Exposure | ||||||
I shot the data for this object at the Texas Star Party, 2016 and 2017. | ||||||
At the star party in 2016, my camera quit working. QSI was kind enough to lend me another and I was actually able to still get 4 nights of imaging. | ||||||
Total Image Frames | 321 | |||||
Total Image Time | 14 hours 40 minutes | |||||
Camera | Filter | Frames | Exposure | Elapsed Time | Start Date | End Date |
QSI-683 | Lum | 24 | 180 sec | 1h 12m | 1-May-2016 | 1-May-2016 |
QSI-640 | Lum | 43 | 240 sec | 2h 52m | 4-May-2016 | 7-May-2016 |
QSI_683 | Lum | 94 | 90 sec | 2h 21m | 21-May-2017 | 27-May-2017 |
QSI-683 | Red | 10 | 300 sec | 50m | 1-May-2016 | 1-May-2016 |
QSI-640 | Red | 15 | 360 sec | 1h 30m | 4-May-2016 | 7-May-2016 |
QSI-683 | Red | 29 | 180 sec | 1h 27m | 21-May-2017 | 27-May-2017 |
QSI-683 | Green | 10 | 180 sec | 30m | 1-May-2016 | 1-May-2016 |
QSI-640 | Green | 15 | 360 sec | 1h 30m | 4-May-2016 | 7-May-2016 |
QSI-683 | Green | 27 | 180 sec | 1h 21m | 21-May-2017 | 27-May-2017 |
QSI-683 | Blue | 10 | 150 sec | 25m | 1-May-2016 | 1-May-2016 |
QSI-640 | Blue | 15 | 300 sec | 1h 15m | 4-May-2016 | 7-May-2016 |
QSI-683 | Blue | 29 | 180 sec | 1h 27m | 21-May-2017 | 27-May-2017 |
Imaging Locations | Fort Davis, TX - Texas Star Party |
Hardware | |
Imaging Instrument | 4 Inch Refractor at Prime Focus |
Focal Length | 530 mm |
Focal Ratio | 5.0 |
Imaging Camera | QSI 683ws-g and QSI-640ws |
Guiding Instrument | OAG via QSI IGP |
Guiding Camera | Starlight Xpress Lodestar X2 |
Software | |
Image Capture | Sequence Generator Pro |
Guiding | PHD v2 |
Image Processing | PixInsight |
Other Image Sizes | |
Full Resolution Image - email me | |
Half Resolution Image (3325x1662) | |
Medium Image (1200x600) | |
Small Image (600x300) |
Imaging Notes |
This was challenging as I had 5 sets of data from 2 cameras. Each set was rotated differently and the two
cameras were very different in shape and resolution. PixInsight handled the registration and scaling very
well. The difference in rotation, however, resulted in sections of the image that had good SNR (lots of frames overlapping) and sections of low SNR (not as many frames overlapping). That made processing a lot harder. I had to do the wide crop to eliminate as much of the low SNR region as I could. You can still see lower SNR remnants in the image, especially the upper right corner. The background also suffered and was not very smooth. Aggressive noise reduction, a tightly controlled non-linear stretch, and a little bit of de-saturation cleaned it up somewhat. |
It's amazing how many galaxies are in this shot. PixInsight found 217 within the bounds of the image. There are a couple places that it doesn't look like I went deep enough to get the label's galaxy, but most of them do show up. |