Very Amateur Astronomy

It’s been a while, and I apologise for not posting sooner as I’ve not been entirely inactive, just rather unproductive with processing. Most clear nights have been spent tuning and learning about the CGEM, and most spare days spend on modifying the scope. The result of this is that I now have reliable clean guiding, the main fix to achieve this was to put in locking bolts for the primary mirror.

Most photography time has been spend on a wide view of M106 and NGC4217, with several other galaxies also visible. I’ve had significant problems during image processing with noise, which I guess is a result of my new ability to expose for much longer periods, I need to investigate a suitable maximum exposure time for my light polluted skies, ten minutes may be to much.

I had 33 good ten minute exposures but the fainter areas of M106 were getting lost in the large amounts of noise, mostly red grain. In the end I decided to make use of all of my test images which included a stack of 5 minute exposures and some which were not flat fielded in order to improve the signal to noise ratio, so the total number of exposures used was 83, which works out at about 11 hours and 40 minutes of data. Some experimentation with my new found ability to guide will be needed to make the most out of exposures at this sort of length.

Here it is anyway,  not the best image but proof at least for me that more exposures equals good SNR.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 23rd, 2010 at 6:26 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.