Posts Made By: Jim Thommes

Tom,
I think it is quite an impressive attempt. I have been nosing around in this area a bit and have a few images in the works - including one like your LDN1251. I hope to post them soon, but I'm afraid they won't come up to the standard you set with images like this. Get work - gives e something to work toward.

Floyd,
Super images of the Cave and Bubble. Are you going to give us a hint on your third image? Or make us wait to find out when you post?

Barry,
Super image! It's amazing what you can do in light polluted skies with narrow band filters.

Maciej,
Great wide field image. The depth and dust are spectacular.

Floyd,
Mighty fine images. I looked at the Cave first and thought this has got to be the better of the two. Then I saw the 7331 image and was truly impressed.SO I decided not to choose. Again, great images.

Maciej,
Nicely done HST on the Soul Nebula.

Thanks for the comments folks.

Charles,
I like the images. I think your M42 is in great shape and your plan for completion looks pretty good. (BTW, you are a brave soul doing M42 with a non-ABG camera)

Regarding the stars, I tend to agree with you in thinking it is a camera orthogonality issue. I have some "middle grade" WO refractors and the flattener does a great job, but the focus mechanisms are somewhat less than robust. I suspect that is the case for the ED80T as well - but I don't have any experience with it. Nosepiece attachment is also problematic at times. I also have to say that I hate grooves in the nosepieces as well - they only cause problems in camera mounting. Top that off with the somewhat heavy ST-10XE and I think orthogonality could be an issue.

The Orion image of mine that you mention was done on an FSQ-106N - Those focusers are truly robust, all camera connections are threaded, and of course the optics are superb. I think the only way I can get other than round stars is to have tracking errors.

Nonetheless, your stars in the upper left can be processed to more "roundness" if you want to do that. You can do that with a corner masked "darken" layer that is radially shrunk a pixel or two (in Photoshop).

Maciej,
Nice image. The Ha data does provide a different perspective than an RGB. Of course with the dominant Ha data, the blue reflection portion of vdB 62 next to LDN 1622 is a little less noticeable.

Charlie,
Nice shot of the galaxy and the SN.