After a long struggle with collimating my SN reflector and with an ongoing tracking problem, it is long since time that I posted at least something. This is luminace only as I spent a fair portion of the night aiming at different parts of the sky in an attrempt to sort out my tracking. I have tried to highlight the contrast in the dark band with this one. I have recently aquired MaxIm DL and it is a ripper for stacking, colour management and fixing bad pixels as well as much more I have yet to learn.

Kind regards
Matt

LXD75 8" SN f/4
DSI II
Luminance 20x1min (due to the tracking problem) unguided
Stacked in MaximDL and cleaned up in PS2

Attached Images

cent A lumj.jpg (131.3 KB, 42 views)

Hi Matt.
Nice image of Centaurus A. I am still working on getting a good alignment with this new Vixen, its a lot harder to learn then my etx 125 was. Hope to have something to show soon. Clear skies to you Paul.

Very nice, excellent detail in the dust band. Well done Matt!

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Hi Matt
Very goog image considering it was unguided, great detail in the dust bands, this is one of the objects I'd love to image but I don't think it is visible from where I live
Best wishes
Gordon

A fine shot it is Matt, looking forward to see it in RGB. A question on maxim does it auto subtract darks on your DSI camera im having issues with envisage its slow, hangs you name it. Clear Skies my friend

Thanks Paul, Mike Gordan and Efrain. Yes Gordon it is almost directly overhead here at -37S which would make it at best, about 8 deg. above your southern horizon around midnight assuming your are 45N. Like Andromeda for me.

Efrain, I've not tried capturing dirctly to MaxIm yet so I am not sure about the auto subtract. I know exactly what you mean about envisage and gave upon auto combining long ago. I now set the comparison to 1 shot and choose the 'save all uncombined images' file save option. This saves all the FITS images so I can later pick and choose. I then manually shoot a set of blacks at the end of the session and subtract them using, up til now, registax or deep sky stacker. About the only useful feature of invisage I have found is the hot pixel fixer which does a very good job if I mess up with the blacks. Not the best option obviously but it can salvage a session. I choose group from the task bar, select the files, select 'fix hot pixels' and then envisage creates and saves a set of "hot fixed" FITS image files.

The beauty of MaxIm for me is the ease of image editing and the range of stacking and colour management options available. I will experiment with image capture when the moon comes back and let you know. Getting off topic here. Thanks for your interest and kind words.

Kind regards
Matt

Your collimation has improved quite a bit. BTW, from 45N this guy is only 2 degrees above the horizon ignoring atmospheric refraction. I've tried seeing it from 40.6 north several times to no avail. There it is over 6 degrees up the the murk killed it every time. I could see a faint hint of Omega Centauri however. I'd think at F/4 you'd pick up more of the outer parts of this guy. Great job on the core and dust lane however.

Rick