Radio Galaxy - Centaurus A Taken through kitchen

[PETER LOO]

Shot taken on 12 Apr 2012, with Meade 80 mm ED APO, IR mod DSLR, Vixen GDP2 Mounts, un-guided @ Tampines

[orly_andico]

That's really good Peter. I didn't even dream one could get Centaurus A from SG! the dark lane is quite visible.

How many shots is that, and how long?

[PETER LOO]

Hi Orly, sorry for the delay, i can't type well, it's using Canon 500D IR-mod, ISO 1600, 18 shots X 1 min each , captured with EOS live view camera s/w with the long exp noise reduction on, so it took twice as long, but i find that it is easier to do post processing later with Nebulosity2 & get a more natural color output than using the MaximDL5 s/w to capture it.

[orly_andico]

only 1 minute exposures.. your sky must be much darker than mine.

there is some trailing though. need better polar alignment. :-) there's a trick you can use called CCD drift alignment. only takes 2 minutes per iteration. so you can be aligned well enough for 1 minute subs in 10 minutes.

[PETER LOO]

i stayed at 9th floor, although above the street lamp, this part of the sky still suffer quite a bit of light pollution, may be because the surface brightness of it is quite okay unlike objects like M101, which often can only get the core. Also it response quite well to Red color filter, when i attach a Hoya Red filter to a 135mm F2.0 lens with X 2 converter, can see the bright portion of it (not the shape, just a line like that) attached to a frame integration security camera (0.5" BW type).

[Gary]

Delicious-looking hamburger! Keep up the good work! Thanks for sharing.

[orly_andico]

I've fixed the star trailing using Fitswork.

Fitswork is not that sophisticated, it can only fix star trails if the trails are horizontal.

So I rotated the original image by -39.5 degrees to make the trails horizontal, deconvolved with Fitswork, then rotated it back +39.5 degrees to restore the original orientation.

[cataclysm]

Nice work Peter!

[PETER LOO]

Thanks for the constant help & encouragement, Kelvin, appreciate ...

[rcj]

amazing perseverance and work you have there Peter!