ASTRO: 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 good night (May 7th). I was an
hour's drive (20 kilometers in Berlin and 67 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

Stefan

I hope you get out to that site often.. nice view and good detail. Your new
10" looks to be a good one Stefan!

--
Regards, Doug W.
www.photonsfate.com
"Stefan Lilge" wrote in message
...
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 good night (May 7th). I was an
hour's drive (20 kilometers in Berlin and 67 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

Stefan