SharpCap Forums

Here's one of my first attempts from the C8 with no filters in my new backyard, Erie, Colorado. Sky roughly 5.5 on the Bortle scale.

Camera: ZWO ASI294MC
Tele: C8
Mount: Celestron AVX
Exposure: 35 exposures at 30s with darks and flats

this is only a stretched screen grab from Live Stack

cheers,
-Ian

Stunning.

How hard did you stretch the histogram? Do you have a screen grab of the sharpcap screen?
With your settings i can't see almost anything on the screen.
Your capture is almost irrealistic and impossibile for me: maybe i am not able to do a correct strectching histogram settings...

I apologize, my initial description lacked some detail. In Live Stack mode I waited for about 35 images to align and stack, adjusted the sliders to taste then did a "save as viewed" to PNG. I stretched that image a fair amount more in Photoshop with the Curves function and did a little color correction to get the final result.

Unfortunately I don't have a screen grab of the SharpCap session, but some of the camera settings for the ASI294MC Pro are:

Gain: 130
Brightness: 0
Temp: -15c

Very nice, Ian! Did you use a focal reducer? If not then that speaks highly of the 294's FOV.

I tried M101 a few months ago. SC recommended a 9.4s exposure which unfortunately resulted in pronounced raining noise due to my guiding constraints. Through experimentation I discovered that I can mitigate raining noise by using longer exposures. I'll give M101 another try next winter. (My view west of the meridian is obstructed.)

Brian

Very nice Ian.

Bill