Took this shot on 10/19/19 with a camera i bought recently and modified for Astrophotography. Here is my setup: Canon EOS 60D (IR modified) Orion SkyGLow Filter (2") Meade F/6.3 focal Reducer (apparently one of the F/4 ones according to Astrometry.net all sky solve) Meade LX-90 classic 8" OTA Orion Sirius EQ-G Tripod Orion StarShoot Autoguider and 50mm finder style guide scope Maxim DL 6.2 and Photoshop CS3 A total of 16 full color images were taken at a setting of 120 Seconds and ISO 1000 with corresponding darks and bias. Unfortunately i was unable to get a good set of flats due to the weather effects on my setup. There is also a lot of noise in the image since i only had time for he 16 shots but i will revisit this object later to get more to add to it. Photos were captured with MaximDL and edited first in MaximDL and then photoshop.
Hi Brian - You can see this has potential. Thanks for sharing. I have this same camera, and it is somewhat noisy, although the colour response is decent in the deep reds. Did you do in-camera long exposure dark correction? That's one option. Another option is to make yourself a master dark at the ISO, exposure length, and same outdoor temperature. Also, if you are using the battery in the camera, either switch to an external power pack, OR use a external battery grip. The batteries gets hot in the camera body, and that adds to the noise. Try shooting at ISO 800. I recall mine gets much worse any faster. You may be able to use MaxIm to clean up the noise and adjust the color balance a bit.
Hey Colin, No, i did a manual dark subtraction/calibration using multiple dark files taken at the same time as the individual images rather than use the long exposure dark correction. I find it does a better job eliminating noise this way. In this case there simply weren't enough dark and light frames at the right temps to eliminate enough noise from the image. I also find the long exposure correction setting on the camera, on occasion, causes MaximDL to error out and disconnect the camera so i don't use it. I think it may time out waiting for the dark frame to capture if it is too long an exposure. I use an external A/C power adapter instead of the batteries as this tends to last longer, the camera tends to go through the battery too fast otherwise. I decided to try ISO 1000 instead of the smaller values to see how much detail i can get. There is a lot of light pollution around my house and the skyglow filter can only eliminate so much of it. However i wanted to see how well the image will turn out at that setting. I did find that any settings above this had progressively way too much glow to make out any details. I might go with the ISO 800 next time and see how it does. I did use Maxim to try to clean up a bit of the noise but usually use Photoshop as i am more familiar with the process there. Either way i know that the more images i add the less noise i will see since it will start to smooth out the noise and bring the details out quite a bit better. I saw that happen with an Dumbbell Nebula image i have been developing over multiple nights. I added it here so you can see the difference. M27-1.jpg is the earlier version that i also added to more recent images. M27.jpg is the current result. As you can see, much less noise showed up after summing all the individual results together. I am hoping that doing the same with M33 will yeild similar results and also increase the detail. I wonder though, can you do a 2x2 Binned image in color and then do a light image and combine them to increase this? or should you Bin RGB separately? Food for thought, might try it too and see what happens.
