Adventures in Photoshop

I spent some time in Photoshop trying to bring out the colors:

M42...Again

Clear skies on Friday night made for a great opportunity to try out the new f/6.3 focal reducer. Again setting my sights on M42, I took 27 30-second sub-exposures at ISO 800. I stacked the images in DSS, and processed in Photoshop. Here's the result (click on image for larger version):

I think the reducer made quite a bit of difference. There's definitely a lot more faint detail in this image, and overall it's significantly less grainy. So far all of my shots have been done with in-camera noise reduction turned off, and I haven't been using dark frames. I think next time I will try turning noise reduction on and see well that works. Supposedly when shooting 30-second exposures and NR is on, the camera will automatically take and subtract a dark frame with each image.

First Imaging Attempt Part II

I spent some time processing the image I took of M42 with The Gimp (The Gimp is a freeware image processing tool similar to Photoshop). As you can see, a little processing goes a long way in bringing out details in the image. (click on the image for a larger version)

Here's the original, unprocessed image for comparison:

Some people say that it's not possible to take decent deep-sky images without long, guided exposures, but clearly the image above demonstrates the falsity of that claim. Granted this picture is far from magazine quality, but I don't think it's too bad given that I'm a complete newbie and this is the very first deep-sky image I've ever taken with a telescope I've only used for one full night!

I've ordered an f/6.3 focal reducer/corrector. This is a lens that screws onto the visual back of the telescope which turns the f/10 telescope into a "faster" f/6.3 optical system. The net result is that it reduces exposure times by a factor of three. So that means that a 30-second exposure at f/6.3 is equivalent to a 90-second exposure at f/10. This should help in capturing more detail at the exposure times I'm limited to since I currently can't take guided long exposures.

First Imaging Attempt

Last night was the first clear night we've had since I got my telescope nearly a month ago. Previously there had been only two occasions where a brief hole opened up in the clouds for about 20 minutes where I was able to view the moon. But last night was cloud-free and no moon. After putting my daughter to bed, I set up in the backyard. Aligning via All-Star align was a breeze. Mars was high in the sky so I slewed over to it and popped in a 2X barlow and a 23MM 2" eyepiece. I could immediately notice the polar cap, and as I stared at it for a few minutes began to notice a few details on the surface, despite the fact that the image was quite small. I think I need to get a shorter eyepiece for planetary viewing.

Given that this will be Mars' best apparition for the next four years, I wanted to try imaging it with my Nexstar camera. After spending a few minutes connecting the camera to my laptop and figuring our how to use wxAstroCapture, I centered Mars in the field and replaced the eyepiece and barlow with a 1.25" adapter and the camera. It took a bit of playing around to get it centered, but was finally able to get a bright blob in the center of the screen. I then spent several more minutes figuring out how to adjust the camera setting and focusing the image. Once it looked reasonable, I started capturing frames. I took three videos, two of 1000 frames and one of 2000 frames.

I then decided to try my hand at deep-sky imaging, and turned the 'scope towards M42 in Orion. It was beautiful through the eyepiece despite my light-polluted suburban Seattle skies. I then attached my Nikon D40x and spent several minutes trying to focus the image. I think I may invest in a Bhatinov focusing mask to help with this in the future. Once I got reasonably focused, I took a series of 30-second shots.

As it was now getting rather late, I packed everything up and went inside. Unable to resist the urge to see what my images looked like, I fired up the computer and transferred the pictures to it.

First I took a look at the .avi files of Mars. The raw video showed a fairly unimpressive blob, but after stacking with Registax I was got this:

This was a stack of 407 frames out of 2010. No processing was done beyond simply stacking and wavelet processing. The polar cap is visible, and some surface detail as well. I'm not sure if the light patch on the Western limb is clouds.

Next I used DeepSkyStacker to process the M42 images. I had eight good 30-second frames. This is what I got:

I realize that this isn't magazine-quality, but I was pleased at the result given that I'm an utter novice at this, and this was the first picture I have ever taken. Keep in mind that this is also an unguided image taken with an alt-azimuth mount in light-polluted skies with no processing beyond stacking. This is also a .jpg image that is greatly compressed from the original high-resolution RAW image (that one looks much better).

Now I need to start learning how to process the images in order to bring out the details. Overall I was quite impressed by the performance of the scope and the fact that I was able to actually capture something. Now I just hope we get a few more clear nights so I can practice.