M51 The Whirlpool Galaxy

The usual Malcolm luck happened last month, I closed down the observatory for some maintenance and what do we get a week full of clear skies. Still it gave me chance to get some  jobs complete such as wiring the dome to the wireless controller. Disappointing that the weather was clear but since rebuild, a PA and test of tracking and guiding was needed,  Every set up nicely and as expected and  from there I have managed over 4 nights captured five and a half hours of LRGB data on target.

Guiding has been excellent with excellent with numbers as low as .30 arc seconds accuracy. I will be happy if these numbers continue. As you can see target was M51, always a favourite and captured many times previously. 

     I am always astounded and I love the ZWO Asiair pro for its simplicity in doing almost everything now. Some  lovely new additions to the software update now include now sky atlas and the ability to name filters. There are of course many things that it cannot do including composing mosaics but I can live with it for now simply because there are other pieces of software such as Telescopius that communicates perfectly with the ability to download a CSV file with the mosaic parameters. There are several summer projects that will use this feature so look out for my updates on this feature. 

So the target was M51 using the LRGB filters with an aim for a couple of hours on each filter. In case of bad weather I set the imaging run to 30 minutes a filter. At least I would have something to process if the project fell flat. I have also the zwo electronic focusser so the whole process is totally automated when switching from filter to filter to imaging again takes under two minutes.

A Typical stretched 180 second sub frame (right) A small target for 550mm of focal length but I am hopeful for a decent crop out of the final data stack.

So after three good nights I have managed five and half hours of data with 30x 3 minutes sub frames on RGB and 1 hour of Luminance data.

During bad nights I also took the opportunity and captured a complete set of calibration frames too from darks, dark flats, & Flats.

To top it all I have finally taken the plunge into the technical world of Pixinsight. A scary thought but with the help of some serious video instruction from Adam Block I have created my first image.

Prior to starting the image processing I used Image calibration & Image combination to create all my master calibration frames.

Again this is all very new to me and I followed this process to create my first image.

Calibrated and stacked using the new WBPP (weighted batch pre processing) script new and updated script that works every bit as good as six or seven steps of manual image registration. 

Part of this hobby also includes trawling the expanse of YouTube and looking for videos that suit you knowledge set and by chance I found a chap called Richard Bloch. and found Basic image processing in Pixinsight 1.8, the cover image was of M51 and I was processing M51 so thought it worth a look, Turns out his explanations and information were spot on. I will send him a message to say hello and thank you

Dynamic Crop

Autoomatic background extractor

Colour Calibration

Histogram transformation

TGV Noise

Range select

Unsharp mask

curves.

Final result I am more than pleased with.

M51 Whirlpool Galaxy NGC 5194

After many hours of adjusting and checking the cameras are fixed correctly and square to the scope I have come to the conclusion that the generic Field flattener I had bought just doesn't work I know it was for a f5.5 to f6 scope and my scope is f6.7 but I lived in the vein hope that it wouldn't be that bad. Alas to no avail. Last week I put out a cry for help on UK Astro Ads and asked if anyone had a William Optics Mk3 field flattener which is dedicated for my scope. I had a reply from a really nice chap who said he had one, and a generic William Optics field flattener for refractors as well. He offered the mk 3 to me at a good price and offered to post both of them for me to test. I like so many others have had a few bad transactions on such sites so I as of course a little unsure when I clicked the pay pal button and duly paid up. A couple of days later a package arrives and you know that feeling you get in your stomach when you think things are about to go hideously wrong. I sat staring at the box while I drank my coffee and reluctantly opened it. What a surprise 2 immaculate field flatteners. Having hurdled our youngest happily playing on the carpet in front of me I grabbed the keys to my observatory and had a play. I attached my Canon T fitting to it and connected to scope focussed on a neighbours chimney and checked it out for defects. Last night we had a fantastic clear night despite the fear of a few hundred tonnes of Icelandic volcanic ash about to land on me I set about focusing using my live view and one of my fellow members who makes superb quality Batninov Masks see Keiths Astro over to your right. Now lets try this thing out. a quick 30 seconds to see if everything was there. I took 7 x 3 minute guided exposures and a few darks and started to stack. Here below is the summation of those Images of M51. Slightly over processed I know for a short duration image. BUT Astounded, Amazed, Totally shocked I have star shapes to the edge of the field I am so pleased to finally have an image that doesn't need 80% cropping. Now the bad news. I have had to dump my entire collection of Darks,Flats and Bias frames to start a new with the new Flattener. My Sincere thanks goes to Dr John and his faith and trust in mankind.(the flattener I didn't require now posted back)