Posts Made By: Andrew Riehl

Here's an m81 that I took last night as well. The darn clouds rolled in on me, so I couldn't finish it. I wanted another half hour or so of Lum's, plus some color, but the astro gods wouldn't allow it. I've changed my goals around a bit; instead of trying to get lots of so-so images, I'm going to do the time and get a few outstanding ones. I also changed my reducer; Got rid of the Giant Easy Guider and got a standard f/6.3 reducer. It doesn't give me as much speed, but I can now pass my imaging train completely through my forks to hit some of those really neat things up north. The decreased chromatic abberation and extra element in the reducer also is giving me much tighter stars. Anyway, for the image, 11" sct with 6.3 reducer (actually f/6.8 in my configuration). st-2000xm camera/cfw-8 unfiltered at full resolution. exposures= 7@10min each.

I got to grab some color last night...I'll only post the small version...I think I'm actually proud of this one.

ok , i decided I wasn't so proud of the first colorized image after all, so I redid it. I think this one's better (i'm still new to color imaging). I need some more practice; I had to blur the color image a good bit due to pretty high noise and the blurred colors showed through on the final; but it's better than it looked without the blur

Blackeye Galaxy (M64) 11" sct @ f/6.8, st-2000 w/cfw8 and IDAS LPS filter. Lum @2x2, color @ 3x3. LRGB=60:15:15:15

okay, think I got this looking pretty good; I'll probably look at it on another monitor and be ashamed of it...Crab Nebula. 11" sct @ f/6.8. ST-2000xm / cfw-8 with IDAS LPS filter. Lum binned 2x2, color binned 3x3. LRGB=50:20:20:20. Opinions (aside from collimation being a smidgin off)?

Anybody know of someone who can recoat a fluorite refractor doublet? (or at the least strip it clean?)

anybody know of someone who can strip and recoat a fluorite refractor doublet?

Your best bet is to buy it like the rest of us did. I for one am not going to hand one over to you.

Sorry for the dual post if you saw this in 'user photos' This is the first light image from my new Takahashi fs-78. It was originally a straight RGB @ 10:10:10 minutes, but my blue channel had bloated stars due to thin clouds that came through as I was acquiring the blue image I believe (or perhaps chromatic shift due to the focal reducer). I wasn't too worried about it, I was just checking to see if everything worked right (first time self guiding on the mount) and stars looked ok. So tonight I had some time while shooting some other images, so I reworked the data into this. What I did was to sum the red and green images to make a master luminescence frame (to counteract the bloated blue image), then did some magic with layer masking and unsharp masking the bright areas while blurring the dim. I then redid the rgb combine with better layer masking and sharpening. I also cut the size in half for ease of upload and viewing (original is 1600x1200). I'm very happy with this, although I think the lum image lacking a blue component kind of skewed my color balance in some places.

I had 'second light' with the fs-78 last night. I grabbed two hours worth of lum images of the Pleiades. Tak fs-78 @ f/5.9. SBIG st-2000 at full resolution (1600x1200) all riding on a standard GP mount with cheapo chinese drives. 12x10min unfiltered exposures (except for IDAS lps). Didn't have the whole evening to devote to imaging, so I focused on getting a good high res lum image; color will have to come another night (hopefully soon). Coma is a little more pronounced than I would like, but I guess that's the price I pay for not spending the extra cash for a triplet. Anybody know if this is the norm for using a reducer with an fs-78? I shrank the final image in half for quick download. I may try some halo removal in the future; I'll see what it looks like if/when I get the color...