M42
Finally, some time and sky to work on long exposure webcam-astronomy... The remaining clouds allowed an open view on Orion. M42, certainly one of the more prominent objects, easy to see and easy to record, gives a perfect light source for experimenting as it includes a very bright open cluster as well as a dark cloud and a bright nebula.
| Instrument |
ETX-70 equatorial mode, #494 autostar |
| Camera |
ToUCam pro PCVC-740, Baader IR
filter |
| Data acquisition | K3CCDTools, 10s exposures |
| Data registration |
RegiStax 2, K3CCDTools |
| Frame stacking |
RegiStax 2, K3CCDTools |
| Postprocessing |
RegiStax 2 & IrfanView,
iMerge |
Some resulting images (based on the same recorded AVI file - have a look at a compressed WMV version) were obtained using different sets of postprocessing parameters (contrast, brightness, saturation, gamma curve, etc.) in order to respect the different aspects of the complex object. All image tuning steps were carried out on all pixels equally (no area selective tinkering).
The Results
Image resulting from registration and stacking, no
postprocessing
The above "raw" image postprocessed using IrfanView
Light postprocessing using RegiStax
Massive fiddeling with RegiStax and IrfanView
postprocessing
Registration using K3CCDtools linear scale
Registration using K3CCDtools logarithmic scale
All above combined using iMerge
The Observatory
Have a look at my hyper-professional setup to catch the hole in the clouds (greyish stuff above the roofs in the background). Even though the mechanical setup looks pretty solid, the RA motor of the fork produces some jitter occasionally. Consequently I performed a manual selection of the frames to be registered, resulting in a loss of about 30% of the 10sec frames.
