Petri Kehusmaa Astroblog

Yesterday I subscribed as a user for Northern Galactic Group’s remote control telescope. Today I was able to use 16″ RCOS Truss f/9 telescope on Paramount ME mount equipped with Apogee U9000 CCD for more than 4 hours . The scope and the camera is a VERY POWERFULL combination of imaging equipment, not to forget the mount.

This is only 80 minutes of total exposure of M83. Very basic image processing.

Watching few hours of Adam Block’s PS tutorials, I tried those new tricks on my old M33 data. Here are both LHaRGB and LRGB versions with new processing.

This project is almost finished. Now total exposure time is 7.2 hours. I added some more luminance and red data. Also I put some more effort to image processing. Hope it paid off!

Additional 70 minutes of Ha data added and color balance finetuned.

* WPG2 CANNOT LOCATE GALLERY2 ITEM ID 717 *

Additional data to this project. Now total exposure time is 320 minutes.

Last night I was able to acquire three more hours of photons for this project and now I’m ready to release the final image v2. Total exposure time is now 8.3 hours. The edge on galaxy NGC 4217 (on right) is possible companion galaxy of M106. There are also tens of other galaxies floating around at background. I hope you enjoy as much I enjoyed making this!

I was able to acquire some additional frames on this. Now total exposure time is 260 minutes of LRGB. Project continues…

* WPG2 CANNOT LOCATE GALLERY2 ITEM ID 648 *

Weather has been lousy up here and I won’t wait anymore to release my first light image. This image was taken with RC10C and STL-11k with SBIG LRGB filters. Total exposure time is 310 minutes. I still have some work to do with the scope’s collimation because I have some curvature in my images. This image is a crop and reduzed to 60% from original size. More story later.

I was finally able to catch some color data for this but am still lacking some blue (about 30 minutes). Total exposure time is now 250 minutes. I will return to this with more blue and some Ha.

This great galaxy is so obvious target that you usually skip it. At least I have done that for years. This fall I decided to go for it and here is the start of project. It is a 50 minutes (5 x 10 mins) exposure with luminance filter. I’m planning to take total of 6 hours of data for this galaxy, so this is only beginning.