Another clear weekday night, so I can’t image for too long.  I’ve taken a few frames of M51 and M81 and also taken some dark frames before moving the scope back to the Veil.  With time being limited I decided to try 30x120secs initially and I’ll see how they turn out.  I’ve taken a dark frame at the same exposure and iso setting (iso1600) before and I’ll take another after. As I’m imaging remotely it’s not practical to run out between each shot and wait in the cold for 2 minutes while the camera takes a black photo, so I’ll make do with just 2 dark frames.  I haven’t worked out what to do about bias and flats yet.

Here’s a quick and dirty draft image using 14×120 second frames and 1 dark.  I’ve streched and tweaked the image to try and bring out the detail in the nebula, but its still very faint on the left of the image.

The Veil Nebula (NGC6960)

Hopefully I’ll be posting a better image here after I’ve got all the data in.

Another quick effort before wor. I managed to get another 10 shots but DSS only stacked 35 of them.  There’s more detail in there I just need to tease it out using photoshop.

The Veil Nebula (NGC6960) 35x120 seconds

I have another dark frame to add to the stack but I don’t have time at the moment.  Maybe later

Update: Saturday 26th September

I was able to create flats and bias frames as I leave the camera connected to the scope so the light path hasn’t changed since these images were taken the other night.  Reprocessing has annoyingly made things worse not better as there seems to be some structured noise that is accentuated by the new processing.

Example of noise

I’m guessing the noise is a result of imaging at iso1600 rather than adding flats and bias frames but only time will tell as I take more images. Unless someone knows the answer and would like to make a comment

I’m currently trying the same flat frames with the Veil image from the 12th as I’m sure the flats will remove the bright area on the image.  I opened the combined flat in Photo shop and stretched it to find an exact match for my bright area which I may have blamed on coma in a previous post. The iso value of the flats doesn’t match the iso value of the lights so I’m not sure I’m going to get anything, but I’ll keep trying.

—–End Update —–

Session details:

Imaging: Canon 300d (unmodified) – Skywatcher 250 Newtonian scope on EQ6Pro mount

Guiding: PHD -Atik 16ic on 60mm refractor

Processing etc: EQMod, Starry Night, Canon Remote Capture, PHD DSLR Shutter, Deepsky Stacker and PhotoShop CS2