Phew, Buddy got brave, finally.
Or... hopefully, so he won't return to the dark side of the charts again
The first time in a while the price went up after i added some sats for useless cash. thumbs up, buddy.
OT: As some of you might remember, i bought a cooled astro camera a while back, to replace my bugged, noisy DSLR.
Without a clear, moonless night ever since, i put equipment and data editing to the test with an image of a rather bright nebula. The beloved and also hated NGC 2244, mostly hated for complicated mix of wavelenghts. You can also see the green cast of the smaller stars in the center area, which proves how much i still suck at editing.
However, getting this object captured in a very clear sky (for longer times) would have helped a lot.
click for larger (still downsized) version.
I also keep working on trying to capture that Comet a.k.a. C/2022 E3 (ZTF), but since it moves in front of the stars, it will be hard to track, not even thinking about conditions (new moon, but clouds and fog everywhere over the place), having to capture this beast shortly before dawn.
Still hoping for better conditions...
EDIT: Biggest advantage of the cooled CCD vs. DSLR camera is much lower (read) noise, revealing much more detail in the darker areas, which would drown in noise and/or get truncated via "black point clipping". The total exposure time for this image was (only) 140 minutes, of which 95 minutes were kept for stacking, the other ones have been sorted out because of thin clouds, occasional vibrations of the scope, both blurring the stars too much. One was also removed because of an aeroplane crossing.
On the positive side, there are close to zero satellites visible in winter, because they don't reflect sunlight, as the sunlight doesn't hit them at the higher angled "path" at night (while it's angle is much lower at daytime). In Summer i often had to sort out half of the pics because of satellite streaks, mostly Starlink's (Fuck you, Elon btw!).
So, where was i?
Alright, i am pretty surprised in a positive way by the final image quality in terms of detail and noise, especially at these low 95 minutes of medium gain exposure at suboptimal conditions. Expect some more, even better pics in the future.
EDIT 2: in the meantime i learned more about colormetry and spectral layers and applied some new edits, so i uploaded and updated the picture.
Poll
