Ad Astra Observatory

Here’s last night’s result. Not too bad.

I really like NGC 4725. It’s one of those galaxies that I never hear about, but it’s very photogenic and has a really cute companion nearby. There is another “buddy” in the upper left corner, too.

I need to ply my trade in Leo some more (4725 is up near the Dipper), but a lot of the galaxies in Leo/Virgo are small. I don’t think I’ve done a good M65/66 yet, though, so maybe that’s next.

I’m also noticing that galaxies which are dimmer than mag 9 are a little disappointing.

Processing notes:
I did remember to use Median stacking this time (which tightens up the stars).

I also tried out the “quality” filter (a new thing in Max 5 I think), using “roundness” of “0.2” (the default for roundness), which ate about 5 of the later images, which is consistent with I thought I noticed later ones with tracking problems.

There’s something wrong with the flats. I turned off boxcar this time, but there is still a bad color gradient from center to edge. I’ll reshoot the flats and see if I can fix it. The good thing is, the dust bunnies seem to have stayed put; all of these calibration frames were from almost a month ago, and in particular the flats are still flattening the image very well, if throwing the color off a bit. I could probably do some tweaking to the master flat (ie throw it into PS and grayscale it) to make it work a little better. But I think I’m just going to shoot more flats and see what happens.

The 900×600 image is my normal treatment; I select a 1500×1000 section of the image that contains my object, do all the processing on that, and then resize down to 900×600 to tighten everything up once I’m finished.

The FOV in this image is around 40′x27′.