New toys & vacations

[chupathingie]

Rav, you also got the Andromeda Galaxy in that frame… nice!

[ravnostic]

Fluffy, herm….If I didn’t spend the amount of money I did and completely lack the know-how to do so, I would probably try that…

chupa I meant to look that up and see what it was; didn’t realize it was so close to the G. Square! I have MORE than enough to stack some GS images and see what I can get out of it; think I’ll start that now, maybe have it stack while I’m sleeping; might even get to finish it before returning to work but certainly when I get back home tomorrow.

//edit: durn. That is a ‘no go’; I’d repositioned the lens 3 frames before the meteor passed, and in the prior position, Andromeda is out of frame. 3 20 second images does not a good stack make. 😥

[chupathingie]

well, at least now you know where to point… 300mm on an APS-C damn near fills the frame on that target, it’s simply huge… about 4-5x the size of the moon when you capture the fainter outer areas.

[ravnostic]

I usually see it when it’s in the NWern sky; I don’t think I’ve ever captured it NEerly. It’s on my bucket list with the 300mm, though; in My telescope, I can only get the core.

[chupathingie]

I shot 20+ subs of it the other night, but it was well up into the upper 80’s and thermal noise made it very ugly and dirty, even with darks. 🙁

[ravnostic]

What’s the camera? I’m amazed at how very little noise I get in the T2i as compared with the xTi, up to ISO 1600; the darks make it seem like the xTi’s 400 shots. And believe me–it’s at least that hot, if not hotter, round these parts this time of year.

[chupathingie]

5DII @1600, which is the same ISO I used for the Orion shots earlier this year. That’s what made me think temperature. After some comments on another forum tho, I’m thinking it’s my process. I’m using UFRAW, and someone pointed out to me that it “develops” using it’s own internal profile and they need to be a straight linear conversion. Stretching levels on my finals seems to support this, as I get less but higher contrast noise after the subtraction. I’m going to re-write my script to use DCRAW (UFRAW is a CLI/GUI front-end for DCRAW) optioned for linear conversion and see if it helps. I’ve been using UFRAW because it has a command-line batch utility, while DCRAW only works on a single file per command. Now that I know enough to be as dangerous as a 5 yr old I can script it and drop the front-end.

Prolly not tonight tho, I’m feeling more like a hot bowl of popcorn and some EVE Online…

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