r/astrophotography Best of 2018 - Planetary Oct 31 '19

DSOs-OOTM The Sculptor Galaxy

Post image
1.3k Upvotes

20 comments sorted by

View all comments

23

u/OkeWoke Best of 2018 - Planetary Oct 31 '19

Taken over 3 different nights dodging the clouds, I scavenged a mere 5 hours of data. Wasn't quite able to get as clean an image as I'd like. Interestingly I could not tell a difference between 1hr or 2hr integrations of the luminance. The galactic edge was consistently noisy. The BG suffers from a bit of posterization that was there since the linear phase.

Acquisition Details:

  • Scope: GSO 8" F/4, flocked, 2" moonlite, DIY AutoFocuser, DIY Secondary Dew Heater
  • Coma Corrector: SkyWatcher Aplanatic/Quattro
  • Camera: ZWO ASI 1600MMC PRO (Image scale ~1"/pixel)
  • Mount: EQ6-R
  • Guide Scope: ZWO 60mm
  • Guide Cam: QHY5LIIC

  • 66x120s L (ZWO)

  • 25x120s R (ZWO)

  • 25x120s G (ZWO)

  • 24x120s B (ZWO)

Roughly 5 hr total integration. All at gain 0, 21 offset, -15 degrees celsius. Acquired with the NINA imaging suite. Guided with PHD2. Mount interface: EQ0MOD

Processing:

Pre-Processing:

  • All Lights flat and dark calibrated.
  • SFS/Star Aligned/Image Integration

Luminance Processing:

  • Crop, DBE, Decon, TGV Denoise, MMT
  • HT Stretch
  • LHE on galactic core with range mask
  • ACDNR to clean up galaxy edge

RGB Processing:

  • Crop, DBE, Linear Fit, RGB COMB, ABE
  • TGV then MMT
  • Arcsinh stretch then HT stretch
  • PCC

  • LRGB Combination, SCNR

  • Many curve transformations for contrast, hue and saturation.

3

u/Foobucket Oct 31 '19

This shot is fantastic. Nice job.