Europa Loc: West Hills, CA

This was shot 4/14, near full moon, so tried to get u a little higher than the moon. Stack of 51x200 second lights, stacked in Nebulosity and processed in Photoshop. (Thanks Craig, I changed my settings in PS, worked out much better)

(Download)

Albuqshutterbug Loc: Albuquerque NM

What ever Craig recommended must have worked. Very nice shot and processing. Well done.

CraigFair Loc: Santa Maria, CA.

OK Brian I really glad that worked out for you.
This is a beautiful shot of the Needle Galaxy.
I assume it's with the QHY12???
Craig

Europa Loc: West Hills, CA

Thanks and yes

SonnyE Loc: Communist California, USA

Wow Brian!

I have a camera I need to throw over the back fence....

Europa Loc: West Hills, CA

I take it you didn't have any good luck tonight?

Bloke Loc: Waynesboro, Pennsylvania

Nice work!

bwana Loc: Bergen, Alberta, Canada

You also have a few other galaxies hiding the background. Nice capture!

bwa

SonnyE Loc: Communist California, USA

Oh no, I'm actually having more fun than should be allowed. This is beginning to get too easy.
I decided to try a different target and did two runs on the Whirlpool Galaxy.
I did a sequence of 300 second images. I felt I was blowing out the center. So I wound up staying up post meridian and did the flip, restarted PHD2 and got it running, then did a second (post meridian) run of 50 - 100s images. I was awake till 3 AM! And just let the telescope do it's thaing for the most part.

I do a single image to get a feel for where to set the sequence section, then click 'Run Sequence' and let it collect the chosen size pile of images.
I don't like that it only records in fit file format, but hey, it's much better than sitting here manually triggering, or looping then storing the results.
The Sequence part does most things auto-magically. And as long as I keep my fingers out of the pie, it stores the sequence. But if I stop it, it all goes out the fan in a green cloud. May as well hit delete, because that's what happens.

The fit files are kind of a bother to me. This is the age of the Internet. TIFF and JPG rule the web, and particularly jpg. Adopie can't figure out what to do with a 16 bit file, so it wants to convert it to 8 bit. That makes me do conversion Called 'Export' in the Orion camera studio program and save the images in another folder for easy transport into udder programs. As a bottom dweller I just work around it for now.
I kinda got pulled aside today so I haven't even pulled the 64GB card from last night. But I believe it has two new piles to play with, process, poke, prod, filter and peadoodle.
Cropped, croaked, and collard greens...

Looks like a giant step backwards..

It's a stacked tif file. Feel free to play with it.

(Download)

Europa Loc: West Hills, CA

Cool, looks like it's going to be a good night, I'm setting up. I had everything torn down, regreased, aligned guide to main, (hopefully) collimated, mount level, scope balanced...just have to focus and align. Fingers crossed.

SonnyE Loc: Communist California, USA

Alrighty then!
Jump in and see Ya in the Stars Brian!
I set up and the sun ain't set yet.
Just connected to the mount. Commencing countdown to lift off.

I hope everything goes perfectly for you!