The Second Half of Life: Preparations for Imaging in July

In the wake of the Skyview Acres trip I have solved some of the problems I had noted. First, I confirmed something that a friend at the star party told me... appearances can be deceiving on the filter colors. SBIG tells me that the filters will often reflect the complement of the filter color and that you can see the actual colors by using a flashlight on them. So... what I thought was Red was Green, What I thought was Blue was Red and what I thought looked yellowish and assumed was Green, was actually Blue. That still left the problem of having to specify Blue in CCDSoft to get no filter over the CCD window. It turns out that in the settings window, beside the specification of the filter, there is a button for filter settings that allows you to change the name associated with a filter position. All I had to do was change the default settings such that the one labeled Clear was actually Blue and the one labeled Blue was Clear and that solved the problem.

One more thing I will do before July is to clean the filters. I had noted that the filter I was calling green was showing some brighter stars as being bloated. This led to some green rings around those stars when I did an RGB combine. A fellow imager suggested to me that this filter may be dirty. With a cleaning I think I'm going to be ready to do some great imaging in July! Primary targets will be the "Omega Nebula" and Bode's galaxy, both of which will be more difficult to image later in the summer. I've imaged Bode's before, but want to "go deeper" with longer exposures and perhaps some color. I've never imaged the Omega Nebula. After those I will be going back to some of the Nebula I observed last year to try to get better images with some of the new techniques I've learned.

I went back to some data I collected last year at OSP on the globular cluster "M22" with the idea of applying my improved processing skills. In the first try last year, I ended up only using the 6" exposure because it was the only one in which I could avoid saturating the core of the cluster... but such a short exposure lost detail in the outer parts of the cluster. With two learnings: 1) importing the files to photoshop as 16-bit TIFF' and 2) using the Curves adjustment in photoshop, I was able to combine all of my three exposures (total of 56") and keep the core from saturating (turning into a big white blob). Both pictures are included below for comparison, as well as the 30" exposure from last year with a saturated core. The 56" exposure (6"+20"+30") is a huge improvement! The dark skies at OSP are great for getting better sharpness in the stars. I'm going to try to image another one this August and include color.