Walter's LogBook: 1999 August 11/12

	Walter's LogBook
	Wed/Thu August 11/12, 1999

My third night of imaging on the front porch in Oshawa. I was again using the Starlight Xpress MX512 and my 10" f/6.3 LX200. There were a lot of clouds floating around tonight, but some stars were visible so I figured I could at least program the LX200 SmartDrive. After doing a single 8-minute training session, I turned the scope to M57 and did some test images. Good news! I found that 30-second untrailed images were now a reality!

It was cloudy on and off through the night, but there were decent clear periods in which I could do some imaging, so I did. Below are my latest M15 and M2 shots. I also tried NGC 7331 and NGC 404, but the results were not as stunning. Better to leave those objects for a dark country sky, I think!

Update, Sept'99: Thanks to the new DDP feature in MaxIm 2, globulars and galaxies with bright cores are now easy to process! The images of NGC 404 and 7331 now included below were processed using DDP. To see DDP versions of my globular shots, consult my PictureBook. For more on DDP, see my notes for Wed/Thu Sept 1/2.

These pictures were acquired and added together using MaxIm DL/CCD software. Processing for globulars is as follows:

square the pixels
do a straight line histogram specification
save as 8-bit TIFF, with a Gamma=3.0 stretch

This worked well for my M13 image the other night. It also seemed to work for M15 and M2. After doing the 8-bit save, the image looked good on the screen. But after closing the 8-bit TIFF and opening it again, the core was burned out! So to get around this, I started over from scratch, repeating the three steps above and then adding the following steps:

copy the 8-bit TIFF on screen to the Windows clipboard (Edit/Copy)
paste into your paint program of choice (e.g. PhotoShop)

This gets what you see on the screen into your paint program. After doing a little sharpening, I converted the images to JPEG format with moderate compression for this web page. Note that all of these processing steps only takes a couple of minutes in total to do, so it's not as bad as it sounds.

M15	2 minutes (4 x 30s)

Yes!

M2	4 minutes (8 x 30s)

Focus a little soft due to murky sky!

NGC 404	4 minutes (8 x 30s)

Processed with DDP. The glare is from Beta Andromedae, which is just six arc minutes away.

NGC 7331	6½ minutes (13 x 30s)

Processed with DDP, which tames the bright core this galaxy has. The small galaxy at top left is NGC 7335, the even smaller galaxy next to the star near bottom left is NGC 7337.