Total integration: 458 minutes/7.64 hours (*77 x 120s for
Cameras: *QHY247C (24mp
Telescopes: Takahashi *FC100DF and **FS128N Steinheil fluorite doublet apochromat refractors @
Reducers: Takahashi *FC-35 (0.66x) and **TOA/FS 130-R (0.7x).
Mount: Paramount MyT.
Filters: 2" Baader UV-IR-Cut, 1.25" Astrodon 5nm
Software: TheSkyX Pro, Sharpcap, PixInsight, Photoshop CC.
Inline image with reduced quality uploaded to forum. Full sized higher resolution image is here: http://ram.org/images/space/scope/1.6+7 ... s_458m.jpg
Triangulum is yet another member of our local group of galaxies, about three million light years away and is the third largest behind our own Milky Way and Andromeda, one of the distant permanent objects that can be seen with just your naked eye under the right conditions.
Imaging this galaxy ended up being a complicated process. I collected all the data that went into one of the final images over a couple of years. I had earlier collected the luminance and narrowband data on my Takahashi FS128N with the mono QHY163M camera in 2017 but I decided to redo this one in
The great but sometimes frustrating aspect of astrophotography is that there are so many ways to produce a "final" image. I find the variant without the narrowband data and just only with mono (L) data just as aesthetically pleasing (and it is interesting to observe the differences). In addition I tried out different weightings for the channel combinations and also different approaches for combination including PixInsight's NBRGB combination script. At this point, this is just one of the few choices among what I considered aesthetically pleasing and also reasonably accurate in terms of representing the data. Short of combining all the respective channels, I ended up doing little post processing for now.
Normally I've been tending towards combining
http://ram.org/images/space/scope/1.6+7 ... s_313m.jpg
http://ram.org/images/space/scope/1.6+7 ... s_313m.jpg
As always, thanks for looking!
--Ram