M11 last night

Hi all, well here is my last image done last night of M11. Not guided, 96 frames of 42.4 seconds, 80mm WO APO LXD650 mount, DSI II Color camera with a full Moon and some upper level haze. But not too bad. The stars are not touched up, they are actually round! I did a bit more adjustments on the RA and some new PEC training and I am getting the error down.

Attached Image:

Much better Floyd... much better...
Little by little you'll go far...

Floyd,
You definitely seemed to have achieved "round-dom" with your stars! Nice color, too. If you don't mind a comment or two, I'm wondering if you didn't clip your black point a bit (I'm at work, so I'm really guessing). I'm also betting that there's more detail hidden there. If you can try a non-linear or curves stretch, it's a better route to increasing contrast and showing detail than overdarkening. There are some good tutorials out there that really helped me. (You can check our Warren Keller's for a start.)
Hope you don't mind my two cents.
Keep it up,
Larry

hi Tyler,

very nice image! the starcolors look perfect!

Stars are looking good Floyd, It looks like your getting the focus down also. what helped me is a motor focuser, just a tap of the button one way or the other. Orion has one the you can adp. to just about any scope. I put one on my Orion 80ed and am going to put one on my new R200SS when it comes.

Good luck

Bob Moore

Hi Floyd. I should be the last person to give advice, and this is subjective, but with a little bit of processing, the image shows a lot of "untapped" detail. I took the liberty and processed the image in photoshop CS using Waid's online tutorial on "Star shaping and enhancement", with good results. Also I think the circular shaped 'haze' surrounding central field of image could be eliminated with a sky flat. BTW, the star coloration is quite impressive with you camera considering exposure time. Joe