M33 - 2020 version

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bobharmony
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M33 - 2020 version

#1

Post by bobharmony »


I got about 4 hours of 3 minute subs on this target Monday night/Tuesday morning. Because no night can go without some trouble the focuser gave me a bit of trouble. First it wanted to slip so I adjusted the tension knob. Then it decided to be cranky about reversing direction on the fine tuning knob, moving well past the point it should have when reversing direction. I wound up using the FWHM and HFD tools to get the focus as tight as I could as the Baht mask tool provided really inconsistent results with repeated reading.

The image consists of 78 180 second lights, darks that are a little too warm to be a perfect match, flats and flat darks calibrated in DSS and processed with StarTools:
M33 LDFDF ST.jpg
Am I the only one who gets all this "glow" around the galaxy? I would love to speculate that it is IFN showing itself. I have shot more subs of M33 over 3 years and they all seem to have that trait. I may combine the best of this nights images with the best from prior sessions and see what I can get out of them.

Bob
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MariusD69 Romania
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Re: M33 - 2020 version

#2

Post by MariusD69 »


Looks great! Well done!
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Re: M33 - 2020 version

#3

Post by BABOafrica »


bobharmony wrote: Sat Sep 26, 2020 2:28 am I got about 4 hours of 3 minute subs on this target....

Am I the only one who gets all this "glow" around the galaxy?

Bob

I'm no expert on the topic, but AFAIK, the galaxy does extend out in the direction of that "glow". You had quite a bit of time with 3min subs. Maybe that is what you are picking up -- the faint edges of the galaxy.

BABO
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Re: M33 - 2020 version

#4

Post by bobharmony »


BABOafrica wrote: Sat Sep 26, 2020 2:18 pm

I'm no expert on the topic, but AFAIK, the galaxy does extend out in the direction of that "glow". You had quite a bit of time with 3min subs. Maybe that is what you are picking up -- the faint edges of the galaxy.

BABO
Thanks, Joe, maybe that is the case. It'll be interesting to see what more integration time does for it.

Bob
Hardware: Celestron C6-N w/ Advanced GTmount, Baader MK iii CC, Orion ST-80, Canon 60D (unmodded), Nikon D5300 (modded), Orion SSAG
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Hankmeister3
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Re: M33 - 2020 version

#5

Post by Hankmeister3 »


Wow, you even captured the extended galactic "glow". I've seen one other astro-image of M33 with the extended "glow" like that. It must consist of extended star "clouds" in the outer regions of the galaxy. Very nice processing, Bob. I think the "glow" is real and not an artifact of the processing regimen.
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Re: M33 - 2020 version

#6

Post by Greenman »


Nice shot, if I expand the image out the glow looks real, as Hank says.
Cheers,

Tony.

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Re: M33 - 2020 version

#7

Post by JohnP_1 »


Nice image Bob. M33 is a beauty, yet tricky to capture and process. As far as the glow, it is hard to say. This target is almost directly overhead for our latitude, which has its drawbacks. When I image even a little east of the zenith, I get a lot of sky glow from light pollution sources. I'm not sure you can pull in the IFN with 3 minute subs. The SNR goes way down with 4 hours of data, but, the signal does not itself increase.
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Re: M33 - 2020 version

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Post by bobharmony »


JohnP_1 wrote: Sat Sep 26, 2020 7:07 pm Nice image Bob. M33 is a beauty, yet tricky to capture and process. As far as the glow, it is hard to say. This target is almost directly overhead for our latitude, which has its drawbacks. When I image even a little east of the zenith, I get a lot of sky glow from light pollution sources. I'm not sure you can pull in the IFN with 3 minute subs. The SNR goes way down with 4 hours of data, but, the signal does not itself increase.
Thanks, John. It is the start of the run that is questionable for me, as at 30° altitude M33 is coming out of the Hartford sky glow. I don't have a lot of tracking trouble at the zenith or after the flip. I haven't noticed the same type of issue with M31, which also starts out in the Hartford lights.

I am going to see if I can stack with earlier subs I have for M33 and see if more integration time changes things. My thoughts are that either the glow really is the extended galactic disk, or that StarTools is getting confused with this particular set of conditions. Extended disk makes more sense to me than IFN, so maybe getting more time will help sort it out.

Bob
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Re: M33 - 2020 version

#9

Post by bobharmony »


After struggling to get the current data stacked with my historical session data, I finally realized that the image scale is different and I don't think DSS will support that. My symptom is that if I choose one of the current frames as the reference frame I can't get DSS to compute offsets for any of the historical data, and if I set a historical frame as the reference, none of the current frames will compute offsets.

I changed CCs from the GSO model which gave 1.1x magnification to the Baader MKiii which doesn't change the image scale at all.

In lieu of stacking more data, I am tweaking the K and S values for the current data and restacking. This will sometimes result in a better controlled final result.

Bob
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Re: M33 - 2020 version

#10

Post by STEVE333 »


Nice image Bob. I'm pretty sure the glow is just the normal glow associated with galaxies. I've seen it with my M33 images in the past.

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Re: M33 - 2020 version

#11

Post by Lowjiber »


Very nice work, Bob! :) Thanks much for sharing your work.

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