That's one from my to-do list. I didn't get to it last spring and
weather has me so backlogged for this year it won't get done this year
either.
The dark site picture looks good. How's it compare to what you get from
your in town location?
Only 10 minutes of color data and you still got some good color. Site
must have been a lot darker. Maybe Berlin doesn't have the light
pollution of our large towns. I went to an observing site for the
Chicago club in 1964 which was even farther outside of Chicago. They
thought the skies great. I thought them worse than my back yard in
Lincoln which was way too bright for me (a town of 150,000 at the time).
But compared to downtown Chicago they were good I suppose.
My version of CCDSoft has a problem with color filters in color mode.
It defaults to Lum, Red, Green, Blue. You can change that which I do
when imaging west of the meridian as I want to get blue when high in the
sky. But when I do it still labels the images in default order. So
while I took them Lum, Blue, Green, Red. The blue frames are named with
Red in the file name and Blue in file name of the Red images. If you
look at the header it is correctly labeled. When I process something
weeks later I've forgotten which side of the meridian I was on so often
end up with red armed, blue core galaxies. Very weird looking and quite
a shock to the system!
Rick
Stefan Lilge wrote:
This is the colour version of my NGC 4051 shot.
Colour was 2x5 minutes each for RGB plus 5 minutes Halpha.
http://ccd-astronomy.de/temp/4051colourgut.jpg
Stefan
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NGC 4051 under good skies
Last week I made two trips to dark(er) places, one of them was OK, the other
one was marred by seeing that can only be called abysmal.
This picture of NGC 4051 was from the first night (May 7th). I was an hour's
drive (20 kilometers in Berlin and 60 outside) to the northwest of Berlin
(near a small city called Fehrbellin), so the southeastern sky was quite
bright from the lights of Berlin, which didn't bother me as I was imaging to
the south and southwest. Limiting mag near the zenith was 5.7.
I have seen much better skies, but I would be very happy if I had something
like mag 5.5 skies every night.
One thing that struck me while processing the data was that some things like
deconvolution in CCDSharp and DDP in AstroArt do actually work if you have
good data. With the images I get from the city the above mentioned routines
only produce rubbish, while they did a good job on the data I acquired near
Fehrbellin. Also I would not have needed a flatfield, while having a good
flat is the most important thing of all when imaging from Berlin.
Colour will follow, my first try at processing turned out a bit odd though,
as if I have messed up the order of the colour filters.
I did two iterations of deconvolution in CCDSharp.
Taken with a 10" Meade ACF at f/5.7 on a G11 mount, SXV-H9 camera, 17x5
minutes.
The picture can also be found at
http://ccd-astronomy.de/temp/4051-17x5gut.jpg