My first try at the Ring - M57

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Mike in Rancho
Posts: 1141
Joined: Sun Jun 20, 2021 10:05 pm
Location: Alta Loma, CA

My first try at the Ring - M57

Post by Mike in Rancho »

I took this one on a whim not quite a week ago. There was a very bright half moon, but my scope and camera were still connected with the L'eNhance at the end of the adapter, and while outside looking up at Vega, I realized it would be going away pretty soon.

About 15 years ago, M57 was the first DSO I ever "saw" in visual observation. For all the work that took, the payoff was disappointing. I figured a picture would be so much better, and indeed it was.

Due to a couple boneheaded errors, my guiding was poor and erratic, but managed to eke out slightly over two hours of usable subs. I also did not realize what a tricky target this is -- very small, and really quite bright. I will go into this with better knowledge next time. :lol: I also eventually found that a custom rectangle and 2x drizzle in DSS helped.

In order to get anything other than a million watt white donut in the middle of the image, I had to be quite careful with the AutoDev, and follow it up with a couple of HDR's (standard and then a customized reveal core), as also utilized the dynamic range extension in SVD. Of course all that didn't work so great for the stars, so I processed those separately and then brought them back together in layer. Worked fair enough for this scale, but a later crop version I did was good for the Ring, but the stars became mush again.

It was fun though. When the new 1.8 HDR ( :D :D :D :D ) comes out, I will toss this data straight at it to see what it can do. And will also work on cleaning up the stars some more, if I can. For now though, it was a lot of fun to capture and process this, and soooo much better than "averted vision" observing.

M57 2h12m driz x2 HOO star ring blend ST8 1B.jpg
M57 2h12m driz x2 HOO star ring blend ST8 1B.jpg (393.29 KiB) Viewed 2965 times
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