower the BP far enough so that "black space" is no longer black. I want to see down to the limits of detection. If that means more noise then so be it. Denoising is over-rated.

Brian

[nexusjeep]

Hi Brian,
Thanks for the comments I will have another play with the images to see what else I can bring out and I don't mind people giving me suggestions / constructive critique as how else are we going to improve or learn. Just wish you could suggest something to do about the weather as the last four months have been awful here.

Don't know about love and a dog as I have a dog and who ever said they help with stress never met mine as most of the stress in this household is the dog

Cheers
Nick

[oopfan]

Nick,

Regarding dogs, I've had some great dogs. Tucker, the Cocker Spaniel, was my buddy. Zoe, the American Water Spaniel, was a great pheasant hunting dog. But Aubrey, our Havanese, tries my patience sometimes. Every waking hour, and probably non-waking hour, she is consumed with food, so much so that she developed diabetes at only 8 years old. She was the most difficult to house train, but now she is back to having "accidents" from all the water she drinks. She receives two jabs of insulin each day. So, I can commiserate with you.

I have to plead ignorant regarding DarkFlats. I see you use APP, so I assume that Mabula is applying them correctly. Someone just suggested to me that you could try reprocessing without them to see what effect it has. My preference is for bright images, so any improvement gets a huge thumbs up from me.

Thanks,
Brian