First light with ST-10 - questions

Hi all, well my new camera arrived last night so I just had to try it out. Drove out to the cottage/dome. The ST-10 is extremely sensitive! I played around with the camera quite a bit,and the seeing was terrible but I did get this luminance image of the M81 region with only 10 x 3 minute subs. I know it needs alot more data, but I had to drive back last night and ran out of time. I have a couple of questions:

1. What is the best software to deal with the blooms? I used CCDops and it is quite cumbersome (and I didn't do a great job)
2. There are "reflections" resembling star spikes around some of the stars that bloomed. Is this also a consequence of the blooming?
3. I also had to get rid of microlensing artifacts - does anyone have any suggestions for removing these?

clear skies,

Jeff

Attached Image:

Wow you are off to a fantastic start with your new camera. I look forward to your finished results.

I use Maxim DL with good results on the blooms, you will have issue sometimes and certianlly when taking the flame horsehead. I generally plan for these issues with camera rotation but you will find that the chip is fairly noise free and as such limiting exposure time to aviod bloom in many situations yields good resuls. Per the microlens issue, I only see that at really short FL so I am not sure what you are seeing or trying to overcome.

Congrats Jeff on a great first light!

Very good first results Jeff. I am dealing with the same issues so appreciate your post.

Clear skies,
Kevin

Nice image Jeff! Impressive.

I am very interested in this thread because my old CM-10 camera is at FLI for upgrade to a MicroLine body. The CM-10 also used the KAF3200XME chip, so I guess I will be imaging with a new camera soon. I am looking forward to using it when the upgrade is finished, and I will be dealing with blooms myself. If you learn anything that works really well, please post your info. I will do the same. Perhaps we can learn together. The few images I made with the old CM-10 showed it to be an incredibly sensitive chip.
I look forward to seeing more from your new camera.
Cheers,
Tyler

Real nice start Jeff!

I went from a ST8xme to the 10xme because of the pixel size for shorter focal lengths. I like CCDStack for stacking and some bloom removal. I use Photoshop for additional bloom removal and refection spikes if they bother me. Photoshop may take longer than other programs but I have it and it works. I don't mind the spikes that much, some like them some don't. Since we are doing pretty pictures, how they look is up to you. There are some creative parameters in how the final aesthetics are processed.

I always pre-plan exposures with The Sky by choosing the imaging field and guide stars ahead of time. I try and place bright stars so the blooms don't take data away from the main target. I try and judge the exposure times with the brightest stars in the field. I don’t like to have long blooms or very many. Around bright stars I usually opt for shorter exposures so I don’t over saturate but take enough images to get a good S/N ratio.

My real advice, collect as much data as possible. I did some LRGB with a total of 60-90 minutes and now I usually get 60-90 minuets of RGB and a least a couple hour or more of luminous. In my case I see a big difference when there are several hours of data collected. I now like to get 4-5 hours for each subject.

Remember not to get to bogged down in all of this and have fun.

Again that is a nice start and hope you will continue to enjoy you camera.

Sam

samsastro.com